The Sierra Club Folds Immediately
The Sierra Club planned a few educational trips to Israel this spring, but received a letter from a coalition of organizations calling on them to cancel the events. Groups included Jewish Voice for Peace, NDN Collective, Palestinian Youth Movement-NYC, and Visualizing Palestine.
The letter detailed Israel’s strategy of greenwashing the occupation. “Israel’s apartheid and colonization are not green,” it points out. “As Visualizing Palestine notes, Israel uses parks, nature reserves and forests to conceal the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages, appropriate land and curtail Palestinian access and development. 182 Palestinian villages that were depopulated by Israel are concealed in Israeli parks and forests, preventing refugees from returning.”
After members of the coalition spoke with Sierra Club board members, the environmental organization announced that it was canceling the trips. This stand for social justice only lasted a matter of hours. After pro-Israel groups like the ADL started condemning the decision, the Sierra Club quickly caved. Soon it was reported that Ross Macfarlane, the organization’s vice president, had called Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to notify him that they were reversing their plans again. “We appreciate that the Sierra Club acted quickly to reverse the announced cancellations of trips to Israel which placed the famed American conservation organization directly into the crosshairs of BDS, anti-Israel, and anti-peace zealots,” Cooper told the Times of Israel.
Moments later Acting Sierra Club Executive Director Dan Chu was putting out a statement declaring that the trips were officially back on. “Let me be clear: the Sierra Club’s mission is to enjoy, explore and protect the planet, and we do not take positions on foreign policy matters that are beyond that scope,” explained Chu. “We do not have a deep understanding or knowledge necessary to do so, nor is it our place to do so. Furthermore, we have and always will continue to loudly condemn anti-semitism and any and all acts of hate. We are committed to working more intentionally, thoroughly and thoughtfully so we can prevent this from happening again.”
Last week the organization tweeted, “The world has been witnessing unspeakable atrocities against Ukrainians for two weeks. We continue to rise in support of the Ukrainian people and call on the American government to continue taking action to support those facing unimaginable loss and safeguard peace”, a statement that is somehow not a foreign policy position I guess.
“The Sierra Club issued a statement reversing their decision to drop trips to apartheid Israel,” tweeted Adalah Justice Project after the reversal. “The statement doesn’t mention Palestinians. At least the trip descriptions mentioned a Palestinian sunbird.”
The case of the Sierra Club is a particularly interesting one as the organization’s early history is connected to the displacement of indigenous people. The group’s co-founder John Muir also advocated for the removal Native peoples of the Yosemite Valley. In 2020 the organization put out a statement (written by former executive director Michael Brune) acknowledging its racist past, apologizing, and committing to policies of deeper change.
Saudi Executions
Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on March 12, its largest mass execution in years. Human Rights Watch’s Michael Page called it “a brutal show of its autocratic rule, and a justice system that puts the fairness of their trials and sentencing into serious doubt. The shocking callousness of their treatment is compounded by the fact that many families found out about their loved ones’ deaths just like the rest of us, after the fact and through the media.”
On Monday State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked about the killings and refused to condemn them. Here’s the exchange:
MR PRICE: Well, we’ve these reports that Saudi Arabia executed 81 people on March 12th. We continue to raise with Saudi Arabia the need to ensure fair trial guarantees, freedom from arbitrary and extrajudicial detention, transparency, the rule of law, and freedom of religion and belief.
QUESTION: So that’s it?
QUESTION: You don’t have anything else to say about 81 people just being summarily – being executed?
MR PRICE: We are – we have been clear about our concerns about the lack of respect for fair trial guarantees in Saudi Arabia. We’ve documented this in our human rights reports. We’ve raised these concerns with the Saudi Government. We’ll continue to do so. What we want to see, and we’ve made this very clear to our counterparts in Riyadh, is for all governments, including our Saudi partners, to respect and protect human rights and to ensure a fair and transparent judicial process.
QUESTION: Okay, fine. Well, do you think that happened here?
MR PRICE: Matt, we are continuing to raise concerns about fair trial guarantees. I’m not in a position to speak —
QUESTION: Well, do you think that any —
MR PRICE: I’m not in a position to speak to specific cases that were included in what transpired on Saturday, but these are concerns that we continue to raise in Riyadh.
QUESTION: Did you express concern over the weekend?
QUESTION: Because —
MR PRICE: Can’t speak to the timing of that, but we have raised these concerns and we will —
QUESTION: So you didn’t call them after this happened or when you saw the report.
MR PRICE: Humeyra, I didn’t – you’re – please don’t put words in my mouth.
QUESTION: But did you have communication with Saudi authorities after this?
MR PRICE: We are in touch with our Saudi partners on a daily basis. We raise these concerns, and we will continue to do so.
QUESTION: Right. But, I mean, you began – this administration began with this kind of rejection of the previous administration’s quote/unquote – what some people called quote/unquote “kid gloves treatment” of Saudi Arabia, said you were going to put human rights at the fore. Now, it’s one thing if you don’t think that there’s an issue with the mass execution of 81 people over the weekend, but if you —
MR PRICE: In the category of not putting words in my mouth, I did not say that.
QUESTION: I know. I know
MR PRICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: I’m saying it’s one thing if you don’t think that that is an issue. But if you do think that it’s an issue, why aren’t you coming out more forcefully and talking about it?
MR PRICE: We are talking about it, and I just spoke of our —
QUESTION: You talked about fair trial guarantees and that kind of thing. But you didn’t say anything about the executions, and whether you thought that they were —
MR PRICE: We’re talking about – you were – I offered that in the context of the question about the 81 executions that took place on Saturday.
QUESTION: Right.
MR PRICE: These are concerns that we have expressed very clearly to our Saudi partners. They know that for —
QUESTION: But do they know that you think that – that you have concerns about the mass execution of 81 people?
MR PRICE: Matt, they are well aware of our concerns.
QUESTION: About this? Okay.
MR PRICE: They are well aware of our concerns.
QUESTION: And how – how do you know they are well aware? Like, was there any kind of communication after this happened?
MR PRICE: Humeyra, we are in daily communication with our Saudi partners. They are —
QUESTION: If you guys are really worried about this, then why wasn’t any – there any communication?
MR PRICE: Humeyra, I have told you several times now, please don’t put words in my mouth. We communicate with them on a daily basis. They are well aware of concerns.
The Biden administration continues to face pressure to designate the Houthis as a terrorist group and its been reported that the Saudi regime has blown oil talks with Biden off in hopes that the United States will support the country’s war on Yemen with even more gusto.
Meanwhile, at The American Prospect, Sarah Lazare writes about how the Biden administration has hired 28 people connected to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “On the campaign trail in November 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden said in a primary debate that he would make Saudi Arabia ’pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.’,” Lazare writes. “The comments came after the Persian Gulf monarchy had been roundly condemned for the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”
“After a year in office, so far the Biden White House is doing anything but making Saudi Arabia a pariah,” she continues. “Instead, the administration has kept Saudi Arabia close, along with the Gulf kingdom’s junior partner, the United Arab Emirates. The two Gulf monarchies, with direct U.S. participation, are deeply involved in a war against Yemen that has drawn criticism for its tremendous humanitarian costs and death toll of 377,000. Biden, however, has not taken moves to constrain the war effort against Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, and is appealing to the Gulf monarchies to increase oil production, to offset rising prices amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Saudi Arabia and the UAE are reportedly responding to those appeals by demanding even more U.S. support for the Yemen war effort.)”
At The Intercept Shuaib Almosawa reports on how the situation in Yemen has arguably gotten worse since Biden was elected. “In the last year, Saudi Arabia tightened a devastating fuel blockade that Riyadh has long used as a war tactic,” he writes. “As Biden was entering the White House, commercial fuel imports to Yemen ground to a halt, with no fuel entering Yemen’s Hodeidah port for 52 days from January 28 to March 21, 2021, according to a report from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. ‘This is an alarming development, considering that more than half of Yemen’s commercial fuel imports had been coming through Al Hodeidah in recent years,’ the report noted, referring to the port, which is administered by the Houthi-dominated government and through which 70 percent of Yemen’s imports enter the country. The agency called the shutoff ‘a precedent not seen since the beginning of the conflict in 2015.'”
Odds & Ends
?? Former vice president Mike Pence told an Israeli paper that a future GOP administration will tear up any new nuclear deal with Iran.
?? No surprise that the war in Ukraine has been great for the weapons industry.
?? The Palestinian BDS National Committee put out a statement about the response to Russia’s invasion invalidating anti-BDS talking points:
This Western double standard is painful, enraging, and humiliating for people in the Global South, including for Palestinians. After all, Israel’s decades-old regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid is not only “Made in the West,” but is still armed, funded and shielded from accountability by that same deeply colonial and racist West, in particular the US, UK and EU.
Insisting on the equal worth of humans and their rights, the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement campaigns to end complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression that denies us freedom, justice and equality. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once described boycotts for racial justice as “withdrawing … cooperation with an evil system.” Indeed, BDS is pressuring states, corporations, and institutions to end their direct and indirect cooperation with Israel’s regime which is killing us, ethnically cleansing us, denying our refugees their right to return home, incarcerating us, stealing our land, choking us in ever-shrinking bantustans, and besieging two million of us in the Gaza open-air prison camp – an ongoing Nakba.
? Historian Stephen Wertheim on what a no-fly zone would mean:
Well, a no-fly zone strikes many people as a humanitarian measure or a technical measure. Our experience with no-fly zones comes from the last three decades, in which a small number of no-fly zones have been imposed against much weaker enemies than Russia. But what it means is that the United States and NATO forces would commit to shoot down enemy planes, any enemy plane that enters the zone. It’s quite clear Russia would not voluntarily comply with our verbal declaration of a no-fly zone, so we’d have to shoot those planes down. And to do that, we’d have to patrol the area with our own planes to gain supremacy in the skies over Ukraine. And to do that safely, we would have to destroy the enemy’s air defense systems on the ground, as well. Many of those are located in Belarus, and some potentially may be located in Russia. Indeed, Russians could fire at U.S. and NATO forces from Russia.
And then the question would become: Would we go to war, go to war and exchange fire with Russians who are located inside Russian territory? So, as you start thinking about how a no-fly zone would actually unfold, it becomes very obvious this would be direct involvement in the war against Russia. And rather than end the war, a no-fly zone would enlarge the war and escalate the war. And that’s why the Biden administration has, rightly, been very clear throughout this conflict that a no-fly zone would be escalatory and is not something that it wants to do.
? Natalie Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American athletic trainer, was allegedly fired from a private, all-girls school in Pennsylvania for social media posts criticizing Israel. The posts are from almost a decade ago. CAIR-Philadelphia has launched a lawsuit against the Agnes Irwin School on behalf of Abulhawa. The school’s move came after Abulhawa was targeted by the anti-Palestinian site Canary Mission.
“It is unacceptable that Agnes Irwin treated me with such contempt and disrespect,” said Abulhawa in a statement. “Employment discrimination against Palestinian Americans and Muslim Americans is a real problem. Agnes Irwin School did not think twice before bulldozing my life, without even a pretense of due process. It only took a known hate site to profile me for them to derail my career. I am telling my story today so that Agnes Irwin School, which purports to empower women, can be held accountable for the ways in which they demeaned, humiliated, and harmed me.”
? Great symposium at Responsible Statecraft marking the 19th anniversary of the Iraq War. Participants were asked,”Has the mainstream press learned its lessons from its performance during the Iraq war, and what danger signs, if any, do you see in today’s media coverage of the current Russia-Ukraine crisis?” Here’s a couple of the responses:
Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper’s magazine: The mainstream press has indeed learned lessons from its performance in the Iraq war. Unfortunately, they are very bad ones. Principally, the press has learned that so long as it sticks very close to the official U.S. government line, it runs absolutely no danger of any ill-consequence or sanction. After all, almost the entire official media (with the exception of the lonely dissenters at Knight-Ridder newspapers) spoke with one voice in endorsing George Bush’s illegal invasion. Following revelation that it had all been lies, one sacrificial lamb, the New York Times’ Judy Miller, was dispatched to career slaughter. And that was it. The most important lesson absorbed by a whole new generation of journalists was that war is good for the career, no matter how bad you are at reporting it.
Furthermore, just as the quick and bloodless (for Americans) 1991 victory in Iraq buried the Vietnam syndrome, at least for a while, so apparently proficient intelligence predictions regarding Putin’s plans for Ukraine may have buried the WMD syndrome — meaning a healthy skepticism regarding intelligence-sourced assertions, that had come to infect at least some mainstream reporters. As a result, “intelligence” will find a lot of unquestioning takers, at least until the next fiasco becomes impossible to conceal.
Noah Kulwin: co-host of Blowback podcast, contributing editor to Jewish Currents and The Drift: The mainstream press was complicit in the planning, selling, and execution of the war on Iraq. The 2003 invasion was not the first military operation sculpted for mass media (not even the first U.S. invasion of Iraq timed for TV), and most of the lessons that journalists seem to have taken from Gulf War II were about how to more painlessly find heroes and villains. As we see in the present — like with the Ghost of Kyiv or the story of Snake Island — these characters need not be real nor the tales true.
This is what I find most ominous: the focus on arming “our” guys to counter “their” guys, the outright lust for conflict, with no concern at all about where escalation may lead and who will bear its cost. Fake stories in war carry currency because they blot out the grim, inhumane truth.
?? Every Jewish Democratic House member signed onto a joint statement condemning Amnesty International USA Executive Director Paul O’Brien’s recent comments on Israel. Addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club two weeks ago O’Brien said that the country “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.”
“The right of the people to self-determination and to be protected is without a doubt something that we believe in, and I personally believe that,” said O’Brien, but “we are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people.”
“As Jewish Members of the House of Representatives, we represent diverse views on a number of issues relating to Israel,” reads the congressional statement. “However, we are in full agreement that Mr. O’Brien’s patronizing attempt to speak on behalf of the American Jewish community is alarming and deeply offensive. He has added his name to the list of those who, across centuries, have tried to deny and usurp the Jewish people’s independent agency. We stand united in condemning this and any antisemitic attempt to deny the Jewish people control of their own destiny.”
?️ Michael Gerald, a pastor who was challenging Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th district Dem primary, has suspended his campaign.
? In Jewish Currents and The Guardian, Sam Levin and Alex Kane report on a 2020 Anti-Defamation League memo that shows the group had internal debates on whether to end controversial delegations to Israel in which U.S. police officers receive training from the Israeli military:
A draft memo obtained by the Guardian and Jewish Currents shows that amid the George Floyd protests in 2020, two ADL executives questioned whether the trips could make American officers “more likely to use force” and contribute to the “problem” of police brutality. They considered advocating for the termination of the program.
“In light of the very real police brutality at the hands of militarized police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions, like whether we are contributing to the problem,” wrote George Selim, an ADL senior vice-president, and Greg Ehrie, VP for law enforcement and analysis, on 9 June in the draft memo. “We must ask ourselves why it is necessary for American police, enforcing American laws, would need to [sic] meet with members of the Israeli military. We must ask ourselves if, upon returning home, those we train are more likely to use force. We hope that that is not accurate.”
Selim is now saying the programs were paused because of the pandemic and might restart soon.
Jewish Voice for Peace Executive Director Stephanie Fox put out a statement on the report. “Our collective power is working: The ADL never would have disrupted their US-Israel police exchanges without the power of our multiracial intersectional coalition forcing them into a corner,” said Fox. “And now the ADL is doubling down with their real commitments: reinforcing apartheid and militarized policing. The ADL’s cover is blown once and for all. There’s nothing Jewish about fighting against Palestinian freedom or militarizing the police.”
?? A United Nations report says $100 billion worth of infrastructure has been destroyed in Ukraine.
? Students at Georgetown have apparently prevented a $30,000 propaganda trip to Israel from happening.
? Victory for Students for Justice in Palestine at UMass Boston. The school’s dining team will stop selling Sabra hummus. The brand financially supports the IDF.
? In yet another example of Palestine censorship on campus, the president of Yeshiva University is apparently stopping Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi from speaking at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Here’s a portion of a statement from Sydney Artson and Heidi Sandomir, second-year law students at the law school and founders/co-presidents of Cardozo on Israel and Palestine (CIP):
CIP planned and advertised the event featuring Dr. Abdulhadi, “Forms of Activism for Liberation in Palestine,” scheduled for March 1, 2022. Dr. Abdulhadi was to speak about her professional experiences teaching about and advocating for Palestinian rights. We sought to provide a platform for students on ways to collaborate with other lawyers, scholars, and organizers in activist and intellectual spaces, regardless of students’ professional pursuits.
Less than a week before the event, on Thursday, February 24th, the Dean of Cardozo informed us that Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, President of Yeshiva University, moved to cancel our event without our consent. We then discovered that the school canceled our room reservation and catering order.
We adamantly insist that CIP’s event featuring Dr. Abdulhadi is not canceled. Yeshiva University’s censorship is offensive to Dr. Abdulhadi’s prestige, integrity, and intellectual labor. Dr. Abdulhadi accepted the speaking engagement at Cardozo despite the chronic institutional retaliation, online attacks, and safety concerns she has faced throughout her career. The President of Yeshiva University should not be able to unilaterally override the interests of Cardozo students and reject speakers. Further, the President of Yeshiva University has thus far declined to communicate directly with CIP and the Cardozo student body...
Amid the Yeshiva University administration’s continued silence, troubling questions remain unanswered: What does academic freedom mean for Cardozo students when President Berman can unilaterally silence voices, without providing students with notice, guidance, or consultation? What do free speech, educational exposure, and diversity within a law school mean if they may be incontrovertibly restricted? What message does Yeshiva University send to its current and prospective law students by assigning itself as the arbiter of which voices and perspectives are appropriate? Yeshiva University’s interference constitutes a transgression into student affairs and interests and a violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Readers of Mondoweiss probably know that this isn’t the first time schools have moved to censor Dr. Abdulhadi recently.
Stay safe out there,
Michael
