Jeremy Sapienza - Antiwar.com Blog

State Dept. to ‘Fund’ Gay Rights Overseas

Let’s leave aside whether State Dept. cash can actually buy gay rights in places like our close allies Uganda, which may soon punish homosexuality with death. I’d like to focus on the sheer hypocrisy of the United States government, responsible for the deaths and maiming and displacement and impoverishment of millions the world over, proclaiming its devotion to the rights of foreign gay people.

As homosexuality and alternative gender identity has become more accepted in the mainstream culture, our otherwise rights-violating, death-delivering government has sought to coopt this acceptance, to roll it into its plan to garrison and subjugate the earth’s peoples. We saw this with the recent revolting to-do about the repeal of DADT, which openly inducted gays into the murder empire. Professional gay activists cheered that now some theoretical American homosexuals can participate in the next irradiation of Fallujah or — hopefully! — napalming of Vietnam? We can only dream. America’s hideous crimes are “pinkwashed” because it doesn’t do to gays for being themselves what it does to Muslims.

The subject of pinkwashing was recently broached in, of all places, the New York Times, in which queer activist Sarah Schulman called out Israel’s own cynical exploitation of homosexuals — look, we allow them to film pornography on Palestinian ruins! — to paper over its other far more numerous and horrifying and sustained crimes against the Palestinians, straight and gay.

Back home, President Obama “ordered U.S. agencies to protect vulnerable gay and lesbian refugees and asylum seekers,” reports AP. We do have a military to staff! Already the Gay, Inc. types are gushing praise upon the Peace Laureate for this empty promise which he will never have to back up with signs of progress of any kind. That’s what it means to be a Democrat.

Rejoice, benighted foreign homos. Hillary Clinton wants to spend cash money on your rights to same-sex screw! Of course gay Pakistani civilians will still be in danger of being summarily evaporated by drones for the crime of being in our fucking way. So have that hot gay sex now before some nerd in Nevada makes you his own happy ending.

South Sudan Bravely Rejects US Military Aid

…at least, we can surmise this from the country’s recent release of 53 child conscripts from its army. They must know Obama cares about stimulating job prospects for children in the world’s most horrifying countries to be a human being.

Palestinians Ride in the Front of the Bus

Actually, they were merely on the bus as it entered Jerusalem, which is confrontation enough. Free and democratic Israel has such a convoluted and restrictive system of permitting for Palestinians going anywhere that Arabs living in what are considered Jerusalem outskirts are not allowed to ride the Jews-only bus into town without their papers, please. For security purposes, of course.

This morning six Palestinian activists, accompanied by a phalanx of journalists, were barred from entering Jerusalem. Police ordered them off the bus, but they refused. After about an hour, they were arrested and pulled off the bus.

“My point isn’t go to jail — my point is to have the freedom to get on a bus,” said 38-year-old civil servant Badia Dwaik.

The activists call themselves “Freedom Riders” after the bus desegregation actions of the 60s in the United States, whose most well-known icon was Rosa Parks.

Palestinians are not allowed to enter the West Bank Jews-only settlements in which certain bus companies exclusively run. One settler was angry the activists had boarded: “This is our bus,” she said, adding: “Quite simply, we are afraid of them.” One wonders why, then, she moved to Palestine.

The interaction between the checkpoint policeman and Dwaik is a textbook example of the banality of evil, but also of calm courage in the face of an uncaring bureaucracy.

“I am not going to obey your discriminatory law,” Dwaik told the policeman, speaking Arabic.

“So you are detained,” the policeman said, also in Arabic.

“Fine. I am not moving.”

Scott Olsen: ‘Freedom of Speech Literally Taken From Me’

Peace activist Scott Olsen reports on his public Google Plus account that he is slowly regaining his speech after being shot in the head with a teargas canister at Occupy Oakland. “I’m feeling a lot better, with a long road in front of me,” Olsen wrote. “After my freedom of speech was quite literally taken from me, my speech is coming back but I’ve got a lot of work to do with rehab.”

Olsen was at the front of the crowd when Oakland police lit up a downtown intersection with gas and “flashbang” grenades. Occupy participants say the police used rubber bullets, but the Oakland PD denies it.

After Olsen was hit, and as Occupy medics attended his wounds, another gas bomb was hurled at Olsen and those helping him. Investigators with the Anonymous movement identified the officer who shot Olsen as Officer Scott Bergstresser of the San Francisco Police Dept after a $1600 bounty was collected to find the name of the shooter. The investigators turned down the bounty, and it was instead donated to Olsen.

Early on, with his brain swelling inside his fractured skull, it was thought the former Marine could die. As the days passed, his condition improved, and now he’s on the road to recovery with a warning to police brutes and their supporters:

“Soon enough we’ll see you in our streets!”

To donate to Scott Olsen’s recovery, visit Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Elizabeth Warren: Bomb, Bomb Iran!

Another one bites the dust, and so fast, too! Progressives bitter about Obama have already lost their latest celebrity, Elizabeth Warren, to the fever swamp of war hysteria, and she ain’t even elected yet.

The Boston Herald reports the US Senate candidate, running against centerfold Scott Brown for Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts, is a hawk on Iran — including the “no options off the table” bit. In fact, she doesn’t just have a particular hate-on for Iran, she’s a big terror war supporter in general: “Our number one responsibility is to protect Americans from terrorism, that’s our job, so being tough on terrorism is enormously important.” And it gets worse — she loves our bloated military so much she made her own child join it. That’s a woman who cares.

Warren is also not sure if it’s a good idea to strip “homegrown terrorists” of their citizenship — she hasn’t read her opponent’s bill proposing such, so really, how could she have an informed opinion? Seems only rational.

I guess according to Little Miss Social Contract, you know that that factory you built backed up by public resources? You should probably use it to make weapons to help the empire murder foreigners. Progress!

h/t Charles Davis @charlesdavis84

Confusing All Around: The Air and Space Museum Bumrush

Yesterday I read with excitement that otherwise docile protests in Washington, DC — the merging of the pre-planned October2011 rally with the spontaneous “Occupy” movement — rushed the Air and Space Museum and got it shut down. Guards shot pepper spray at the crowd, affecting several. The Museum, at the Smithsonian on the Mall in the capital, was featuring an exhibit about drones.

Today it turns out the most active participant in this rush was one Patrick Howley — a writer at the American Spectator. And he openly admits in his column that he ended up as an agent provocateur after first only planning to infiltrate and write a hit piece on the “socialist” movement and its apparent “indoctrination” techniques. But aside from this, the story is pathetic all around.

Howley reports the protesters, ever-bolder as they marched to the museum for a planned action, slowed down as they approached the building’s steps. Only about half rushed up them and tried to enter the building; only Howley and another protester actually got in the doors past the guards. In the ensuing moments, Howley and the protester were pushed and then pepper sprayed, and apparently the spray reached several others. Howley then ran through the museum thinking he had opened the way for the other protesters to streak through and hang banners and whatever other actions they planned. He turned around, squinting through his mace-swollen eyes to realize nobody had followed him.

Creepily, Howley is proud of the guard who sprayed him — he and the other guards “acted with more courage than I saw from any of the protesters.”

Now, the lefty blogosphere is outraged. This isn’t journalism! they shriek. Well, yes and no. It’s legitimate to infiltrate a movement in order to report; that’s classic stuff. But the result by Howley is less journalism than goofy slander — the piece he intended to write would have been rather weak without his little adventure.

But what’s puzzling is that Charlie Grapski of FireDogLake seems to have been snookered into kneejerk opposition to Howley’s actions, not just their intent. Sure, Howley did something he himself thought was terrible and would set-up and implicate the antiwar protesters as disruptive hoodlums. So… Grapski — and hundreds of commenters — agree with Howley? Yes, apparently.

“In light of his detailed description of his activities today the fact that they clearly document the commission of the crime of trespassing on federal property, if not the intent to incite a riot there, these admissions should not be taken lightly or ignored. … the presence and admitted activities of this self-proclaimed agent provacateur should be brought to the attention of federal law enforcement officials. … Who was really to blame for the chaos and disruption of a Federal Museum?“

Blame? Surely, Grapski means who was the unintended hero in the righteous disruption of a museum that engages in imperial propaganda, when all others stood back and cowered? We’re supposed to be in solidarity with the masses of Tahrir, no? Well they burned down the party headquarters, buddy. If protesters had smashed up a few papier mâché drones in a museum wouldn’t exactly make Gandhi cry.

It’s time to embrace these nonviolent tactics that may happen to break the rules. It’s time to take some clues from the Occupy Boston participants who told the cops “No.” Let them eat their free-speech zones. They certainly have the seasonings handy.

Why is FireDogLake opposing this “crime of trespassing on federal property” — at all? This is the ONE truly heroic hardcore direct action against authority and the glorification of violence that we’ve seen! Smashing up a publicly owned shrine to remote death from the air — hurting nobody — is nonviolent. A sit-in — oooh, trespassing! — is also nonviolent and absolutely just. Who owns that museum? What crimes is that museum complicit in pimping to American children as legitimate?

Shutting it down was right. And sadly, it took some provocateur asshole to show us how it’s done.