[I wrote this a few months ago for McSweeneys, before Elizabeth Warren was in ascent. They didn’t take it. ]
To: The Buchanan County Ohio Democratic Central Committe
From: Betty Pannabecker-Garcia
Hello fellow Dems! I know it’s early in the election cycle to be endorsing a candidate. But one candidate running in the Democratic primary makes my heart star beating a little faster and start tallying up my posterboard and Sharpies budget at Michaels. Not Biden is the nonbinary, multiracial, multigenerational, and bisexual candidate, I think, that looks like America and could get our country back on the rails.
Not Biden is a proud social progressive; they believe that all Americans have a right to affordable healthcare and housing; they at times have even called for a universal basic income. Even better, they have a plan to make it all work out! And having governed in California, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Montana, Vermont, and Washington, which have large agricultural economies, they understand the needs of people in rural areas like us.
As for their voting record, Not Biden’s is mixed; I don’t support everything they’ve supported, but they are the only candidate never to have voted for the Iraq War. They believe that women should have control of their own bodiesand they’re not so handsy-sniffy. Also, I told my Uncle Ray a quarter century ago to stop telling my son that it’s his job to protect his sisters’ virginity and that’s not something I’d appreciate in a president either.
As for the people who are saying that only Biden can beat Trump, remember that it was 78,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsinwho handed Trump the White House. We can get twice—four times that many people out with all the gifts that Not Biden brings to the table!
And you know what I’ll be bringing to the table at next month’s meeting? That’s right, my famous Pannabecker potato salad! And Jorge will bring his mama’s chilaquiles. Bring your own dish to pass, and I hope I can convince you over some good food that Not Biden is the way to go!
So I’ve been experimenting with writing humor. This Father’s Day piece was turned down by McSweeneys.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. As a symbol of the love that you chose to give my brothers instead of me, I will again settle on a box of English Leather cologne products as my gift to you. My vague memories of physical affection from you are all associated with that smell.
Which gift box will it be this year? Should I choose the one with the cowboy on the front? Why would they put a cowboy on a box of English Leather? Why not show someone riding English style—as opposed to Western style, in which you break a horse rather than train it. Just like you tried to break my spirit when you sent me to fat camp, Dad. But Patches didn’t body shame me; we rode like the wind.
Maybe I should give you the classic wooden box again. You know, like the one I got you last year from Ebay because it was like the ones you had when I was a kid. I thought it would evoke some nostalgia for that time before you told Tim you couldn’t believe I came from the seed of your loins. Do you remember your reaction Dad? You half smiled, nodded and then reached for Tim’s present, which was a “Best Dad Ever” mug. With faux modesty, you rolled your eyes and said, “Well that’s a little hyperbolic, don’t you think?”
“It’s insanely hyperbolic,” I said.
You know what you’d say if I gave you another wooden box set this year?
“Didn’t Tim give me this last year?”
Of course the year I gave you English Leather Black was a disaster, even though that variation at least has a picture of an English saddle on it. I thought it would be funny to go full Goth. So I when I made the presentation, I wore fishnet stockings with skulls, black nails, lipstick and hair. You remember Troy? He was the one that did that fake English Leather tattoo, matching the script on the bottle. I remember you saying, “Aren’t you a little old for dress up, honey?”
You liked the English Leather Soap on a Rope I gave you one year. You twirled it around over your head, glint in eye and said, “You know, I could probably kill someone with this thing.” Then you looked meaningfully in my direction.
When I tried to mix things up with English Leather Lime the on the Father’s Day after Mom died and a bottle of your favorite tequila, you told me, “I hope you kept the receipt.”
“Of course,” I said, “It’s from Walmart.” But I was gracious. I told you I was glad you were taking $4.72 out the Walton family’s pocket and thanked you for doing your part to rein in capitalism run amok.
Googling the options, I see I haven’t given you the box of four travel size English Leather aftershave balms and skin softeners yet.
To: Customer Service, Dana Classic Fragrances
From: K——
Subject: Idea for new products
Have you thought of an English Leather skin softener, but for the heart?
Photo by Joe Carr. Carr worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Gaza and later with CPT in Hebron and At-Tuwani. His sequence of photos showing the bulldozer running over Corrie was not enough to convict the driver of her death.
by Kathleen Kern
Note: Our director asked if we were going to remember Corrie in some way, so I wrote this for CPTnet. Not sure if I hit it out of the park, but I don’t necessarily have to do that every time.
In 2003, when the Hebron team heard that the Israeli military had crushed Rachel Corrie to death with a Caterpillar bulldozer, the news hit all of us hard. Some of us had conducted nonviolence trainings for the first waves of International Solidarity Movement volunteers that had poured into Palestine to address violence of the Second Intifada. These volunteers had included Corrie, and Tom Hurndall who was shot and later disconnected from life support, as well as Brian Avery, also shot and permanently disfigured. Most of us had at one time or another stood in front of a bulldozer or had friends who had stood in front of bulldozers in an effort to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. Israeli soldiers and police had roughed us up, detained us or arrested us. Until Corrie died, I don’t think we believed that soldiers would run us, our friends or the Palestinian homeowners over.
Sixteen years later, if I heard soldiers had deliberately run over anyone with a bulldozer in Hebron in this current political climate the news would not shock me. The number of extrajudicial executions that happen in this city simply because Palestinians make soldiers nervous is frightening. Yet right now, less lethal things chip away at my soul: for example, young Israeli soldiers addressing professional Palestinian men in their forties and fifties as “walid” or “boy” as they walk through the checkpoint. Also, can you think of anywhere else in the world where elementary schoolchildren are regularly, routinely blanketed with teargas as they walk to and from school? And little children scurrying from teargas aren’t even the images that haunt me. It’s the faces of soldiers laughing I can’t shake. They laugh as they load the teargas grenades into their launchers, preparing to shoot them at the children.
Adam Serwer, a writer for the Atlantic, wrote an article last year about the Trump era, entitled “The cruelty is the point.” Nothing is quite so demoralizing as cruelty for the sake of cruelty, as watching grown men and women in uniform taking pleasure in mistreating children and our other neighbors in the Old City of Hebron.
But while this cruelty can haunt and even paralyze those who care about Palestinians, that’s not the lesson to take away from Corrie’s life. I remember reading emails to her family after her death and being struck by her optimism and her plans for the future. Her final email to her father particularly moved me:
Thanks also for stepping up your anti-war work. I know it is not easy to do, and probably much more difficult where you are than where I am. …
Also got an invitation to visit Sweden on my way back – which I think I could do very cheaply. I would like to leave Rafah with a viable plan to return, too. One of the core members of our group has to leave tomorrow – and watching her say goodbye to people is making me realize how difficult it will be. People here can’t leave, so that complicates things. They also are pretty matter-of-fact about the fact that they don’t know if they will be alive when we come back here.
I really don’t want to live with a lot of guilt about this place – being able to come and go so easily – and not going back. I think it is valuable to make commitments to places – so I would like to be able to plan on coming back here within a year or so. Of all of these possibilities I think it’s most likely that I will at least go to Sweden for a few weeks on my way back – I can change tickets and get a plane to from Paris to Sweden and back for a total of around 150 bucks or so. … Let me know if you have any ideas about what I should do with the rest of my life
As the cruelty of the Israeli military occupation increases, and internationals find it increasingly difficult to travel to the Occupied Palestinian Territories because the Israeli government denies them entry, Corrie’s words remind us that Palestinian resistance ultimately does not rely on outsiders. And, that like Corrie’s father, internationals can undertake much of that resistance in their home countries and communities. Corrie’s words also remind us that while internationals can seriously commit themselves to the cause of Palestinian liberation, they do not have to take themselves so seriously. We do this work knowing the risks, but assuming there is a future. And that even if we cannot envision the change that is going to occur, we know that something will change.
Kurdish villagers are dying at the hands of a war the world has ignored for too long
Because we didn’t pay attention to the thousands of Kurdish villages Turkey destroyed in the 1990s, the Turkish state still believes it can act largely without scrutiny.
Family mourning Himdat Osman Darwish – a Kurdish villager killed during a bombing – by his grave ( Lukasz Firla )
We arrived in Barmiza village one year to the day that the Turkish military bombed the car of 20-year-old Himdat Osman Darwish as he was driving to work. Other civilians were on the road as well – not PKK guerilla fighters, the ostensible reason that Turkey uses for bombing these areas where Kurdish villagers live. Himdat left behind a wife and four-month-old son.
Dressed in black, the women of the village gathered with the family’s mothers and sisters in observation of the anniversary of Himdat’s death. The men told us how the 13 Turkish military bases on the hilltops around Barmiza are strangling the village – bases built inside the internationally recognized borders of Iraq.
They detailed what appears to be the Turkish military’s current strategy to empty Barmiza of its inhabitants: villagers who take their flocks more than 400 meters in the direction of any of the thirteen bases are at risk of getting shot or bombed.
Dozens of Kurdish villages along the border are facing an identical situation. Both Iran and Turkey also bomb these villages from across the border, because guerillas resisting their governments make their homes in Iraqi Kurdistan’s mountain caves.
European and US allies of Turkey – because of lucrative weapons contracts and because it serves as an attractive location to base Middle East military operations – do not seem to care that the warplanes they sell to Turkey drop bombs on Kurdish civilians, nor that Turkey seems to have a long-term plan of re-establishing its Ottoman Empire.
“They want us to disappear,” Sumaz, our Kurdish colleague, had said that day as we discussed Turkey’s displacement of more than ninety villages closer to the border in 1995.
Himdat’s mother, Shema appeared in the doorway. Leaning against the frame, eyes downcast, she broke into our conversation to ask us if we needed anything else, because she was preparing to leave with the women for the cemetery.
I winced when the freelance photographer traveling with us asked if he could follow them, but she stood taller in her black clothes – a color she would now wear for the rest of her life, according to Sumaz – and nodded her head in urgent agreement.
When we arrived at the cemetery, the mourning ritual had begun. Shema was singing a traditional Kurdish dirge, in which the mourner recounts the attributes and actions of her beloved.
Every so often, her strength gave out and she vented her grief in wordless anguish while older women tended to her. Himdat’s father, who had accompanied us to the cemetery, crouched away from the group in his green workman’s overalls, his back hunched in solitary mourning, wiping his eyes.
Two Kurdish members of our team prayed through their tears.
I glanced at the Turkish military base overlooking the cemetery, one of the thirteen that made it so deadly for the villagers to tend their flocks and fields. Perhaps Shema was willing to have the photographer record this occasion of mourning so that her son’s death would not become another of thousands in the ongoing Kurdish genocide that passed unnoticed.
After another attack of sobbing had wracked her thin body, she drew a breath. Her pale brown eyes met ours. “Do you see? Do you see how much we loved him?” they seemed to ask.
The next day we visited the family of Dunya Rasheed. Dunya died this June in a mortar attack near a Turkish military base as she gathered seeds from the kanger plant (also known as gundelia) with other villagers from Halania.
We had shared Dunya’s story widely through our internet platforms, along with a family photo of her with her brother’s disembodied hand resting on her shoulder.
I had looked at her amiable face so often, that when I had a chance to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan last month, I wanted to ask Dunya’s family what she was like as a person.
I had no intention of reviewing the tragic events of her death. But her mother, after sharing briefly how sociable, smart and respectful she was, slipped into an altered state and, as though she could not help herself, began in a monotone detailing what happened on the day she died.
She said that Dunya at first didn’t want to go collect the seeds, and her father said she could stay home. That she changed her mind, because all her friends were going. That her mother had brought her an extra bottle of water and told her to drink, because the day was hot, but she said she was fine. That her daughter’s body had floated into the air in an explosion of dust when the mortar hit her.
That her son had placed his sister’s body – its arm, shoulder and leg ripped away – on his mother’s chest so she could hold her. That after the Turkish soldiers collected the mortar fragments, they ordered the family to say that a landmine had killed her.
Kurdish journalists never contacted the family about Dunya’s death, and Dunya’s father bitterly complained that he had seen no mention of it in any Kurdish publications. (The Kurdish political parties control all the major media and the KDP, which controls the region where the family lives, is friendly to
Dunya Rashid
Turkey.)
“When an American woman was killed in Duhok, the whole world knew,” he said. The fact that his oldest daughter’s murder by the Turkish state would pass unnoticed still gnaws at him, because her absence has left such a giant wound in this family.
“If Dunya were here, it would be different,” her mother finished. “She would be happy you were here. Everyone loved her. Everyone who knew Dunya is like me now. All of her teachers. All of her friends. She was so different, so lovely; God didn’t want me to have her. She is always in front of my eyes. This has been a great disaster for all of us.”
Here is a picture of Dunya. Her name means “world”.
Both the Talmud and the Quran have some variation on the saying, “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by
scripture to have saved the whole world.”
Because the international community did not pay attention to the thousands of Kurdish villages Turkey destroyed in the 1990s and the unknown number of Kurds it killed and disappeared, the Turkish state believes it can kill a Kurdish civilian here and depopulate a Kurdish village there largely without scrutiny.
But for Himdat and Dunya’s families, for the hundreds of families mourning the losses of their loved ones and their villages in the last two decades, Turkey has destroyed, and continues to destroy, entire worlds.
Mariel Hemingway was 16 when she started working on Manhattan. Allen tried to lure her away on a weekend trip to Paris after the filming. Her parents encouraged her to go, but unlike her character in the movie, once she found she would not have her own room she decided the invitation was creepy and said no.
But, my liberal film aficionados, are you planning on seeing Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel when it opens and comparing it to his other masterpieces over dinner with friends?
You cognoscenti who judge the white evangelicals in Alabama for supporting a man who dallied after teenage girls in a mall — you are hypocrites if you think an artist’s comedic genius, his directorial brilliance somehow justify a selective amnesia on the part of your conscience. If you must see Wonder Wheel, so be it, but your penance is this: when you walk up to the box office, you have to say, “I am financially supporting a child molester.”
In March, I attended the 2017 MadCap Writing Cross-Culturally Workshop. Although I was disappointed that more adult literary writers did not attend, much of what I learned was helpful to any writer about representing worlds—fantasy, Sci-Fi or real life—accurately.
In order to write accurate representation of the world around us, having actual relationships with people outside your own ethnic/religious/etc. group is helpful. Maybe some of those people will even read your novel and tell you where you’ve gotten their culture right and where you’ve really messed up. And now you can pay someone from a marginalized group, called a Sensitivity Reader, to evaluate your manuscript for offensive, weird or “off” content.
The photo comes from an interview with Ireland in Locus Online. Her upcoming novel Dread Nation, about a zombie apocalypse during the civil war is on the top of my list of audiobooks to download when it comes out in 2018. Also for sure follow her on Twitter: @justinaireland.
However, sensitivity readers are not a panacea. One recent book that caught the attention of author and social critic Justina Ireland is the Young Adult book American Heart. Set in a time when the U.S. government is detaining Muslim Americans, the narrative, according to its critics, seems designed entirely to support the emotional growth of a white teenage girl as she helps a Muslim university professor escape to Canada. What the professor experiences is beside the point. As someone on the Twitter feed pointed out, American Heart is analogous to a man writing the The Handmaid’s Tale. The author had a Pakistani American read it, but Ireland maintained on her Twitterfeed the author used a sensitivity reader as a stamp of approval, rather than a wish for honest engagement.
For my fourth novel (working title Don’t Call Me Buffy) I have paid three sensitivity readers to take a look at the manuscript in addition to my usual faithful crew of beta readers: a neurodivergent MIT graduate student, a Palestinian Christian, and a Muslim. I am also asking a white evangelical writer to take a look at it, since I have not lived in that culture for some time, and I am actively looking for someone from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to read it.
I felt confident enough to have a young Palestinian woman be one of the three viewpoint characters in my narrative, because of my relationships with Palestinians. I deliberately chose not to write from the viewpoint of a Seneca Nation character, because, I am ashamed to say, I have traveled halfway around the world numerous times to Palestine, but spent very little time on the Seneca reservations near my home in upstate New York. I also chose not to make the novel primarily about the encampment that follows when the Seneca nation takes over a church property on their land—a church pastored by the father of another viewpoint character. Given the profound spiritual importance of the #NODAPL encampment in Standing Rock last year, I knew that the right to fictionalize the encampment experience belongs to an Indigenous writer. Nevertheless I want to have a Haudenosaunee reader look at my novel to correct mistakes of culture, etc. that I assume I will have made. Also I have some concerns that I have created a fictional piece of land, and a fictional treaty abrogation, and fictional medical waste dumping by a fictional western New York University on the actual Allegeny Reservation, when the real life traumas that the Federal government and State of New York have committed against the Seneca Nation are immense. The database of Writers from the Margins does not contain Haudenosaunee readers, so I have taken out classified ads in the local papers, and have contacted the Director of Indigenous students at nearby University to see if any of her students might like to make a little extra income reading it.
If any of you have Haudenosaunee friends who like to read, I’m hiring!
A version of this article first appeared on Medium. I invite you to go there and clap for it!
Recently a friend who works for a non-profit that seeks to reform U.S. foreign policy posted on Facebook a mild defense of comedian Louis C.K.’s “apology” to the women he had sexually harassed. I pointed out the deficits of his confession in the comments and linked to an article about the Old Boy’s network in comedy that enabled Louis C.K. to continue his harassment and which silenced his accusers. A LOT of other people offered up their opinions in the comments on my friend’s Facebook post.
In a subsequent posting, he wrote, “It’s so funny to me that if I post something about Louis C.K., some people get so exercised about it that they send me private messages about it. But if I post something about the U.S.-assisted Saudi genocide in Yemen, two or three of my closest people respond. Nobody else gives a shit. I need to figure out a way to force people to care about this.”
Most people would agree that genocide, military occupation, police brutality, political prisoners and other issues taking up my head space are more important that celebrity culture. But truthfully, I have never had much interest in celebrity culture. I have, however, found myself intensely engaged in the stories of victims coming forward and accusing powerful figures in the political and media communities of sexual abuse and silencing. I haven’t watched Woody Allen movies for years, nor would I watch anything by Roman Polanski.
My friend’s Yemen comment made me probe the depths of my interest. I have experienced mild sexual harassment, but I think the sore spot these stories touch don’t relate to these encounters as much as they do to my history with bullying.
I grew up socially awkward. I cried easily, and because I read several hours a day, I used a vocabulary that was not only beyond my peers but, I realized in later years, some of my teachers. In elementary school, I was always the last chosen for teams, an object of scorn and derision, the cootie girl. One of the worst insults a boy in my classes could hurl at another boy was to claim that I was his girlfriend.
In junior high and high school, the bullying stepped up a notch. It’s probably safe to say that almost every day I was the target of verbal or physical abuse. I was tripped; I had food thrown at me in the cafeteria; I was slammed into lockers and asked “Why are you even alive you ugly skank?”; I had my books ripped out my arms and thrown across the hall—always, always to the accompaniment of laughter by my fellow students. As I write these events—and my hands are trembling as I type—once again, I feel the old shame, shame more than anger, the wondering “what is there about me that is so inherently disgusting that would cause people to do this to me?”
Not once, did any adult intervene on my behalf. When I tried to tell what was going on, I was given some version of, “You need to buck up or you will always be victimized.” Kind girls who reached out to me, I repaid by becoming too attached and clingy, desperately wanting to hold onto their friendship and protection. I became depressed, withdrawn and suicidal, pleading with God to kill me during the night as I slept.
In college, I had a chance to reinvent myself. The sensitivity and passion that made me a loser in public school gained me friends and allies in college. I poured myself into Nuclear Disarmament and Central American solidarity work. Later in 1993, I joined Christian Peacemaker Teams, where I have spent the last twenty-four accompanying people in Haiti, Colombia, Palestine, Washington DC, and in Indigenous Communities who have lived far less privileged lives than I have—who, if we’re going to go for metaphors, have had to fight against state-sanctioned bullying on their entire populations.
Many of the people I know who go into human rights work have had difficult childhoods. I used to find redemption in this narrative. But I have become less enamored of the “wounded healer” trope lately. First of all, in human rights work, it has colonial overtones. Also, I have seen the damage done when the unhealed wounds end up bleeding all over tasks we need to do. But more importantly, in relationship to myself, I don’t think it sustains you for the long haul. If true healing never really happens, that bullied girl keeps getting in the way of adult Kathy, diverting focus from the acute needs of people I am supposed to be accompanying.
And currently that bullied girl, who experienced silencing and gaslighting from her peers and the adults who were supposed to protect her is celebrating that Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey (whom she liked in the film Beyond the Sea), Louis C.K. (whose TV series she enjoyed) and so many other celebrities are facing accountability for their silencing and gaslighting. She is ecstatic about the Washington Post story on Roy Moore. She wants Bill Clinton to face reckoning, finally, for rape, too.
Adult Kathy…well, I am watching as Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are still living as free men, even feted, and the woman who was fourteen when Roy Moore sexually molested her is already having her divorces and bankruptcies (Donald Trump’s divorces and bankruptcies being somehow irrelevant) displayed for public scrutiny. I am thinking that even if the victimizers du jour are finally held accountable, it won’t bring back the careers of so many of the people they victimized, nor will it un-traumatize the lives of their victims. I am thinking about famine in Yemen, the Israeli military occupation of Palestine and the current futility of either the two-state or one-state solution. I want be an ally to people of color and sits wordless in front of the Twitter feed and Facebook as I bear witness to the indignities they experience, how society both targets them and renders them invisible. I think I have no right to feel this paralyzed, this hopeless, given my life of privilege. I want to be like other activists I know, who approach the work with a certain joie du vivre, who draw energy from the struggle and from their association with other activists.
But before I get over the PTSD I am experiencing now from years of working in Palestine, I am probably going have to fix her—the girl with the glasses:
May healing come to all of us, who have tried, in our own muddled ways to hold people accountable and may the next generation—whatever gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or ethnicity—live free of silencing.
I took a leave of absence from Christian Peacemaker Teams beginning in January 2017, having a long list of goals to accomplish in mind. I knew from the experience of my sabbatical four years ago that I would not accomplish all or most of these goals. Still, despite the fact I have played way too much Plants vs. Zombies and have been dealing (gladly) with unexpected health crises of elderly relatives, here are some things I have accomplished:
I wanted to finish my novel, working title Don’t Call Me Buffy, and I did. I don’t have the perfect pitch yet, but here’s a summary:
Jubilee McVey, brought up in an evangelical purity culture, deals with the shames heaped on her by her family and church by brutally restricting calories and indulging in mutilation fantasies. Then Rania Khalidi, an energetic social justice activist and Lior Artzi—who views the world through the lens of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, approach her one day to tell her that she has been called by the Council of Huldah to convince her father to stop building his dream church on land belonging to the Seneca Indian Nation. She assumes that what they are asking her to do is impossible, but the encounter pulls her into a world where she discovers abilities she had not imagined.
What Rania, Jubilee and Lior do not know is that the Prophet Huldah, briefly mentioned in the book of II Kings, is alive and grumpy and teaching Biochemistry in western NY. She has little interest in God or prophecy. Mostly, she wants to support her talented student Jayce, a member of the Seneca Nation who is investigating medical waste dumping on the Allegeny reservation. But as she sees a prophetic movement beginning to emerge in Western NY the way it did in Israel and Judah, and as Jubilee flees to Jerusalem to escape her prophetic obligations, Huldah wonders if the land belonging to the Keepers of the Western Door has been chosen to change history.
Currently, my beta readers say it reads very fast, so that’s always good news.
I also cleaned out boxes that had been sitting in the upstairs alcove of our house pretty much since we had moved in, as well as some that came my way after Mom moved into the nursing home. I found recycling my mother’s stuff emotionally wrenching as well as other keepsakes, so I dealt with it by posting about it on Twitter:
Today I recycled my mother’s proofreading notes on my second novel.
Today I recycled a handwritten coupon good for “1 hour of sewing help from Sylvia D. Klassen exp. 12/25/04” @SylviaDHook
Today I recycled my 1984 college commencement program and dozens of Christmas letters from people I love.
A more amorphous “success” for the year was that I generally said “yes” to my husband Michael when he suggested an activity for the evening or weekend instead of telling him I was too tired or had too much work to do and that felt good.
When I think of what I did not achieve around the house and yard, well, it’s a pretty long list, and I won’t go into it; besides, I’ve still got two months, right? Probably of most concern was not just my neglect of spiritual growth, but my inability to focus on spiritual growth. I found sustained attention on prayer, meditation, or anything remotely spiritual almost impossible. Coming along with this acknowledgement of my deficit is that I realized I have for some time been dealing with low-grade PTSD, and I’m not sure what to do about it. After serving in Palestine since 1995, and seeing small victories, friendships built all get swept away, seeing the relentless cruelty of occupation get more and more entrenched—I think it has broken something in me. And I am reluctant to use the word “trauma” in relationship to myself when I’ve been coming over just once a year, because the people of the Old City are living with this brutality every day. It seems like whining, or attention-seeking behavior.
But this year, for the first time I had to walk out of a movie at the Palestine Film festival after eight minutes. I had already seen those faces at home demolitions. I had seen those terrified children being dragged away by soldiers. I didn’t need to watch them on the screen. And I had to stop watching a documentary about Israeli women soldiers on our local public television station for the same reason. I acknowledged it was a good thing they were coming clean about their abuses of Palestinians, but I kept seeing the faces of those Palestinians they had abused.
So I probably won’t be going back to Hebron when I return to work in January. Perhaps I will work on another team, or perhaps I will just take a year off to work with Christian Peacemaker Teams’ new Communications Director. And maybe I’ll figure out how to classify my stupid trauma. Maybe I just did.
Ever since the start of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has invited comparisons to authoritarian figures in history.
Richard Nixon is currently enjoying favor in the media because of their shared obsession with law and order, White House leaks, and hatred of journalists.
But before the punditry glibly snags another Trump twin from its Arcade Claw Machine of Despotism, I’d like it to focus, really focus, on Nixon and the COINTELPRO era of law enforcement, because we still have political prisoners in the United States serving sentences due to the legal abuses from that era.
And one of them is my friend, Jalil Muntaqim.
As has been amply documented by authors like Peter Matthiessen, Ward Churchill, Betty Medsger and documentaries like COINTELPRO 101, the FBI under Nixon targeted activists who were part of movements like the Black Panthers, and the American Indian Movement (AIM), infiltrating their activities, often marking them for assassination.
When they fought back, their experience with the judicial system was one marked by the government’s illegal tampering with evidence and with witnesses lying to judges.
In Jalil’s case, the tampering in his trial and his co-defendants for murdering two police officers involved inconsistent evidence from three witnesses, the recanted testimony of one witness who was intimidated into cooperating, the suppressed exculpatory FBI ballistics test on a .45 caliber weapon seized after he and his co-defendant Albert Washington were arrested and the perjured testimony of NYPD detective George Simmons concerning the test. The Nixon tapes contain a record of a secret White House May 26, 1971 meeting in which Richard Nixon, John Erlichman, FBI Director Herbert Hoover, and others named the murders “NEWKILL,” (for “New York killings”). Those involved with the case of Jalil and his co-defendants believe they decided to blame them on Black Panther Party (BPP) members as part of the COINTELPRO conspiracy to destroy them.
While the 1975–76 Senate Church Committee hearings disclosed some of the abuses of COINTELPRO and other intelligence agencies, it never sought redress for those prisoners framed by the FBI’s manipulations of the justice system.
So Jalil and the other COINTELPRO targets are still in prison.
Why? Because the Judges that put them there refused to grant appeals and because parole boards are made up largely of law enforcement personnel, who almost never vote for the parole of prisoners involved in the death of other law enforcement personnel. And they have a powerful lobby when it comes to petitioning governors and presidents against clemency.
Any other prisoner serving twenty-five years to life with Jalil’s record would have been paroled long ago.
While in prison he has graduated with a BS in psychology and a BA in Sociology, taught computer skills to prisoners, and helped them get their GEDs.
He has twice received commendations for quelling prison riots and was recognized by the Deputy Superintendent of Auburn Prison for his efforts to raise inmate funds for the Red Cross after 9/11.
From prison he has also co-sponsored a Victory Gardens project, enlisting Maine farmers to distribute produce to poor urban New York New Jersey and Boston communities.
Think of what this man could have done if he had not spent the last 45 years in prison.
I saw Jalil last weekend.
He had been transferred from Attica to a super max facility near the Pennsylvania border because he had been teaching a class in Black History and had compared, unfavorably, the Crips and the Bloods gang membersto the Black Panthers.
He noted how the former were not invested in supporting their communities while the Panthers’ raison detre was uplifting their neighborhoods.
Somehow, the prison authorities took from this bit of pedagogy that Jalil was promoting gang warfare.
Attica is refusing to release the tape of the session, which Jalil is certain will exonerate him — but it is in the hands of his lawyer now.
We asked him why he thought Obama, during his last days in office, had pardoned Oscar Lopez Rivera, targeted by COINTELPRO because of his activism for Puerto Rican independence and not AIM activist Leonard Peltier, also a COINTELPRO victim.
(Jalil, convicted on a state offense, is not eligible for federal pardon.) Jalil thought Jimmy Carter appealing for Lopez Rivera probably had something to do with it.
However, he thought that it probably had more to do with the quantity of votes Puerto Ricans had to offer the Democratic Party versus the quantity of votes Indigenous people have to offer.
I have followed the Free Peltier Campaign for some time on social media, and my heart broke in January for Peltier and all the dedicated activists, when they found out that Obama would not pardon Peltier, who is quite ill.They viewed Obama’s decision as a death sentence.
Because, of course, no one has any illusions that Trump will respond to appeals for political prisoners.
This is a man who still claims the Central Park 5 are guilty despite the fact they were all exonerated after DNA proved them innocent and the actual rapist confessed to the crime.
So what is our responsibility to Jalil Muntaqim, Leonard Peltier and all the remaining political prisoners in the United States?
Addressing past assaults on civil liberties that resulted in the presence of political prisoners in U.S. jails might very well equip us to face the contemporary assaults on civil liberties committed by the Trump Administration.
Learning the names of these prisoners is a start.
Here, for example are all the Black Panthers, like Jalil, currently still in jail or in exile.
Updates since this this article was written in March.
April 2, 2017 Update:
Jalil reports that he has finally received all of his property, except for TV. The typewriter is broken and has been sent out for repairs.
March 22, 2017 Update from Jalil:
I’m out of SHU, however, phones, commissary and packages won’t be restored until March 29, 2017.
They released me from SHU and placed me in the “Close Supervision Unit” (CSU) absent any notice or due process procedure. At the surface, prisoners are treated like all other prisoners, go to school, programs, recreation, etc., as all other prisoners. But they are scrutinized more closely, searched more often, and, I imagine, reported on more frequently.
I intend to file a FOIL request for all documents regarding the unit and the arbitrary and capricious decision to place me in the CSU. Once I get the documents, I’ll file a grievance to exhaust administrative remedies and proceed with a petition in the Court.
Still haven’t received my property, hopefully by the end of the week at the latest.
Revolutionary Love and Unity,
Jalil
In the Spirit of Nelson Mandela
in Apartheid NYS Prison System!
Please take the time to write to Jalil and let him know he is in our hearts and on our minds.
Anthony J. Bottom #77A4283
Shawangunk C.F.
P.O. Box 700
Wallkill, NY 12589–0700
I am a U.S. citizen who has worked in the West Bank City of Hebron since 1995 with the human rights organization Christian Peacemaker Teams. I am currently serving with two Australian teammates who brought to my attention a picture of the four you enjoying time in Jerusalem under the caption, “Bringing peace to the Middle East.”
I do not know you, but if I were to see a similarly captioned photo of Democratic and Republican lawmakers from my country in Jerusalem, I would feel it like a kick in the gut. People are dying over here. In our context, it happens most often when soldiers shoot them at checkpoints in extrajudicial executions with complete legal impunity. For years at the checkpoints we monitor in the morning, we have watched Israeli soldiers shoot teargas at small children walking to school—something that you would never tolerate in your own electorates. We cannot count all the other indignities and humiliations we have witnessed this military occupation inflicting on the inhabitants of Hebron—as it is in the nature of all military occupations to do.
And the geographically expansive region of “The Middle East,” to which you referred encompasses the people caught up in the carnage currently engulfing Aleppo, Syria, as well as the violence in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt. These are real human beings, loved by their families, who feel pain when bombs and bullets slice though their flesh, or who who suffer that stab of utter horror when they realize it is their child buried beneath the rubble. In other words, peace in the Middle East is not a joke, Mr. Marles, it is a moral imperative for all people of conscience.
Sincerely,
Kathleen Kern
Colleague of [names redacted in order to foil Israeli security officials who think Palestinians have no right to have internationals spend time with them and who have complete control over the borders of Palestine.]
Diya (11) is arrested by an Israeli Border Policeman
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