It Could Happen Here Weekly 102

you can make your own decisions. Hey, everyone, Robert Evans here, Welcome to It could happen here, as I'm sure you're aware, at this point over the weekend, somewhere between five hundred and one thousand Hamas fighters. Those numbers have a lot of flex in them. It's really unclear at this moment. That just kind of my guess based on what I've seen so far, carried out a successful infiltration and sneak

attack across a wide swath of the Israeli border. Their methods were varied from motorized hang gliders and boats to mobile columns of technicals and bulldozers which they use to breach fence lines. Surprise seems to have been newly total in their worst intelligence failure since the nineteen seventies. Many IDF troops were caught literally in their underwear. Casualties seem to have been highest among the police, who were unprepared

for militants armed with conventional military weapons. Casualty accounts remain heavily in flux, so I will not labor over them here. Suffice to say that the best information at the time that I'm writing this suggests at least one thousand dead in the first day or so of fighting. It appears at the moment to be fairly evenly split between Israeli soldiers, police, and civilians, as well as Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians.

We can expect the death toll among Palestinians to rise steadily in the near future as the bombing of Gaza escalates. It is very clear, though, that the Hamas did not strike only military targets, and Israelis and Palestinians are not the only people killed.

of other killings. I've seen one video of a man beating another man's head in it's claimed to be a HUMAS militant and civilian clothes beating a Filipino guest worker in Israel to death. There's no actual evidence that I've seen as to who either person in the video is, and a lot of the videos of horrible things that are spreading right now are just that, videos that definitely show violence, but that are extremely unclear as to who is perpetrating the violence and why. We do, of course

know that hummas targeted a number of civilians. A significant number were killed, including people in their homes, and unknown numbers of people were kidnapped and taken back across the border to be ransomed later for imprisoned fighters and Palestinian civilians. This has happened before in previous escalations of conflict in the area. It's not a new tactic, and the videos of it are of course horrifying. The capturing and killing of civilians is by any definition of the term, a

war crime. Israel's response has been horrifying as well, and writ on a larger scale. Significant chunks of Gaza have already been leveled in air strikes. At least one hospital has been targeted, killing a nurse. Israel has cut off power to Gasam, an active collective punishment that also qualifies as a war crime. That term has less weight than it used to these days. Many of us in the West grew up with illusions about a rules based international order.

The crimes occurring now will continue to erode the idea that war might ever have limits, Like whitewater cutting a path through stone. I try to stay plugged into such things, and I become aware of this most recent eruption as it happened. I spent several hours trying to understand the early open source dilligence, watching people that I trusted in the region post videos that they could verify, and then I went to sleep. When I woke up, I saw

the expected river of bloodthirst on social media. This is also nothing new. The Internet has not created this behavior. You may have read when you were in high school that early in the US Civil War, picnicking civilians would show up to ogle the Battle of Manassas. Certain aspects of online culture have, however, lent a deeper ugliness to the affair. I noticed this for the first time during

the fighting against ISIS. I reported from Mosel several times and kept up with various Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, and Twitter accounts that shared footage and updates from the field. A subculture developed around this, fueled by a mix of professional seeking intel and amateurs, some of whom later became experts, and others of whom simply liked watching the violence. All of us experienced a degree of desensitization, and Gallo's humor

was common. Researchers would share their favorite ISIS nachets, actively Jihati theme music, and throw Arabic phrases that they'd read in issues of Debiq, Isis's magazine into daily conversation. Lines of dialogue from different videos of combat became catchphrases. The best known of these was probably a video released in April of twenty sixteen, which showed a group of four

ISIS fighters battling Kurdish troops north of Mosul. These guys were not overly familiar with their weaponry, much of which had recently been looted from Iraqi army stores. One of the fighters in the video, Abu Hajar, fucks up constantly, at one point roasting his own men with the back blast of a rocket launcher. The timing on it is pretty perfect, and it's basically impossible not to laugh a little at this. His comrade shouts a now infamous line

at him, what is wrong with you? Abu Hajar. The man who filmed the video dies, of course, and so did a bunch of other people that day. Now, these guys are Isis fighters, so it wasn't hard to laugh at the footage and move on. I did, and so did many other people. I still chuckle sometime at it. Of late, though, I've come to find the laughter more unsettling. This started after the expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine. I began to see videos of wounded, dying, and dead Russian conscripts.

These were often close in gory shots, devoid of broader information, and shot purely for entertainments. One thing to watch combat videos in which people die if it gives you an understanding of the nature of combat in that theater of war. The kinds of weapons, use the efficacy of certain tactics. It's another to just look at a bleeding teenager as

he slowly dies and joke about it. Now, some of the folks who were laughing are people I knew Ukrainian civilians and volunteers, and I cannot blame them, and do not blame them for taking satisfaction or even mirth in the death of an invader. That is how war works, that is how war has always worked. It is foolish and cruel to ask for decorum from people under siege. I'm sure many Goasins feel the same about footage now

flooding the Internet from this most recent attack. But many of the people cheering at dead Russian conscripts were not soldiers and not civilians who were being shelled by that state, but were random Americans, middle class, suburban war aficionados, far from the danger, who spent time, who took a moment from their day to joke about suffering soldiers in a foreign country. A mirror of that behavior now proliferates as well. It curdled my gut then and it still does. But

my feelings here are immaterial. I have come to believe that this behavior is impossible to avoid or even mitigate. To a very substantial degree. It also appears to be nearly universal. Social media has made barbarism easier than ever to monetize. As the years have gone on, every new eruption of violence around the world brings with it more footage faster. Ocent open source intelligence accounts have gone from a niche obsession among reporters and conflict nerds to mainstream entertainment.

Because views equal money, especially on Twitter, where Elon Musk pays people based on the end game age they get, there is now a financial incentive to post videos that will be shared widely, and as always, the stuff that is shared most widely is the stuff that makes people angry. Videos need not be truthful to spread. In some cases, this means reposting old footage as if it is new.

This is particularly easy with the conflict in Gaza, since Israel has launched so many strikes against it over the years. One video of a building crumbling into rubble left or a missile strike is as good as another. To the rats scrambling for Elon Musk's pocket change, many viral disinformation videos are just clips from the check video game Arma two. For roughly a decade, footage of in game combat has gone viral, netting followers and sometimes money for all manner

of shady figures. If you see video that's claimed to be an Israeli helicopter or a Russian helicopter or an American helicopter being shot down in some erupting field, you should really double check that, because there's always a very good chance that it's a clip from this video game of a chopper going down or of some other kind of military vehicle being taken out. In real warfare. It's quite rare to get footage at a good angle and

close to that sort of thing. So anytime you see footage that seems like it might be too good to be real, it probably is. Such disinformation is, of course unsightly, but that's not all it is. It can provoke violence as well. A recent New York Times article on social media disinformation makes this clear quote. The Times found several pieces of misinformation that spread out across Israeli and Palestinian

neighborhood and activist WhatsApp groups this week. One which appeared as a block of Hebrew text or an audio file, contained a warning that Palestinian mobs were preparing to descend on Israeli civilians. Palestinians are coming, parents, Protect your children, read the message, which pointed specifically to several suburban areas north of Tel Aviv. Thousands of people were in one

of the telegram groups where the post was shared. The post then appeared in several WhatsApp groups, which had dozens to hundreds of members. Now there were no reports of violence in the areas mentioned in this post. This kind of thing happened all over the world and has been happening for years, and the fact that it's untrue does not stop similar viral lies from inspiring and justifying mass

violence in places like India and Myanmar. In both those countries, much of this targeted disinformation was posted at the direct behest of state security agencies to further their efforts at genocide. None of this is new. It all just works much faster thanks to social media. The one truly significant change in recent months has been the addition of a direct profit motive to sharing lies. The best recent example of

this is a fellow named Mario Naffall. He's a con artist and a crypto scammer who embezzled from his own company and has built a massive following retweeting out of context videos, starting with the Wagner rebellion in Russia. Earlier this year, Elon Musk, whose ignorance of that conflict is unsurpassed, called Naffall's messages the best coverage I've seen so far.

More recently, Marion Na Fall has been responsible for spreading fake news about the potential capture of Nimrod Alone, who is the commander of Israel's southern forces in the region. The video that he claimed was Nimrod Alone being taken into captivity was in fact a completely different person. It's actually unclear who. Mario does not know anything about anything, and I think was just lying because that would be

the most salacious thing possible. It's also worth noting that Elon Musk recently made a post highlighting a couple of ocent accounts that were his recommendations, his picks for credible people to report on the conflict, and you should follow these folks. He then deleted part of that tweet and self censored himself when one of the sources he had picked referred to dead Hamas fighters as martyrs, which Elon

had an issue with. Clearly, what he's doing is attempting to pick and set his own propaganda dispensers, you know, the people that, for whatever reason he thinks, are providing the most convenient narrative about what's happening. None of this should be mistaken for actual news.

same time. I do still think so, but I'm no longer sure that my feelings on the matter are quite rational. The most commonly accepted definition of intelligence of intellect that you'll find is the ability to adapt to change and select environments, or the ability to deal with change in your environment. If that is truly the best measure of intelligence, then my discussed at disinformation makes me kind of stupid. Its purveyors have had blinding success in using it to

push their own narratives and to shape reality. I use the word barbarism earlier to describe this, and it's a loaded word, but not nearly so loaded as its synonym, savagery. Savagery is a word that inspires powerful emotions for good reason. It was often used by white supremacist colonizers to paint whole peoples as backwards and less human, especially when they engaged in acts of resistance that were in reality no bloodier or more violent than the acts being perpetrated against them.

The word predates European colonialism, though it seems to date back to around thirteen hundred, and it entered French salvage like the Cologne Johnny depphawks from the Latin salvaticus, which literally means of the woods. Why this digression because in two thousand and four, an Islamist strategist named Abu Baker Naji published a book on the Internet titled Management of Savagery.

In Naji's conception, savagery was defined as terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure and stufflike tourist facilities, which were meant to provoke violent escalations from superpowers, that violence would radicalize more people against the West and lead to a progressive degradation of social order and operational capacity. In the nation's nause saw as enemies, The management of savagery was a key text for the men who wound up creating the Islamic State.

Some will use this to argue that the tactics failed, since Isis is not exactly thriving at present. To do so would be to ignore the six trillion dollars the United States lit on fire fighting a disastrous war on terror, which supercharged much of the underlying instability in our country and may yet lead to a collapse in domestic order. I will admit that I have found the framework of managing savagery useful in my interpretation and understanding of conflict,

both domestic and international. In twenty twenty I got to watch the process up close over the course of dozens of protests. The basic strategy of most Portland protests that year. When like this you got a bunch of people to march up to a police building, they would chant and yell until the police got angry and then gassed and or beat up everybody. After a while, this dynamic was

widely understood and accepted by protesters. They saw their suffering and the risk that they engaged in as an acceptable trade off because it revealed the violence and savagery inherent in policing as an institution. This, they hoped would radicalize others against it, people who watched clips of videos from the protest or who attended themselves, And for a time this strategy worked quite well. Many people who had been a political on the matter grew utterly hardened against the

cops after a few hours in the gas clouds. People cannot endure violence, however, without being changed by it, so as the week's war on, participants grew more and more comfortable with not just property destruction, but with the use of things like molotov cocktails. One may consider a molotov to be necessary sometimes, and throughout history they often have been, but savage is as good a term to describe firebombs

as any. No one was killed by any molotov that I ever saw used in Portland, but of course no protests come close to the savagery of warfare. The emotional dynamics at play are shades of each other, though, and I thought it might be useful to mention. Perhaps a more or illustrative example would be my own experiences in Mosul. In the early summer of twenty seventeen. My team and I were embedded with an Iraqi federal police unit in the Old City, where the fighting was intense and hideous.

We came under fire from a sniper. Some of the shots were so close that chipped concrete hit my helmet. The mortar team with us responded with the help of a spotter. They dropped explosive shells on homes and shops until they hit and killed the sniper. In that moment, I felt elation I've seldom felt since. After we found better cover, I began composing the scene in my head, laying out how I would write it. Then my fixer, Sangar, said something that interrupted my train of thought and has

remained with me ever since. Did you count how many rounds they fired before they hit him? I told him I thought it was six or seven. Maybe where do you think the others landed?

scene was more sober, more careful, and much better. As a result, saying our's words have helped me shape both my coverage of war and my reactions to it. Ever since this shouldn't matter to people being bombed out of their homes and losing loved ones right now, it might be helpful though, to those of us watching bloodshed from behind a screen, at least until we're the ones filming.

is obviously a problem. Someone should probably do something about this. And stuff has changed a lot the past the past few years. I mean, like the anti fascist movement that I got kind of that I kind of got into only twenty eighteen. You know, it's very different now, and it's I don't know, there's these types of things live on through like oral histories as well as you know, books, and I think it's really cool to have these types

of conversations. So joining us today is Shane Burley, Emily Gorcinski, Michael Novic, and Darryl Lamont Jakins. Greetings everyone, I'm going to hand it over to Shane and you can kind of talk about the book, I guess.

five years to pull off. But really the idea was trying to do something that was bigger than what had been written about anti fascism at that point, which was shockingly narrow. What people understood of as of just a few movements, mostly very recent history, and so much wasn't being included in that conversation. So the idea was, how can we build out like a much bigger picture of this by including as many voices as possible.

I think with this conversation, the way we were thinking about this is I wanted to I wanted the opportunity to talk with basically my friends about their history a little bit, and so I asked three folks that had a really long history with doing organizing work, and so I thought it would be cool maybe if you go through talking to them a little bit about their prehistory

or their early history organizing. And Michael, your history goes back the furthest as you know, we know, so I thought we could kick off with you and then talk with Emily and then Darryl, just kind of getting into your background. So how do you get started in movement work? Actually I should say first, when did you get started in movement where?

that process. So there's a family history there for me also obviously grew up in the shadow of the US atomic bombing of Rosha Monagasaki and the US incarceration of Japanese Americans and concentration camps, so you know, those realities in my life. I've lived in a you know, orthodox Jewish immigrant working class family and neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is now dominated by extremely right wing forces Borough Park. It's one of the bastions of probably uh you know,

neo fashionst Republican prosionists. But somehow when I grew up there that was not the case. Anyway, I got involved in politics in the sixties and you know student movement stuff, anti war stuff, and at Brooklyn College, which when I was there was a three public, four year college part of the City University system in New York, and I

was actually eventually elected student body president. They had liquidated the student government earlier when you know, people opposed the Korean War, and we had a struggle to get you know, for student rights and anti war stuff and so on, and we succeeded in getting student body elections for officers for the first time in about a dozen years. But you know, as part of all that anti war and anti police brutality and other stuff that was going on

in Brooklyn at the time. And then we raised the question of the fact that Brooklyn College was ninety eight percent white or nine percent white in a borough that even then was you know, the majority black in Puerto Rican. And suddenly all the student support we had had for all the other struggles cops off the campus and you know, Navy off the campus, and so on we go, you know,

got a dean of students fired and other stuff. But as soon as we raised the question of opening the campus up and having open ambissions to the city university system and a special emissions program for black and Puerto Rican high school students, most of our student support evaporated.

And for me that was an object lesson that unless you're you know, conscious the organizing about internalized and institutionalized racism, everything else you do that is you know, progressive or anti imperialist or anti war is kind of a house of cards or you know, castles made of sand. And in particular and raising those issues, we discovered that there

was a fascist element down the campus. There were people who formed the early Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn who were primarily anti black and Also there's a group called the youth what was it, Young Americans for Vitom YAF, which was like the youth wing of the National Review, right wing Republican formation, and they were pretty openly fascistic

in their politics. So, you know, it became a question that if you were doing you know, anti racist and anti war and anti capitalist organizing, you were going to face not just you know, a struggle against the force of the state, but that there were reactionary elements within particularly white society. And I think because I said the colonialism,

you know, there's a mass base for that. And struck by the title of the show just say, I don't know if people are familiar with the book, it can't happen here, but obviously your title is a reflection it could happen here. I think it has happened here. For one thing, I think the fashion has always been an

element of US political culture because of settler colonialism. You knows, definition of fascism is that it's bringing the methods of rule of the colonies into the metropol But the US is the settler colony, and therefore there are colonized people inside this country. You can always have been and so fascistic elements of you know, slave labor genocide, you know, land theft, all the rest have always been part and part of that is also creating that mass base within

the settler population that supports you know, that leadership. So anyway, I think that that you know, that both those personal aspects and that consciousness, and so I came in contact with, you know, the very radical forces in the Black Freedom Circle back then. The Black Panther Party is very active. There was one of the people in the Black Student

Union joined the Black Panther Party. You know, there's a period of very fascist attacks and the Panthers had formed the National Committee of Combat Fascism and had an analysis that you know, the US was fascistic, and you know, George Jackson at that time said, you know, fascism is already here, and I think he meant it, you know literally, And so that's part of the perspective I've carried through for you know, I don't know what that is sixty years now close to him.

organizing collective in Hayward, California. Eventually out of that I got connected with, you know, some of the people that lad a foreign Prairie Fire organized committee. I was in a group in the Bay Area called the June twenty eighth Union. It was a gay ends, pro socialist, anti imperiallests, pro feminist collective of mostly people of being the set.

And we went to what was called the Hard Times Conference, which was put on by Prairie Far Organizing Committee in Chicago, and it turned out that there was secretly an effort by the weather underground to come up from underground to create a new communist party, and they surfaced that at

that conference. But there's a lot of opposition to that from across the board, from different Black liberation, American Indian movement, the Puerto Rican, depending, the Struggle, Chicago movement, all of them, you know, felt that there was a sell out of the politics there anyway. Out of that process I was

part of. I joined a Prairie Fire Organized Committee eventually, and that split and then it was a West coast group which captained Prairie far the East coast formed a group called the main Eineteenth Communist Organization and they launched the original John Brown Anti Clan Committee, an initiative from the prisons, the organized prisoners and New York had discovered that there was an extensive network of clan claverns that were based in the prison guards and some of the

white prisoners, and they asked for outside supporters to begin to expose that and deal with it and help them deal with it. And John Brandon, the Gillen Committee, was formed out of that. Separately very far on the West Coast had formed a group called Take a Stand against the Klan. There was a lot of you know, that was the period that the beginning of the sort notification

of the clan that was going on. So this is the seventies and eventually, you know, under a challenge from particularly the New African Independence movement, the Malcolm Xis grassroots movement, New African People's Organization, which both Prairie Fire on the West Coast and May nineteenth and the East Coast were connected to, they pushed for a joint organization. So at that point there was a kind of reconstitution of John Brannan at the Clan Committee, and so I was part

of that and we merged. You know, there were chapters in Atlanta, Chicago, the Bay Area, Los Angeles where I ended up in New York, I think Bowling Green, maybe the couple of Connecticut, and so they were quite active in that period, and you know, street level confrontations and you know, other exposures of early Neo Nazi activity and clan activity, but particularly from a perspective of conscious and active solidarity with the black freedom struggling, particularly the New

African Independence Movement which is a very high level of unity, and over a period of time, you know, there was a struggle to broaden that out and try to be a more all embracing organization that could relate to the struggle. There were a lot of different formations at that time.

There was the National Anti Clan Network, and there was a couple of others, and there were different politics among all of them, and you know, John Brandeth Glen made that time took more of a position of pro direct action and also, as they say, kind of just salidated with the Black freedom struggle as a basis for doing that work.

Very first iteration of the John Brown Committee was they were doing a prison organizing with Black Panthers and Upstate New York and they were writing these letters saying the prison guards are clan and they thought, you mean, they're really racist, you know, obviously they're the prison guards. Yeah, and when they went and looked it up. No, the president of the prison guard union was the Grand Dragon of the State KKK.

this strongly libertarian, strongly supremacist mindset. It was sort of the worst of that meritocratic ideal that a lot of us had to experience in university and in our workplaces, and it just seemed like it was getting out of control.

And that was kind of at the same time that we were seeing a lot more women come into the tech industry, we were starting to see a lot of changes in the space, and then there was sort of like this this vacuum left by gamer Gate as that all sort of died down, a lot of this sort of energy needed to go somewhere, and so I started speaking out against some white supremacist organizing that was happening

at conferences and things like that. And I think the first wake up call for me happened when some folks that are linked to Milo Yanapolis put together a list of SGW Social Justice Warriors and this was journalists and activists and people who were speaking out and I somehow made that list. And I realized, after you know, looking at this and seeing what was going on, that be political being sort of just somebody with an opinion, wasn't you know, there was no way to be that wasn't

a defense against what was coming. And so I just sort of looked inside and said, well, if this is the way it's going to be, like, I'm going to fight back, I'm gonna I'm gonna figure out what to do. I didn't really have a lot of organizing ties, they didn't really have a network, so like every other person, I just you know, shouted at Twitter and somehow that worked.

The irony of this all is that all this was going on, I was starting to do you know, digital activism, using my my tech skills to try to shine light on things that were wrong in the federal government and the Trump administration and things like that, and I really.

my community. I knew that we had things going on with our local low income housing space, we had a lot of you know stuff around the statues that was coming up in town, and I didn't really expect, like it was kind of random that Unite the Right was you know, destined for Charlottesville, and so all of the work, all of the organizing that I had started to do that spring, and that where I guess that winter in that spring started to pay off, as you know, as

Charlottesville became the target of all of the neo Nazis. So I think it was sort of I don't want to say it's it's fortunate, because it's not really the greatest like it's not a positive thing that that's what happened. But I guess that I am lucky as I came to this awakening it was happening you know, before and not after, and that I was able to use the network that I was building, the audience I was building

in order to help like back. So yeah, I guess that's that's sort of like, I don't know that I would have been, you know, as much as dedicated as it was if it wasn't for that very personal sort of experience. And I look back at that and I'm kind of embarrassed by that. But you know, we all have our own paths.

kind of those that early flash mob that Richard Spencer led, that gave people the opportunity to build up the base. So how did you kind of shift to focusing on that first? I guess how did you hear about Unite the Riots, this big kind of like target event, But what was the steps along the way there?

amount of state violence and still be successful. And when Richard Spencer first came to town that first flashbob is now called Charlottesville one point.

they spread their message. And so I think that, you know, as I learned about all of this going on, what the first thing that I tried to do is just look around and say, what can we learn from people who have been here before, who have done this before and have this in their living memory. And that's what I tried to take back to Charlottesville. And then, you know, I think it was after that trip I was in

Berlin in May. I came back for that trip. I joined in the anti fascist march almost as soon as I got back, and that's when we had heard we've like learned about the two rallies, the July eighth KKK rally and the August twelfth Unite the Right, and at that point, like from that moment, it was just like every making moment of my day was spent organizing for those rallies.

and these were not super political folks. These were not people like from some activist synagogues who were mainline synagogues, but they connected with a number of faith leaders from the historically black churches, both of which were saying, Okay, we're both going to be targeted here, and there's no there's no institutions coming to help. Really, there's no one

we can count on here. So they created those collaborative spaces and really pretty complicated and effective organizing models, having no experience doing it because of that hyper intense space, which I think is in a way that's why those circumstances have such an important effect on it. So how did you basically planned those couple of weeks in advance?

How are you thinking about it, and what was the kind of groups you were working with so like networks that were coming together formal organizations.

with and that I connected with. And it also happened that I started dating somebody who's also connected to the local anti fascist scene at the time, so I sort of brought into all of these circles through that relationship as well. And so I think that sort of all of these things combined really made it clear that we had a small but very knowledgeable base of people that

could organize. And I think that one of the things that we did exceptionally well in the lead up is because we had such a small core of people who don't who didn't really have you know, a breadth of experience, you know, in doing this, we were able to compartmentalize really well. You know, some people were focusing on, you know, what are we going to do with the you know, the clergy collective and how are they going to organize

what is their action going to be? And we had a media collective and that was where I put most of my energy. And so I think that we had these different groups of people that could focus on different things that helped helped us unblock ourselves from like the grander, sort of more theoretical, more abstract way to respond. We just we didn't have the time to debate over tactics, We didn't have time to debate over the ideology of anti fascism, what the right thing to do was, or

what the best thing to do was. We really had to focus our time on what do we have time to do? What can we achieve given the constraints that we have, And with those sort of constraints, I think that maybe we left some good actions on the table, But what we came up with I think was fairly effective.

And how you do that. I mean, you can have considerations about how they bring in the community and try and align with other groups, but in the end, there's other decisions are being made, and so people often get disappointed when that ends up being what those projects actually are. Now, Darryl, you were down there, I unite.

the World Church Creator. He was he was a local from World Church to the Creator that invited the leader of that group, Matt Hale, to hold the public meeting at their local library. It was a tactic that that particular group had and what that resulted in was about three hundred Neo Nazis coming to York, PA, about three four hundred anti fascists coming out to oppose them. And

you pretty much saw a parallel of Charlottesville. As I said, up to an including a this was January twelve, twenty twelve, and up to and including a someone driving into a group of people and no one pad, no one died, no one was killed, hurt pretty bad. I think the only reason why he served two years was because one

of the people that he hit was a cop. Now we fast forward to Charlottesville, and ironically, I saw the person that organized things in York represented Vanguard America at Charlottesville.

And two days prior, Mike for One People's Project had a little bit of a podcast where we basically said that after everything that was going on in Charlottevielle prior to Charlottefvield one point oh, Charlottesville two point zero, and then this whole Unite the Right thing was happening where it was just making a big production out of having

this event. We pretty much were resigned to the idea that this was going to be the so called rights ultimat in the sense that this was going to be what and everybody, you know, realizing how bad things can get, you know it's gonna be bad. We expected it to be bad. I went to Charlotteville armed, and I think really it was one of the first times that I ever did strap up when I went to one of

these things. When everything went down, I mean, prior to everything going down, I was just basically doing my think videotaping everyone cracking jokes. I was playing happy Warrior because you know, you see this all before up to and including the fighting. The fighting is there. I mean, that happens all the time, even that massively, I'm used to it. What I wasn't used to was when someone was murdered, when someone was killed, because that's never happened, and that

actually freaked me out. It Actually, I actually got really pissed off when that went down, and I think a lot of us did because if we recognize this ourselves, if we who had been on the front lines all these years recognized that this was the direction that was going in. We also recognized that we had the ability

to do something about it beforehand. That's one of the reasons why the ACO you got into a lot of trouble because they were busy trying to protect the free speech of everybody in all the neo Nazis there and insisting that they were going to be in that park

because that's where they wanted to be. And when everything went down, a lot of people just looked at the ACO and said, could you at least recognize us how dangerous they was trying to make the situation ACOU I believe will no longer represent groups that insist on holding armed rallies. I think that was one of the things that they had said, that they were one of the changeups.

And even with the whole discussion about their freedom of speech and saying it was a matter of that freeze speech, people's attitudes were just like, Okay, fine, that's a given, But couldn't you let them get their own attorneys? Why do you have to keep defending the worst of society in the name of a free speech that frankly doesn't seem to be afforded. The rest of us whenever we are opposing them. That's the attitude that a lot of

people had, and it was really the last straw. Charlotteville was really the last straw, and people really got on a different footing and dealing with fascism. I was used to people trying to pull all the stops and trying to defend the quote unquote defend the freedom of speech of not just the fascist in our society, but the right in general. So every time I would criticize somebody on the right, somebody would try to say things ranging from we have to respect their freedom of speech or

we should just ignore them, you know. And I hated it whenever it was and when it was combined the best way to fight hate speeches with more speech you use the more speech, Well, why don't you just ignore them? That stopped after Charlottesville. All of a sudden, people started saying, Okay, we need to start doing something about this group. That's why you saw forty thousand people in Boston protesting against the fascist up there when they tried to hold a rally.

Maybe a week or two later, you know, that's why you saw websites like the Daily Stormer get you know, yanked out of yanked out of the mainstream, and now they're sitting on the dark web. That's why you saw people disowned their family members because they went to this rally. We are seeing people being not just James Field's but others being held legally accountable for what they did in Charlotteville. And all of those individuals are fascists. All of the

individuals were white supremacists. We realized that we had the ability to do something, and we started doing something. Unfortunately, we stopped after Trump lost and people tried to go back to that whole just ignore them routine, and within months we got January sixth, and that was when they tried they ratcheted up again about how we're going to really curtail the right and all and all that we

but now that just became rhetoric. We're here again because you're starting to see a lot of the rumblings with the attacks on the trans community. Basically, conservatives across the country are primarily trying to essentially do something to the rest of the country. I mean, you heard that when you go to the SEAPAC meeting, the Conservative Political Action

Conference a couple of months ago. All they did was talk about things they wanted to do to America, you know, And this is what we have been fighting all our lives. This is what we have been warning about all our lives. And while anti fascism has essentially become mainstream, there is still a lot more work that we have to do in order to basically see all that work therefore, and that's them pretty much the deal.

There's a ton more at stake than we thought. And I think you're right that we've gone back, like right, we've gone back to the previous understanding, which I think is what everyone kind of a lot of people. I guess they felt like they could vote for Joe Biden and then it was done, like it had disappeared. And I'd be interested to hear all of your insights, with all your experience in the movement and like what needs

to be done. I guess to keep that organizing going as wearing this kind of Nadir or thermidor of like anti fascist organizing in the US.

but of course it has happened before. And so in nineteen seventy nine there was a death of the Clan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and people were you know, attacked and killed by an alliance of the clan and the Nazis with you know, the ATF had people in one and the I forget I think the FBI had people in the other and were instrumental in bringing the two forces together to attack the anti Clan group and several people were killed in that. And then the same thing with.

fashion organized. One of the things that happened after the seventy nine killings is that Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of the killing of schwar Er Chainyan Goodman, on a state frights platform, And while he was president, you know, I brought in Pat rob Pat Buchanan and you know, went to Bittberg.

So there's a long history of the state, you know, playing foot seat with these people, and I think we should recognize that, but also that there are going to be ups and downs in and both fascists and anti fascist organizing, and you know, just see that that I think the longer range perspective that is important to understand. The other thing I did want to take a little exception to is the idea that the role of anti fascist is to destroy fascists, and I think that I

don't completely agree with that analysis. I think that it's critical that actually anti fascists force to see themselves as part of a revolutionary transformation of this society and its entirety, and that the ability to actually reach an organizing people has to do with making it clear that fascists are not proviting an alternative to what's wrong with the society although they claim to be and that we are, that we're part of liberatory and you know, self determination elements,

anti colonial elements, you know, support for sovereignty of indigenous people, you know, support for LGBTQ people's rights and all those things that have a positive aspect of a way to reorganize society in a different way than the facts are

putting forward. And I think that that is critically trying to sustain the base and build a base by you know, having a positive you know, one of the things that I've been doing for many years, I published Turning the Tide, which you know, started as a little zine we were sending to the other chapters of Anti Racist Action and also went to the prisons, and you know, eventually we changed the subtitle of that to the Journal of Intercommunal Solidarity.

In the sense of saying, Okay, it's not just anti racist action, it's not just anti fashions, but what are we ford You have to have a positive if you really want to organize people, you have to have a positive sense of what they're struggling for, not just what they're struggling against.

a line that was said. I don't I don't know which family members said it, but that was a line that stuck with me since I was a kid and at the time I wasn't really politically a stud I just that's how I recalled that situation. And with Dan and Spit the Las Vegas murders that that is a different situation however, because that wasn't the rally they sought them out. That was basically on the off time, so to speak. Assassination. Yes, and we've seen that before, most

certainly Luke Kerner from Portland for example. I mean he survived, but he's quadriplegic because somebody came after him.

more high profile for various reasons. But I think that as we're looking at you know, what you were mentioning there, like the anti trans legislation, the rise of the political far right in government in power, we do need a different solution. I'm not saying that you can't go out and like intercept Ron DeSantis's motorcade and like punch them.

we've ever had in history. A lot of our energy should be pouring into supporting those networks, supporting that that care, supporting that mobility and that freedom of movement, rather than just trying to run up against this brick wall that is this Republican you know, behemoth that is moving you forward into all of our rights. Like we're not going to face it down head on. We need to go

around it in some way. And I think that that that going around it is going to require that building, that community, that that sort of redevelopment of those alternative structures. So I think it's so important to have that as well.

This is Garrison Davis. This episode is part two of a conversation that myself and James Stout had with some of the contributors to a book by AK Press titled No Passeran. It's an anti fascist anthology that talks about the modern anti fascist movement and some of the writer's

own experiences with anti fascism. So we'll pick up our conversation basically right where we left off, talking about the modern state of anti fascism, anti fascists and like, you know, the left quote unquote in general right now is kind

of in a weird place. You know, like a lot of people were you know, extremely kind of catalyzed after Charlottesville, and that led to a like massive resurgence of anti racist action, anti fascist action, and I think the quote unquote like Antifa movement of the twenty teens, as like was is probably one of the largest like politically radicalizing forces for people, especially people my age, people a little

bit older. It's you know, it's very influential in what the kind of the modern like anarchists or you know, left you know scene is, and there's like there's a lot of positive parts of that. There's also you know,

there's some some drawbacks for that as well. Kind of one one kind of recurring thing is that like when your only tool is a hammer, then everything is a nail, and there's certain elements of of like and and this like antifa notion or like people who like grew up with with like anti fascists and being their primary kind of mode of practice. Then it can be very easily

turned horizontally. But you know, it's after after j six, after after Biinden's been inaugurated, we have had this very weird lull, but there's still been you know a lot of fascist mobilization. But this is the sort of response to it that you know, was very normalized in twenty

eighteen has has definitely shifted. We we've seen, like, you know, the one thing that's been new is like you, like you mentioned regarding you know, Charlotte Speld there's a lot of like debate around if people should show up armed. We now have like the Drag Time Story Hour kind of defenses, like armed defenses with John Brown gun clubs becoming more popular. But you know, one of the kind of recurring things that everyone's kind of been talking about it.

I've been hearing like there's so many parallels to for what we've been going through the past like five ten years, to other kind of things in the past. Like while all of the John Brown Anti Clan Committee stuff, there's just a lot of cyclical notions. I mean, even I'm here in Atlanta right now, there's this Rico grand jury indictment. Everyone's thinking about like green scare stuff. Even even John Brown Anti Clan Committee did grand jury resistance back in

like the eighties. Like it's this this, These things have happened before. And I think one thing that you know, the quote unquote laughter anti fascists sometimes they're kind of bad at is actually passing down the history. There's this tendency that when people get involved, we're kind of forced to reinvent the wheel every time but it's like completely like unnecessary, but we tend to just keep trying the

same things over and over again. So there's even people younger than me who weren't even old enough to get involved in anti fascist stuff in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and they're now kind of growing up. There's still this fascist mobilization. You know, Liberals are kind of passive because they have their guy in the White House, and we're going to be reaching a really interesting tipping point in

twenty twenty four. So for these types of people who are like either wanting to get involved or who are like just just starting to realize that, hey, maybe we should actually do something about all this stuff, especially as you know, trans existence is one of the main things under attack right now. What is kind of some like lessons from the passage you would like to be passed down to people.

after John brand Ask and Anti Clan Committe left. One of the first actions we did was there was something called the American Spring at the Mexican Border, which was a neo fascist element. It kind of grew out of the previous Clan border Watch that David Duka done and they were trying to you know, build up a base of support for you know, very you know, close the borders. And so we did bring people from la and joined

up with San Diego. And actually at one of those rallies somebody drove a car at and nearly hit someone from the the you know, the anti fascist forces. So I think that's an important piece of we should be thinking about the other thing in terms of killings and shootings. You know, somebody from the Red Nation was just shot in Albuquerque, and you know, I think that again, the question of Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous rights is a leading

edge of struggle. A lot of the struggles around missing and murdered Indigenous women have to do with the you know, fossil fuel industry and in the back in other places where you know, women have disappeared and been killed by you know, people in the fossil fuel industry basically, And I think bringing all that to bear is really critical to have the breadth of consciousness and the understanding that there is a global struggle that's going on and indigenous

people in particular are part of that, about the survival of humanity and of the planet in a sense. And to situate anti fascist struggle in that context, I think is really really important and relates to who are our allies, who are leadership, where is the struggle being led by?

And so you know, one of the things we uncovered here in La is that people involved in the militia movement started their operations by supporting Christian militias in Guatemala and the Philippines, attacking left forces in those countries and indigenous forces in those countries. And you know, having that global perspective, I think that's one of the really great

strengths of the book. By the way, that I thought was really amazing, as the coverage of anti fascist movements all around the world, and you know, the anti fascists in India and so on, and having that sense that it's not just you know, people of European descent or you know, African Americans in the United States who are post to fascism.

people going through this, both in time and space. Right there's movements that are going on elsewhere that are facing a much deeper sort of repression than what we see in the United States, and they are still finding ways to organize. I like to do you know when we talk about like the attack on queer rights, and you.

are organizing quirget demonstrations. Pride happens every year. Pride is attacked by cops every year. They still continue to persist.

on trans anti fascism. Right, we need to, like, we need to absolutely bring in historical contexts and comparative analysis into our into into what we're doing. But that does not mean that we need to say that everything is literally the Holocaust. What we need to do is look at what are the factors, what are the causes, what are the root causes of the things that are happening, and how can we strategically organize to disrupt and to

bypass those forces. So I think it's really important to have that multifaceted perspective.

so successful. It is because we don't wait for the fascists to do something. We do something to them before they make a move. And we know when to do it because they basically send us signals out courtesy of their free speech, that they want to do something, and we just take those cues and say, okay, here's how we are going to go forward. We're going to let people know about you. We're going to let people know how to keep you at bay. I mean, that's the

kinds of things that we need to do. We need to just basically say we are establishing this institution, we are establishing the security around this institution, and you are

not going to be able to breach this institution. The other thing that we do need to do in that while we build that is also make it clear to some of those that lack of a better term, or wishy washy on the subject, are more mainstreamers and liberals and such who are quick to defend the fashionsts that they say they don't believe in before they defend us. We gotta start telling them to chill, and we gotta start telling them to pick a side and stop getting

in everybody's way. Stop being a bulwark because you're too cowardly to put up this fight or you're too interested in protecting your other interests as opposed to being concerned about what's coming down the pike. The book starts off with a discussion about a three way fight. We definitely are in one.

Heart brought that up. Now, I don't think that we need to smack people upside their head with a mace, but by the same token, we do have to let people know that we do have to be a little bit more I should say, assertive in our efforts as we go forward and basically try to route this particular fascist element, and an assertive means blowing past those that

are supposed to be on our side. I mean, because I was thinking about the fact that this is now the twelfth anniversary of Occupy Right, and Occupy was trying to do that. Occupy it's still trying to do that. In many respects. The folks that were in Occupy, but some of the folks, because what you also saw at Occupy were a lot of folks who thought that they will be able to take advantage of the progress that we were making in this effort and turned it into

a more fascist thing. I mean, I was just looking at a lot of the characters that come out of Occupy that went to the fascist side, and when you look at who they are, you realize that you had a whole bunch of opportunities that were within our ranks that were looking for something totally different than what the rest of us. We were looking out for each other and Occupy. The true people that were dealing with Occupy Wall Street were looking out for each other in our communities.

These guys just thought, hey, perfect opportunity to just say that we're one with them and drag them over here to the right. That's strasserism, that straight up stratsirism. But when you look at it even further, it's just a bunch of people that only cared about themselves ultimately. And we've seen it after year after year in this fight. So I think that it's going to be very important to build and protect our institutions and recognize what it is we are protecting them from. And it's not hard.

We have shown over and over and over again that we are prepared to weigh that kind of war. We just have to basically recognize it within ourselves when we have to do it. And that's just. And do not wait for people to die. I mean, Heather Hire did not have to die. No one in January sixth, regardless of how I feel about any of them had to die. That should not be the thing that we should respond to. We already know what to do, we just need to do it.

bombs and stuff. You get attacked by far right groups, you had to have a defense development. There was no other choice.

all kinds of component pieces. So those things require that kind of back and forth. And I think that also begs to how do you get people in. We're talking about a lot of problems with people on like the moderate left not kind of taking the next steps, those defensive steps that are necessary, but also how do we

find a pathway for them in? You know, if we're talking about mass participation in something, if we're talking about like a revolutionary movement with huge masses of people, we have to figure out what those pathways for people are and giving them access to them. And I think also moving past what we've thought of as the far right before. I mean, people have talked about this a little bit.

You know, a lot of what we think of as recent anti fascism was built around finding the alt right and other kind of recent short term projects and what we have now is just radically different, just like it will be in a few years, and so having a deep kind of intersexual understanding of how that works, because when you do that, you have that kind of natural understanding of where that's going to show up again, how it might interact with different communities, and what rule places

for you, How are you able to interact with it as this person coming into a social movement.

be a posed it's going to be. You know, I was just talking about before how we shouldn't just try to like retread the same ground over and over and without learning the histories from the past. But like this, for a lot of people who have just been doing like street politics the past few years, figuring out how they're going to oppose like fascism in this much more like electoral setting. It's going to be an interesting shift because, yeah, you can like punch Richard Spencer and no one really

cares too much. But if you punch someone like you know, DeSantis, that is going to be a different thing to kind of sort through. And so, yeah, I think that is kind of one of these shifts that you know, maybe maybe coming up here soon and whatever kind of evolves on the anti fascist side to kind of meet that is going to be interesting to watch and take part in.

fascist elements in power in this government right now. And you know, the fascism has come to power in quite a number of you know, in Italy, neo fascists as the prime Minister in you know, in the United States, Matt Gates, and that element has a clear you know, they're in power within the Republican Party they control the House representatives in a way, and I think that that's a critical understanding. But also it speaks to the fact that fascist practices and elements exist in a lot of

different places. And I think one of the things I've always tried to put out to people is that this is an aspect of the nature of imperialism, central colonialism, and I want to emphasize that because I think there's a fractal character to what we're dealing with or holographic, you know, there's any element of this society that you attempt to deal with, you're actually facing the entirety of

imperialism and fascism there. So if you look at the labor movement right now, labor is a big resurgence, particularly here in southern California. There have just been you know, the hotel workers and restaurant works on strike, the screen actors on strike, the writers go on strike, and the fact that there, you know, there is a fascist element

to the employment structure and trying to organize it. If you look what happened with the Amazon union, or just the fact that again going back in history, you know, the Taft Hartley Act was written to criminalize you know, communists, and also solidarity with the labor movement and outlaw, you know, solidarity strikes and that's fascist, that is you have to

understand that. And you know, one of the reasons that the Puerto Rican Dependence Movement attack Congress was that the US attempted to put the taft Tartly Act into practice against the labor in Puerto Rico, and the Nationalist Party said, no, we're going to counterattack. So I think that that's a really critical understanding. We started out talking about the prisons,

and you know, there's nothing more fascists's in prison. And one of the things they do in prison is they use privilege to try to divide the prisoners, you know, and we haven't talked much about privilege and how it operates in the society, but you know, it's a key factor in how people are are organized by the system to collaborate to you know, get along by going along

and so. But even inside the prisons we've seen here in California and elsewhere, you know, the Alabama, Georgia, elsewhere, prisoners are able to organize under conditions of fascism that exist in the prisons. They have ways to communicate with each other they've built into racial solidarity in many cases.

So I think those are examples of anti fascism that we need to embrace and understand the same way that people organ you know, if you're organizing a union, you're operating on a certain level clandestinely, because if you're open about it, you're going to get fired, and they're going to retaliate and they're going to Anybody you talk to

is going to get fired. So we need to have an understanding of ways to organize that are not always I'm not talking about arms struggle, but I'm saying that people have to organize below the radar when you're dealing with fascism, especially when it's in power, and fascism isn't power, and a lot of sectors of the society right now and people are dealing with it, as Emily said about you know, Istanbul and Pride marches, you know, so you know, I think we need to make those connections into the

labor movement, into the prison movement, into the you know, formally incarcerated people's movement, you know, the solidarity with indigenous druggers are going on against fascist the colonization of their lands and struggles, and I think that if we understand that that's an aspect of anti fascism, I think it actually strengthens what we're engaged in.

And one thing I enjoyed about your book is that when we talk about fascism, and we'd already mentioned Michael's mentioned the border as a sort of a location for fascist experiments within the United States, which I think it's very hard to argue against living on the border. If you protested in twenty twenty against police violence, you were surveiled using technology that has been used for years where

I live, against migrants and citizens who live here. But I really liked your perspective on looking at global fascisms, because fascism is it's very easy to spend too much time defining fascism, especially as anti fascists, right, Like, it's extremely easy to be like, it's not fascism unless it comes from the Fascia region of Italy, kind of like

this like cheese or champagne definition of fascism. But like they've focused on, for instance, fascism in India, Like if I go to the border, I was at the border a couple of days ago, right that there are tons of Punjabi Sikh people camped out in the desert right now because border patroller are holding them in an open air concentration camp, essentially because of what's happening in India that they turn up here, right and as well as

bringing sort of migrant detention resistance and migrant mutual aid and twenty fascism. I think it's in n AETI fascists also, like we can take concrete action to protect and like

to care for victim survivors of fascisms. I guess people who fled fascism, and like, when I think about what my backgrounds in the study of the Spanish Civil War, right that that's what my PhD is about the thing that radicalized young often Jewish men growing up in the same part of New York that you did, was often seeing people fleeing fascism coming to their communities and then being like, we can't allow that not only to not happen here, but the crucial step that like, we can't

allow that to happen anywhere, and that being what kind of motivated them to travel to Spain, and many of many of them died fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Right. But I think we could do better to do that as well. Like now, I know not all of us are living in the To States right now, but sometimes, like Emily said, American anti fascism can be very exceptionalist

or whatever. But I think that we have so much to learn from anti fascists in my sort of formative experiences who were in Catalonia, in Spain, but also in India, also in Russia, right, And I wonder if anyone could shell like sort of I guess concrete ways that people listening can help to expand that solidarity into an international anti fascism.

Nazi League. So there's sort of a step. They're taking this colonial rule back home that's the testing ground, and then using it domestically. And I think what that actually does is create a certain bridge between two communities that there's now a point of connection where they can relate. That doesn't mean they're in the same situation, right, Like it doesn't mean that like someone protesting in the United States is in the same situation as someone in to

call in my space. But having that shared system that actually binds us together in that sense of solidarity, that's a new model of safety, that's a new model of community. So it's now seeing my strength in that alignment with someone else, So connecting with communities internationally, learning from what they're doing, but making real connections between them, ones that have a real sense of weight between them, where someone's success in international social movement has real effect on your

lives and back and forth. I think committing to that is actually the kind of biggest thing we can do that creates an international movement and it makes everyone stronger, everyone more effective.

think that that really is an important element. And again what I said is that we need to understand that, you know, similar to what Lennon said about the Russian Empire, that is the prison house of nations, that there are captive nations inside the borders of the United States, and that you know, indigenous sovereignty and you know Puerto Rican independence, and you know Hawaiian sovereignty and a lot of other issues. And I think those are things that you know, the

fascists try to exploit. Also, you know, they present themselves, you know, fascionism presents itself in the Third World as a strategy for you know, national dependence. When the Japanese you know, empire.

the internationalists aularity with labor struggles elsewhere. One of the things I raised with in relation to the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild here is that you know, they raised this whole thing about artificial intelligence. And I don't know if people are aware, but artificial intelligence depends on tens of thousands of people in the Philippines and elsewhere that are working you know, as gig workers processing stuff

to put it into artificial intelligence. And you know, the same thing you're saying about the border, the technology of self driving vehicles is based on the same technology using to you know, for motion detection on the border.

into a political situation that gets muddled. I went to the border twice in Ukraine when the war broke out. I would relive Unite the right one hundred times before I had to go back to that again. We don't understand scales until you have seen it, until you've seen the hundred or the thousand yards there from hundreds of people, you know, poring over the border. I'm sure James, you're you're you're very familiar with this, with the border work that you're doing there.

listen more, and speak less. Right, try to read, Try to to see what people elsewhere are doing, how they're organizing, what their needs are. You know, how do we do mutual aid in earthquake and flood stricken areas? How do we do mutual aid for refugees who are fleeing a war, and things like that. There's just so so much out

there that we need to bring into perspective. And if you think that you can fix any of it, or even just a small part of it simply through speaking up or you know, awareness campaigns, I think that you'reld. So I think my call it action is go out, read books, meet people, get off of Twitter. Scrass for me to say it. But the master's tools can't dismantle the Master's house, right. We can't keep this pattern of outreach cycles up. In order to move the issue forward,

we have to come up with something new. My challenge to people is to put your brains together and figure out what that new is going to look like.

We need to just go ahead and do what we need to do so we can benefit what it is we want to do. And that's the attitude that we got to have. We got to have that hip hop attitude, gotta have that punk attitude, and we just simply got to build the institutions that will address the situation. And I will say it again, that's what Occupy was about. I think we need to continue to learn the lessons

from Occupy in order to go forward. And once we start doing that, first of all, when we do that, we're going to see again people trying to either co op or or take it down. And we got to also protect ourselves from from that as well. I mean, I know I'm repeating what I had said earlier, but I think that the solutions and you know what what I didn't say, I think the solutions are already being implemented. I think that we are all have been working and

doing this. Folks that aren't on this Folks that aren't on this podcast, folks that would never be on any pockets are just basically putting their time and to make sure that the things are done properly. I just got I just saw on the news that they had in Delaware, they just passed the law against I guess what they call panic panic killings in regards to the l g B t Q community. You know that what they also

call back in the day, the gay panic thing defense. Yeah. Yeah, Delaware became the seventeenth state, I believe, yesterday to make that illegal. It should have been illegal in the first place, but they basically for those who don't know what that means, it generally means you cannot kill somebody because you're freaked out over someone being gag. I mean, that's just basically what it is concerned for. It happened after Jenny Jones.

Somebody expressed their feelings towards another man, and that person after the Jenny Jones show, had murdered that person, and the killer, instead of getting first degree murder, got second degree murder because he used the gay panic defense. So people initially, so that was where everything started and everybody was saying that we got to do something about that.

If it was not for us putting together the mechanism and the institutions to basically basically voiceocers and voice our issues and say we got to do something about this today, would that have happened. It should not be seventeen states, by the way, it should be all fifty. But that's the kind of things that we need to do. These are the things that it's all going to depend on us and how we act to things that is going

to make all the difference in the world. So when everybody's ready, that's rock and roll.

think a piece and pathway for folks. I mean, right now, I think considering what we're dealing with climate and economic collapse, mutual aid networks or a natural central piece of that. So it's a labor movement.

redefine that a little bit. But having that adaptability is what we've kind of learned over this rapidly changing environment the last few years.

but it was a community organization. And I think that we have to rebuild that, you know, from the bottom up, and it is happening. There's a lot of young people involved in labor organizing. I think that again what I said earlier about the fractal nature of the system, I think one of the things people left in the name is anything they're trying to do, they have an enemy. It's not just a problem that they're trying to face.

They have there is an enemy out there that is trying to enforce the system that we have as it collapses. And I think that that's critical. So, yes, the mutual aid and the kind of things Emily was talking about, I think are critical. I think people are working on people's assemblies. I was at this dual power gathering and the Midwest, and there was just one up in Portland recently.

And I think that the understanding that all the power and all the wealth that this system possesses is actually stolen from the people that it oppresses and exploits, and that it's our power and it's our power to take it back. We have the creative power. I think that's critical, and that their power is exploitive and power over an

hour is the power, you know, to create. I think that understanding and that concept of solidary and I do think that you know again, Stephen Bico, part of the Black Conscience movement in South Africa, said the you know, the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is

the minds of the oppressed. And I think to the extent that we can wage to struggle for a different consciousness that is not based on privilege, is not based on getting along by going along, is not based on individualism, you know, but it is based on collective solidarity, and that actually disempowers the people that we're dealing with and threatens them in ways that you know, they're they're they're freaked out. They understand better than we do the the

tenuous nature of their power. And you know, the reason for fascism to turn to fashions is that they want to try to intimidate people and you know, U you know, break people people solidarity up. And I think that that, you know, we need to understand there's a dialectic there and to the extent that we can create those connections between people that actually disempowers them, the fascists and the state. You know, I have a different perspective on the three

way fight. I think the three way fight is versus the fascists, you know, the self declared fascists and against the state and the capitalist, the bourgeoisie, and you know, they're not identical. They have contradictions with each other, and we can exploit those and drive wages of our own.

I think we have to find wedge issues that peel people off from their identification with the oppressor, with white supremacy and with imperialism, and you know, pull people together and then who've been you know, separated from that identification with the state and with white power, and bring them into solidarity with you know, the global majority of people who are struggling for you know, survival the better world.

five chapters, and it really covers the gamut. Some of the stuff we talked about, some stuff we didn't get to, so it's a really good overview of some of the different conversations happening in the anti fascist movement and hopefully where it goes in the future.

Anti Racist on the Square, laid Yahoo dot com. I was also involved with, although I did edit or anything, but I contributed a lot of material to We Go Where They Go, which is from PM Press. It's the history of AAR and it's chock full of incredible material about you know, specificity. One of the things we didn't talk about AARs involved in was cop Watch. But you know, just a lot of you know cultural material and other stuff there that it's well worth reading.

this current time. We don't walk in fear is the is the latest documentary that I've been involved with. Some students in Villanova University wanted to do a documentary about me, and it's not exactly available to the public. What I've been doing. You can probably find it at film festivals and things like that. But what I've been doing is showing it at various events that I've been invited to, whether it's some sort of speaking engagement or what have you.

So it's only a half hour long, but if anybody in a university or in a bookstore or whatever, and would like me to come out and show the documentary to folks and talk about it later. Please feel free to give me hit me up over at our website One People's Project dot com. We also have a newsline

that's adevox dot com. Both of them on threads and on ig We also have also The last thing that I would like to hype is also in twenty eighteen, there are There was the movie Skin where Mike Culter who played Luke Cage and it's in the TV show Evil. He plays me. It's about a neo Nazi, someone from the villain the Social Club, one of the nastiest and forces, who got out thanks to myself and others. And it's a beautiful story and it's been out since twenty eighteen.

The short film is a different story. I'm not gonna say too much about it because you need to watch it. You can find it on YouTube, or you can find a feature feature Skin on Amazon Prime. But you can find they find a short film on YouTube. It actually won an Oscar in twenty nineteen and I'm listening as a consulting producer, so I guess I have an oscar. And that's about it. I mean, if you want me to speak, come to your colleges or whatever to speak

or show the documentary. We don't walk in fear. Feel free to give me a ring. I'll be happy to see you. I love traveling.

drive for October. Anyone else joined the station. They don't live in La Anti Racist dot org has about thirty five years of turning the tie and a bunch of stuff actually from earlier. I put some of the stuff from brother Reform from being in sexism but I worked on in the seventies up there, including a letter from Michelle McGee was just recently released. Finally, after I think forty eight years in prison, survivor of the Marine Courthouse rebellion.

It is going to take place on November thirteenth, no matter you know some people disagreeing with aspects of it or having concerns about aspects of it, it is it is going to take place. So my interest in putting out this episode is to have a very open and clear discussion regarding some of the questions people have about this quote unquote non violent action and also provide enough informations that people can make their own informed decision regarding

what's going to happen next November. So with that, here is my conversation with Sam and Jamie from the Block Cop City speaking tour. Joining me today is Sam from Block Cop City and Jamie Peck. Both of you have been going around the country I think it's around seventy cities right now, doing a speaking tour to talk about this upcoming action in November to Block cop City. Thanks for coming on.

one the previous March. So what's different about this new upcoming three day kind of mobilization.

there's power in numbers. And I feel like the June Week of Action people were kind of going all over the place, not really sure what to do when. And I talk to a lot of people who were like, just tell us what to do, tell.

least are now facing charges. We've got people facing domestic terrorism charges, We've got people facing RICO charges, just like an absurd overreach of the state, even according to mainstream legal scholars. So we really need a way for people to feel empowered doing direct action again is what we've settled upon as a solution, and maybe Sam can take it from there.

and you're over in Maine, vast continental wide tour. One of the primary functions of this tour is like the activation of affinity groups to sort of catalyze and come down to Atlanta so that crews can sort of have the confidence of flexibility, the warmth and the revelry that comes with moving through space with your homies, with your comrades, while at the same time there's a very large cohort of various logistical teams trying to figure out various programming events.

trying to employ non violence as a strategic action. Do you want to talk a little bit about kind of how that's being envisioned, because I know there's certainly, even in Atlanta, there's a lot of people who are either skeptical or confused or fear that there's like other you know, safety issues with within action as public as this, right, because you're trying to get thousands of people to show up, So this is this very publicly announced thing, which also

gives the police a big heads up. So I know there's been a lot of you know, there's there's a lot of questions, and I feel like, you know, the this this aspect of non violence is a very interesting one because the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement has been I think very historically defined by you know, very spontaneous, fiery acts of sabotage. So I guess, yeah, just that's I want to kind of I'm interested in this kind of strategic non violence aspect.

the fight. I mean, the highest level of violence that any activists have even been accused of is probably about the same level that you'd find if you've ever had a Roman candle fight with your friends, right, you're shooting fireworks in each other's general direction. Obviously that wasn't happening for fun when folks did it in the activism world. But yeah, why non violence?

It's possible that that would happen, although I don't think that's what's going to happen.

would be a political crisis. On the other hand, the state could do and there are signs that has been pulling back, right because what I just said, if the state charges people with misdemeanors for doing the exact same thing that people were recently charged with terrorism or hit with RICO charges for doing that will also serve to further delegitimize these charges for the people already facing them.

the Copsity construction site. It's certainly concerned a lot of people have, especially when you know we're talking about possibly police arresting hundreds of people try to kettle them in the site. It's it's certainly a very very valid concern to have.

being arrested actually useful in any way? And I'm sure that is part of part of some people's thought process going into this, is is you know, if there's a decent chance I am going to get arrested just for walking onto a site, is is it worth it? But sorry you were I realized I was interrupted you and went on a short, a short rant.

months and months and months. There hasn't been an occupation of the forest since the cops killed tort in January of this year, except for a couple of days during the March Week of Action, But largely speaking, in the forests has been held by big scary men with big scary guns for many months now, and the horizons feel incredibly obscured.

tirelessly at other methods of change as well. Right so, our sort of theory is the most powerful action that we can do is one that's sort of defined by our by our power in numbers, by our power in our unity by our power and sticking together in order. So for me, the interesting question isn't even necessarily what happens on November thirteenth of this year, the day of the action. For me, the interesting question is like, what

new horizons does this open up in the movement? How we can reactivate and recatalyze our energy and understand and prove to ourselves in a collective fashion that embodied action in the forest is indeed possible at a math level, and this actually sort of seeks to advance the energy and the movement to a new height that hasn't actually occurred. What's going to happen is more people than ever will be in the forest together at the same time, and that right now is precisely what's needed in this.

will be, as Jamie sort of opened with, discussed democratically and horizontally at these in person outdoor COVID Safe Spokes Council meetings on Saturday, November eleventh and Sunday, November twelfth, down there in Atlanta, where all these affinity groups from around the country, around the state, and around the city of Atlanta will sort of elect one of their home needs to go to this larger general assembly type thing that will then sort of democratically and horizontally determine what

the actual specifics of Monday's plan will be. Are there any sort of community agreements that we want to that we want to uplift and highlight so that we can all sort of know and be on the same page and move in a similar way together. And those could be I don't want to speak for with there because

those will be determined in the Spokes Council. But the sort of like there's been questions, I guess lastly, there's been questions about well, what does that actually look like to maintain a level of non violence whatever that might actually mean.

to that effect. Right, Our wager with this, our goal with this, is the activation of affinity groups of crews that roll up together who enter into this sort of like consensual horizontal decision making space where community agreements are explicitly laid out in the days leading up to the action, those specific affinity groups can hold each other accountable to those norms in whatever way that they want, Right, you and your homies holding it down for one another in

like what we're calling for, right is non violence. Like that we can debate, we can have a heavy political debate about.

what we're doing. What we're calling for in this moment in time, in this specific geography, if people have other ways to engage in other spaces or at other times. One of the hallmarks of the movement is that by all means they should right.

I was there for. There was a march a rally into March at the MLK Center during the March Week of Action, and it was put on by Community Movement Builders, which is a great group, all black group organizing in specifically black working class communities in Atlanta, led by Kamal Franklin, and he put out a statement before this rally in March saying, you know, attention camera, this particular event is going to be a low risk event. We've decided that

is what we need today. We've done a lot of work in the community getting community members to come out to this who maybe haven't been that involved in the past. A lot of older working class Black people are going.

do today at this particular thing. And everybody pretty much listened, and everybody bathed themselves, and I thought it was a really cool example of you know, the respect, the mutual respect across different different corners of this movement.

to the cops. That that that that that is a precedent. But in this case, like you you know, these specific people and community movement builders have been pretty down with the more militant aspects of this movement for years, and you know, in the in the hours before that action, you know, people sought and gained more clarification on like no, like we're not going to like fuck you over, but like, hey, we're trying to like bring our grandmas and our kids

to this. And not that the police need any excuse to you know, attack people, but this is you know it, this is the thing that we're planning, This is what this is what we're trying to do. You don't have to come if you don't want to, you know. And it's it is that type of like mutual understanding and

agreement that actions like this kind of rest on. Because I certainly know that there's there's probably a good deal of forest defenders who you know, would like to jump at the opportunity to do you know, spicy stuff on the site, because that's that's a you know, from their perspective, that's a very uh, it's a very attractive proposal, which you know also as president. In these types of big mass mobilizations, There's there's certainly aspects of that that kind

of intersect with this especially. You know, one concern people may have is that this is being pushed as like, hey, we're you know, we're going to all these cities, We're trying to mobilize all these people, get a thousand people, we're all planning this thing together. There's there's a certain risk that that type of language could be turned against any of the possibly hundreds of people arrested on March thirteenth and rule these into and have that role in

to the reco charges that people are facing in Georgia. Now, I also kind of, from my understanding, part of this action is to kind of showcase the kind of absurdity of these reco charges by by demonstrating this is like very typical civil rights kind of you know, social movement organizing.

But I think those two things I think can actually coexist, where yes, this is very typical civil rights organizing, and also the state specifically, you know, the state that you know in Atlanta have been have have not cared at all and is very is very willing to use these to use charges like this as a chilling tactic to suppress any future like protest or mobilization against cop City.

So this is like, I think one other dynamic that people are certainly thinking about in terms of, you know, deciding if they want to participate in something like this.

up legal charges related to this movement. And and also there's you know, throughout the history of American social movements, there's there's there's president after president after precedent of people organizing their communities and their friends that they care about to travel to a place of you know, of injustice and stand in solidarity together.

there isn't risk involved. Right, with any action that we go to, there's risk involved. But you know, our understanding is that the risk of inaction far outweighs the risk of action in this moment.

we need to ratchet up. And this is precisely the sort of level of accessible but also drastically heightened level of ratcheting up of our intensity of our collective power together that's possible in this moment.

lead to cop City being stopped. I think that's a really important aspect to kind of clarify, because you know, there are some detractors who are you know, framing this action as being like the only you know, path forward that organizers are wanting to do, and I don't know this. This movement's been very very based on people taking their own spontaneous action and there being not just one strategy,

not just one plan. There's always a big, a big, you know, litany of things that could be going on, which all kind of starts to put pressure on this on this house of cards, so to speak.

because what the fuck is he even talking about? Like, how are youths going to work together to fulfill Mlk's dream of you know, freedom equality? Uh, not just in terms of who gets to buy things at a particular store, but like true economic power and equality for everyone, especially black proletarians who have served a very specific and important role in American capitalism.

is bullshit. Despite all of the propaganda that's been coming out from from the state and from the you know, the bourgeois media and the mainstream press that just kind of uncritically reports the things that the mayor says, the things that the cops say. The propaganda isn't working. One hundred and twenty thousand people signed this petition in a city of five hundred thousand. I mean, I think they can clearly see who's really carrying on this project of social justice and equality.

day they post some absolutely absurd thing. I guess because the last thing I think it's probably worth mentioning is that like a big part of this plan is trying to catalyze affinity groups to come to the city, you know with you know, specifically with the idea of them participating in this in this action on November thirteenth, But you know, nothing is stopping affinity groups from pursuing other forms of direct action during the for the four or

so days they might be in town. I think it's you know, a big, a large part of this movement's been very based on like self determination and radical autonomy, whether that's that includes your ability to participate in you know, big big collective max big collective mass actions, or just having fun with your friends around the city, like what happened near the end of the last week of action where eight motorcycles mysteriously vanished from the material plane.

including the ones on Zoom. There's also going to be a schedule for the weekends festivities that is coming up quite soon, which could include several cultural events, welcoming ceremonies too, in person spokes concil meetings, general direct action, non violent direct action trainings, as well as other ways to spend time quality time together down in the forest leading up to the mass action on the morning of Monday, November thirteenth.

be in the form of in person housing. Has helped with transportation, help with collective cooking processes, help with social media outreach, journalistic outreach, help with just thinking through this thing right and how we can make it as empowering and successful as possible and help sort of allow this to once again raise the bar for what it means to fight against deforestation, to fight against over policing in black and brown communities around the country, to fight against

economic injustice and the attack and dignified forms of life, cross social movements and regions.

in other episodes, so look forward to those. But today I want to talk about why exactly this attack from Hamas is so different and so unprecedented for many reasons, and why the response by Israel is also extremely unprecedented. There has been a lot of violence, a lot of death, and I thought a better way to start to learn about this might be with something really specific, like learning about the border fence that has been cajing in Gaza for years, why Israel thought it was so impermeable, and

how they were wrong. So let's begin the video and images going around on social media of a bulldozer breaking through a portion of the fence that has long enclosed the Gaza stript for years, this cage that surrounds that territory, the image of a bulldozer there's running straight through it

and Palestinians running to the other side. I don't think you can find anything better to represent the long history of Israeli Palestinian tensions, the decades of brutal Israeli occupation, the recurrent Hamas bombings and rocket strikes, and the political deterioration on both sides than this image. No one thought

this was going to happen. Professor Clive Jones, director of Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University, said, this is the first time since nineteen forty eight that any Palestinian militant movement has taken territory in Israel proper that symbolic victory and defeat for Israel will resonate across the region. So on the morning of October seventh, there

was a surprise attack from Hamas against Israel. What happened was a colossal failure of Israeli intelligence as well as the Israeli government. I'll go into this in more detail in a bit, but in this surprise attack, resistance fighters were entering an up to twenty nine different locations outside the Gaza Strip. Most significantly, fighters tore through the border fence, which has also been called the Iron Wall. They knocked it aside with bulldozers, drove right through it with jeeps

and motorcycles. Other Hamas fighters sailed right over it with fan powered gliders, and others hopped on boats to try to reach the other side by sea. A crucial component of Israel's defense from an attack like this, or at least it was supposed to be, was this sophisticated border fence. I want to talk about how exactly Israel came to build this fence, because throughout most of its history, the IDF did not want much to do with defensive measures.

Its traditional security concept rested on three complimentary pillars, the terrents, early warning, and decisive battlefield victory. Guided by the concept, the IDF built offensive power designed to deter enemies from attacking and intelligence raised in order to detect when that

deterns had eroded. If it was unable to convince the other side that it was better off avoiding conflict, the IDF would bring the full might of its offensive capabilities in search of a rapid and decisive quote unquote victory, which just means they would end up killing a lot of people. They would fly in cities and masker hundreds of people in order to essentially make the other side lose all hope and not fight back, and if they did, to tell them never to fight back again. This would,

according to this concept, initially strengthen the terrens. The idea of defense for Israel began sneaking into the conversation in the nineteen sixties, as Israel considered purchasing the Hawk surface to air missile system from the US. This idea had

some opposition at the highest level of the IDF. Air Force Commander Ezer Wiseman opposed the idea on the grounds that it would give Israel's political chiefs an excuse to avoid the bold offensive operations, in this case, surprise airstrikes that would take out entire buildings, which he viewed as necessary to win a war in the end, though five Hawk missile batteries were purchased just before the nineteen sixty

seven Six Day War for thirty million dollars. The first makings of the present day security fence began in nineteen ninety four, after the signing of the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, when Israel constructed a forty mile fence along its boundary with Eastern Palestine. The construction was completed in nineteen ninety six, though it

didn't necessarily represent a hard border. In two thousand and five, under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel carried out a disengagement from Gaza, which included, among other things, pulling out its troops. This meant that the one kilometer buffer zone that the Israeli Defence forces maintained after the first fence was torn down by Gozens in two thousand was no longer a possibility. A plan for an alternate forty five fence a few dozen meters east of the original fence,

entirely on Israeli land, was then developed. The present day forty mile long barricade has several sections. A twenty foot high smart fence, which is the over the ground fence with a maritime section manned by sensors to detect encouragements from the water, and an underground wall of classified depth and thickness with sensors to detect any digging. The overground barrier, which makes up eighty one percent of the fence, is supported by a complex network of cameras, radar systems, as

well as command and control rooms. One hundred and forty thousand tons of iron and steel were used in the construction of the underground wall, which took three and a half years to complete. The total cost of the project is estimated at one point eleven billion dollar. The project of the quote unquote smart fence was publicly announced in twenty sixteen, and in twenty twenty one, Israel announced the completion of the smart fence, which included an underground concrete barrier.

This addition, which I feel like is important to mention, was because Hamas used underground tunnels to blind side Israeli forces. In twenty fourteen, access near the fence on the Gaza side was limited to farmers who were on foot. On the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put in place to monitor threats and slow intruders. With the announcement of its completion in twenty twenty one, the then Defence Minister Benny Gantz said, the barrier placed a quote

iron wall between Hamas and southern Israel. But on October seventh, as we saw, the wall failed massively and a surprise series of coordinated efforts enabled Tamas to get past the wall. The fence was breached at twenty nine points, according to the IDF. There were also Israeli guard towers positioned at every five hundred feet along the perimeter of the wall at some certain points, and the Hamas fighters there appeared

to encounter very little resistance. It soon became apparent that the border was minimally staffed, with much of Israel's military diverted to focus on the unrest in the West Bank. Matthew Levitt is the director of the counter Terrorism Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He said the most compelling parts of the system were the ones that provided indicators and warnings. But you don't see in advance that someone is masked at the fence. It's still

just a fence, a big fence, but just defence. Still, he says, the idea of a bulldozer getting that close to the fence at all just boggles the mind. The attack has been documented as the following. To put it very simply, using commercial drones, Hamas bombed as Raeligh observation towers, communications infrastructure, and weapons systems along the border. Israel said Hamas fired more than three thousand rockets into its territory, with some reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Militants also use explosives to blow up sections of the barrier, and men and motorbikes drove through the gaps, and then the bulldozers did the rest and this allowed for enough space for their larger vehicles to drive through. Experts said an attack of this magnitude with all of these elements would have required weeks at least of preparation and subterfuge. But maybe you're asking, well, why now, why did Hamas

now decide to launch an attack of this magnitude. There are some clues in the name that Hamas gave the attack. They named it Operation of Alxa Flood. Just days before the attack, hundreds of Israeli settlers, with the protection of the Israeli forces stormed Atlexa Mosque and occupied Easter Russ. I've talked about this before, but this compound is a very important and contested religious site, and it's often very

often a target by Israeli settlers and the IDF. And Hamas said it launched its attack in response to the desecration of Alexa. Mohammad'ef, the Rassam Brigades commander said, we have decided that the time has come to draw the line for the enemy to understand their time is up and they can't keep going without consequences. But again, experts

said this plan would have taken weeks to plan. I'm sure the attacks on Aleximosque played a role in the attack, but it was probably being worked on for quite some time before that. And Hamas also said the attack was a response to decades of Israeli violence and occupation. The daily impact of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and other occupied territories at the West Bank is a huge part of this story. Let's take our first break before I forget no clever segue here. Just

listen to these ads and we're back. Analysts and experts have been warning for months that the reality on the ground in Palestine and Israel was leading up to this. Nor Ude, a political analyst and former Palestinian Authority spokeswoman, said the record number of Palestinians killed, dispossessed, injured and traumatized by Israeli forces and settlers across the occupied West Bank, the continued siege on Gaza, the relentless attacks on Elxamosque,

they were all pushing the situation towards this moment. I don't think anybody imagined the particulars of this moment, but I think everybody with a sense of what was going on knew that this quote unquote calm was deceiving and that something was going to happen, something big. And it

did happen. The wall came down. But for the two point three milli million Palestinians who have been virtually trapped for fifteen years, as well as the Palestinians on the West Bank who have been constantly surveilled, having their movement restricted, and have experienced growing military violence, bulldozing through this fence means something else. While the Israeli response was feded by the failure of this system, making the future of all

Palestinians even more precarious. The impact of Saturday's attack for Palestinians is hugely significant psychologically and symbolically. It shatters the idea of Israel's military superiority. It's a physical symbol of breaking out of the open air prison they've been held captive in, letting them step onto the land that they've been forced out of, some of them for their entire lives.

Most of the Palestinians in Gaza are children, and they have only ever known life within the confines of that fence. So bulldozing a hole right through this fence to the other side will obviously have ripples in more ways than one. I want to mention something here that I've been thinking about is that Gaza is often referred to as the world's biggest open air prison, which is true, but I was thinking about it, and prison implies that they did a crime. They did not do a crime. The Palestinians

are innocent. They're stuck in a cage against their will, and they have no way out. I think a better way to describe Gaza might be an open air concentration camp, the biggest open air concentration camp period. It's just something I've been thinking about because I feel like open air prison implies they're all criminals and they're not. So just something to think about when it comes to semantics and the power of words, I suppose, even if it's subconscious.

Gaza has been under a land, sea and air blockade since two thousand and seven. More than two point three million Palestinians live there, all crammed in and they cannot leave without Israeli permission, which very few people get. Hamas is a political and armed group that took control of two thousand and six, and there hasn't been an election since. It's part of a regional alliance which also includes Iran

and the armed group has Bela and Lebanon. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and the EU, among many others. We'll be doing a history more in depth about Hamas soon, but it's important to

note that Israel basically helped create it. More details will be in that episode, obviously, but just to summarize very briefly, Israel bolstered Hamas's creation and funded its expansion because it wanted to divide the Palestinians amongst themselves and they viewed the leftist PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was the governing party at the time, as a threat, and so they encouraged Haamas to flourish and thrive, which leads us

to now again be separate episode. There is so much to cover and I can do it all today. Although the PLO used to be the dominant party decades ago, in recent years, the PLO and the secular FATA party which the PLO is centered around, is often criticized for being ineffective, and so many Palestinians see Hamas as the most active group when it comes to resistance against the

violent Israeli occupation. Palestinians have lived in violent occupation for seventy six years and the world has largely done nothing. Palestinians have no outside support whatsoever, and no one is coming to their aid or rescue. They unfortunately only have this militant group because of this, and also just a reminder that Palestine has actually tried everything and that violence is not their first resort. Many Palestinians don't even support Hamas.

Let's not forget about BDS, which is a Palestinian nonviolent movement which calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions for Israel. BDS is now deemed illegal. In twenty twenty one, thirty five states passed anti BDS laws, so even boycotting Israeli products is suddenly illegal. So that was BDS. People are obviously still engaged in BDS, and I encourage everyone to read more about it, because divestment and sanctions work. It

worked in South Africa, but here we are. And then in twenty eighteen, Palestinians in Gaza mounted the Great March of Return to show the world their plight. Day after day they walked unarmed to Israeli's military fences around Gaza. How did Israel respond to this non violent protest. They shot eight thousand Palestinians with live ammunition, killed two hundred and twenty people and wounded thirty six. One thousand, one

hundred and forty three. Palestinians are getting killed regardless of the existence of Hamas, because Israel bombing Gaza isn't actually about Hamas but occupation and ethnic cleansing. Israel and Hamas have fought many on and off quote unquote wars. I say, quote unquote because it's not a war if only one side has an army, and I personally really hate when it's referred to as a war because it's falsely portraying an occupation as an equal fight when there's actually an

oppressor and an oppressed. But regardless, the last big war Israel had had with Hamas was in twenty twenty one. In the past, it's usually been an exchange of fire across the Gaza border. Hamas launches rockets into Israel, Israel drops more bombs on Gaza. Hamas launches rockets into Israel, Israel drops more bombs on Gaza, and so on. Usually this results in a huge civilian death toll in Gaza, with Israel bombing entire residential buildings and killing entire families

and hundreds of children. And just a reminder here that Gaza does not have an iron dome to defend itself. When Israel bombs Gaza, it does so knowing it is very densely populated and filled with hundreds of innocent people that have nothing to do with Hamas. They drop bombs on buildings, hospitals, schools, nothing is off limits. I don't have to remind you, or maybe I do that they've also killed members of the press clearly wearing press vests.

But I guess that's another topic for another day. What happened this time around with the attack that Hamas launched on October seventh was very different, though it's repeatedly been called unprecedented, and this is true for a few reasons, One because of the scale of the attack that Hamas launched, and two because nobody really saw it coming. As of this recording, more than one thousand and two hundreds of Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians,

were killed and more than three thousand were wounded. Hamas also said that it captured more than one hundred Israelis, including some senior military officers. Nothing like this, especially at this magnitude, has happened since two thousand and six, when Hamas captured one Israeli soldier, Galatschilit and held him in

Gaza for five years. And in three days after Hamas launched this attack on October seventh, there were still gun battles going on between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces in the three main areas in southern Israel, and despite verified footage and reporting from Gaza that indisputably shows countless Palestinian

children who Israel has killed so far. Israel's murder of Palestinian children is receiving little to no media attention in the US or globally, but they create the worst possible enemy the world, supports the destruction of an entire people, And as an Arab, I want to mention that it's really hard to see all of this play out, and if you have any Arab friends, I'm sure they're going through it too, especially if they're Palestinian, because it's almost

like deja vus of what happened after nine to eleven, and what happened after nine to eleven didn't really stop. To be honest, it's not like a somophobia took a break and then came back. It's always been there, but now it's very shameless and disgusting, and it makes no attempt to cover itself because it's not only ignored, but encouraged in order to validate the actions of the US

military and the Israeli military. Another reason for this all being so unprecedented is Israel's failure to stop it from happening. The Israeli Army is one of the world's most sophisticated military and intelligence organizations as well as one of the most powerful armies in the world. Because of the United States support and billions of dollars in funding, any kind of communication going in and out of Gaza, at least in theory, would be listened to by Israel's intelligence units.

And again, the offence is heavily militarized, but still it collapsed. I think another significant result of this, which I kind of touched on earlier, is that this successful attack from Hamas completely undermines the never endingly talked about power of Israel and the power of their army and military, especially their capability in the region. It kind of disrupts their

entire image in a way. I also want to quickly mention that the claim that Hamas's attack was unprovoked is ignoring the years of brutal occupation and exactly why they attacked in the first place. It was a surprise, yes, but I would never say it was unprovoked, because you can't keep someone in captivity their entire lifetime and expect

them to hug it out. And maybe what I'm saying sounds radical to you, especially by the standards of American media, but here is this award winning Israeli journalist and writer Gideon Levy. He wrote an incredible piece about what's happening right now. He writes opinion pieces in a weekly column for Herits, and he focuses particularly on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and he has won awards for his articles

on human rights. He wrote an incredibly moving, powerful piece called Israel can't imprison two million Gozzens without paying a cruel price. I want to read excerpts from this because he is speaking as an Israeli and I think it's extremely important to hear what he has to say. Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance, the idea that we can do whatever we like that will never pay the price and never be punished for it, will carry on undisturbed.

We'll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess, and protect the settlers busy with their programs. Will fire at innocent people, take out people's eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing, and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip and everything will be all right. We'll build a terrifying

obstacle around Gaza and we'll be safe. Will rely on the geniuses of the Army's eighty two hundred cyber intelligence unit and on the Shinbet Security Service agents who know everything. Fe'll warn us in time. It turns out that even the world's most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great.

This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped, despite the billions poured into it and all the famous experts and fat cat contractors, we thought, we'd continue to go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits, always contingent on good behavior, and still keep them in prison. We'll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates, and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they're erased, as

quite a few Israelians would like. We'll keep holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners, some without trial, most of them political prisoners, and we won't agree to discuss their release, even after they've been in prison for decades. We'll tell them that only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution, only because we don't want to deal with all that, and everything will continue that way forever. Once again, it

was proved that this isn't how it is. A few hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in a way no Israeli imagine possible. A few hundred people proved that it's impossible to imprison two million people forever without paying a cruel price. Just as the smoky old Palestinian bulldozer tore through the world's smartest barrier, it tore

away at Israel's arrogance and complacency. And that's also how it tore away at the idea that it's enough to occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones and sell them to half the world to maintain security. On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before, Palestinian vehicles patrolling gets cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance. The Gaza. Palestinians have decided they're willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom.

Is there any hope in that?

We haven't learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay, even though Israel is paying a high price once again. Prime Minister Benjamin N. Yaho bears a very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay that price. But it didn't start with him, and it won't end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza. Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel, Gaza,

which has never known a single day of freedom. I just think that piece is very powerful, and I know I read a good chunk of it. But I think it's important to hear, especially from an Israeli as he mentioned, Israel, because of this, has responded to the attack with extreme force. Prime Minister a little Bitchna and Yahoo said the enemy

will pay an unprecedented price. Israel has bombed Gaza for days, hitting Gaza with air strikes, targeting hospitals, mosques, entire residential buildings, and calling Palestinians animals to the media, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said we are fighting animals and acting accordingly.

Israel also said that it wants to wipe out Hamasa's military capability and end its control of Gaza, which doesn't really make sense because they're kind of targeting anything and now anything they can hit, including civilians, and at the end they want control themselves. So I think a lot of right wing Israeli politicians, which was most of them

these days, say empty, stupid shit. And it also looks like amidst all this, that a ground invasion is likely going to happen because the IDF has been readying tanks and military jeeps. It sucks that I have to say this out loud, but peace should not come at the spence and the brutal oppression of others. There was no peace before this attack. The violence of the Israeli occupation has been there since the state was established in nineteen forty eight. Hamas is a direct result of that violence.

There has never been peace in Israel because it was created in violence. And this clearly does not justify Hamas killing innocent people. That is never okay. But Israel also can justify killing thousands of people because of that. Abby Martin, who is the creator and host of the Empire Files. She also made the film Gaza Fights for Freedom, which

I highly recommend. She posted this exchange on her Twitter between her and one of their field producers in Gaza, and he says, I'm scared, Abby, I feel I could die any second. Most of the people here lost power and internet connections, so we don't know where they hit. Entire neighborhoods are being erased. They killed twelve hundred of us so far and destroyed massively, and yet they say they have not started yet. We know massacres are coming, and we're sure they got the green light from the

US to kill us all. So that is a perspective of someone standing in Gaza living in fear which isn't entirely new as far as living in fear goes, because that's been the reality for Gazans for decades. But this time it's different because it's very clear that Israel's committing a purposeful genocide. But they're in the dark with no one to help them, and I can only imagine how helpless and hopeless it feels. It just it breaks my heart. I just want to give a update, an unfortunate update,

because things are just fucked and people keep dying. But I'm recording this update on the afternoon of October twelfth, like a day after I recorded the original stuff, and Israel has killed five hundred Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since this morning, five hundred in the last six hours

twelve hours. Gaza's Health ministry said that one thousand, five hundred and thirty seven Palestinians, including five hundred children and two hundred and seventy six women, have been killed and there are almost seven thousand others wounded because of these Israeli air strikes. Loss of this magnitude is unsettling and overwhelming, and I also want to mention this is something I

just learned. Israel has bombed the international airports of Aleppo in Damascus in Syria, and this has forced them out of service. So not only are they massacring the entire families in Gaza, but they're also dropping bombs on civilian airports in Syria. And the Western media still wants you to think that Israel is the victim. It bears repeating that Gaza is very densely populated, with two point three million people trapped in a very small space, unable to leave,

with nowhere to escape to. An example of this empty, stupid rhetoric that Israeli politicians are saying is when Natanyahu said that civilians should leave and evacuate Gaza. He said that knowing full well that that is impossible because his government forbids it. He said that to the media so the world can see that he is just and not trying to attack any civilians. It's all a fucking show, like I guess all politics are. But it's still really

infuriating and I hate it so much. And in Gaza, before all of this, before the thousands that have already died, there was already a blockade. They were trapped for fifteen years. And now in addition to this blockade, Israel has imposed a total siege on Gaza, inflicting collective punishment, which is illegal under international law. But Israel routinely commits war crimes and goes about its business unchecked. Why would it be any different this time. Remember that half of Gaza's population

are under eighteen. Hundreds of children have been murdered, and horrific videos have been circulating of the destruction of Gaza, of bodies and babies and innocent people being pulled out of the rubble. I had a break down last night because I saw a video of a Palestinian father holding his dead child's corpse and hugging it for the very last time. And I'm very privileged to be sitting here recording this, And if I have difficulty processing it, I

cannot imagine what Palestinians are going through. Israel controls everything in Gaza. If cut off electricity, food, water, and gas for an entire population, Israel is massacring Palestinians in a blackout on purpose, so they're unable to connect with anyone from the outside. No electricity also means that hospitals have no way of the already limited machines they have available to them so they can save lives. Before this, the water in Gaza was already ninety seven percent undrinkable, and

now it's completely gone. This will lead to dehydration deaths, among many, many other deaths. Israel is starving an entire population live on your television, openly committing genocide as the world watches on as it always does.