US & EUROPEAN (WHITE) NATIONS BOYCOTT UN RACISM CONFERENCE

What credibility is there in Geneva’s all-white boycott?

What do the US, Canada, ­Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week’s UN ­conference against racism in Geneva

by Seumas Milne

The Guardian, Thursday 23 April 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian

What do the US, Canada, ­Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week’s UN ­conference against racism in Geneva – even before Monday’s incendiary speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23 European states.

In international forums, it’s almost unprecedented to have such an ­undiluted racial divide of whites-versus-the-rest. And for that to happen in a global meeting called to combat racial hatred doesn’t exactly augur well for future international understanding at a time when the worst economic crisis since the war is ramping up racism and xenophobia across the world.

Didn’t Canada or Australia have anything to say about the grim condition of their indigenous people, you might wonder, or Italy and the Czech Republic about violent attacks on Roma people? Didn’t any of the boycotters have a contribution to make about the rampant Islamophobia, resurgence of anti-semitism and scapegoating of migrants in their countries over the last decade?

The dispute was mainly about Israel and western fears that the conference would be used, like its torrid predecessor in Durban at the height of the Palestinian intifada in 2001, to denounce the Jewish state and attack the west over colonialism and the slave trade. In fact, although it was the only conflict mentioned in the final Durban declaration, the reference was so mild (recognising the Palestinian right to self-determination alongside Israel’s right to security) that the then Israeli foreign minister, ­Shimon Peres, called it “an accomplishment of the first order for Israel”.

In this week’s Geneva statement, Israel isn’t mentioned at all. But the US bizarrely still used its reaffirmation of the anodyne Durban declaration to justify a boycott, to the anger of African American politicians such as Jesse Jackson and Barbara Lee, who chairs the US Congressional Black Caucus. In fact, like the other boycotting governments, the US administration had been intensely lobbied by rightwing pro-Israel groups, who had insisted long in advance that the conference would be a “hatefest”.

Ahmadinejad’s grandstanding played straight into that agenda. The most poisonous phrases in the printed version of his speech circulated by embassy officials referred to the Nazi genocide as “ambiguous and dubious” and claimed Zionist “penetration” of western society was so deep that “nothing can be done against their will”. That a head of state of a country of nearly 70 million people is still toying with Holocaust denial and European antisemitic tropes straight out of the Tsarist antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is not only morally repugnant and factually absurd. It’s also damaging to the Palestinian cause by association, weakens the international support Iran needs to avert the threat of attack over its nuclear programme, and bolsters Israel’s claims that it faces an existential threat.

But, perhaps as a result of an appeal by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, Ahmadinejad dropped those provocations at the last minute. What in fact triggered the walkout of European Union ambassadors was his reference to Israel as a “totally racist regime”, established by the western powers who had made an “entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering” and “in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe”.

The rhetoric was certainly crude and inflammatory. Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband called it “hate-filled”. But the truth is that throughout the Arab, Muslim and wider developing worlds, the idea that Israel is a racist state is largely uncontroversial. The day after Ahmadinejad’s appearance, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, echoed the charge in the conference hall, describing Israeli occupation as “the ugliest face of racism”. It’s really not good enough for Britain’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham – who led the Ahmadinejad walkout – to say of the charge of Israel’s racism, “we all know it when we see it and it’s not that”.

This is a state, after all, created by European colonists, built on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, whose founding legal principles guarantee the right of citizenship to any Jewish migrant from anywhere in the world, while denying that same right to Palestinians born there along with their descendants. Of course, Israel is much else besides, and the Jewish cultural and historical link with Palestine is a ­profound one.

But even those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens face what the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert last year called “deliberate and ­insufferable” discrimination by a state which defines itself by ethnicity. For Palestinians in the occupied territories, ruled by Israel for most of the state’s existence, where ­ethnic segregation and extreme ­inequality is ruthlessly enforced, the situation is far worse – even without the relentless military assaults and killings. And Israel now has a far-right ­government whose foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has said 90% of Israel’s Arab citizens have “no place” in the country, should be forcibly “transferred”, and only be allowed citizenship in exchange for an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Zionist Jewish state.

But if Lieberman had turned up to speak at the Geneva anti-racism conference, who believes that western delegates and ambassadors would have staged a walkout? Of course, there’s a perfectly ­reasonable argument to be had about the nature of Israel’s racism and whether it should be compared to apartheid, for example. But for western governments to hold up their hands in horror when Israel is described as a racist state has no global credibility whatever.

Israel’s supporters often complain that, whatever its faults, it is singled out for attack while the crimes of other states and conflicts are ignored. To the extent that that’s true in forums such as the UN, it’s partly because Israel is seen as the unfinished business of European colonialism, along with the Middle East conflict’s other special mix of multiple toxins. The Geneva boycotters, fresh from standing behind Israel’s carnage in Gaza, are in denial about their own racism – and their continuing role in the tragedy of the Middle East.

This article was amended on Friday 24 April 2009. We originally referred to Shimon Peres as Israel’s prime minister in 2001, he was actually the foreign minister at that time. This has been corrected.

The far-right Israeli lobby rolled up hard on President Obama and made the popular President back out of the UN Conference on Racism

Congresswoman Barbara Lee who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus was not happy when the US bounced from the racism conference

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REBEL DIAZ TAKE A SERIOUS STAND AGAINST CORRUPT POWER

  The members of The Rebel Diaz Arts Collective put together a video that was inspired by the actions of the folks of the Right to the City Coalition, by Picture the Homeless, by the NYU and New School takeovers…..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQ0P0uQRpxc

Heres the link to new video by the members of The Rebel Diaz Arts Collective. we were inspired by the actions of the folks of the Right to the City Coalition, by Picture the Homeless, by the NYU and New School takeovers…..this is our way of showing solidarity….This is our response to the conditions of our communities in New York. Mayor Bloomberg has to be held accountable for the police murders and brutality, for lack of housing, for being an investor in so much of the gentrification going on in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the South Bronx. Here is our response. Featuring: Lah Tere, G1, RodStarz, Hipnotic, Marc Bucannons, John Mega, and Yc the Cynic…..and many members of the Hunts Point community, the movement and the Rebel Diaz Arts collective…

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JOYNER, HARVEY & TAVIS-THE CURRENT STATE OF BLACK MEDIA

When the Tom Joyner Morning Show was pulled first from Chicago, and then from other markets early this month, Joyner counseled listeners that “…black radio will never be what it once was, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.” 

Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, and the Impoverishment of Black Media

Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 04/15/2009 – 11:46

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

When the Tom Joyner Morning Show was pulled first from Chicago, and then from other markets early this month, Joyner counseled listeners that “…black radio will never be what it once was, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.”  This message of powerlessness and permanent defeat, of resignation to someone else owning and controlling the black conversation may be all we can expect from Joyner and the rest of the black elite.  But is it the real answer? Does it even address the crucial question of how we might have and own our own black civic conversation?

 

 

Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, Tavis Smiley, and the Impoverishment of Black Media

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

“The cancellation provoked outrage among fans because the Tom Joyner Morning Show is about as good as commercial black radio is allowed to get nowadays.”

‘The bottom line,” radio fly-jock Tom Joyner told fans in his blog, “is that black radio will never be what it once was, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.” Joyner tried to put the yanking of his show by Clear Channel into perspective for fans, who deluged his blog and email with expressions of support, and even talk of consumer boycotts. Joyner discouraged boycott chatter, and like Steve Harvey, who seems likely to replace him on many Clear Channel outlets, declared it was all “just business.”

The cancellation provoked outrage among fans because the Tom Joyner Morning Show is about as good as commercial black radio is allowed to get nowadays. Despite the show’s limited playlist of corporate-approved music and periodic descents into minstrelsy, Joyner regularly sets aside a small amount of time for commentary, issues and appeals addressed to African Americans as a community. It was never much time, and the issues, the commentary were relatively safe stuff on the whole. But to the news-starved audience of black commercial radio, Tom Joyner, like his colleague Tavis Smiley, stand out like rare gulps of fresh air.

But sustaining the life of a community takes more than an occasional breath. Community and democracy demand a steady diet of news to fuel civic engagement and public conversation in the public interest.

As BAR’s Glen Ford pointed out all of six years ago in ‘Who Killed Black Radio News,” the owners of commercial black media have for a generation enforced a no-news policy, justifying it with the unsupportable claim that all black people want is to be entertained.” The fact is that news is less profitable than 100% entertainment. PR firms and the celebrity industries provide their own “news” releases complete with commercial tie-ins, and already segmented to the age and income divided groups that marketers love. Black radio owners decided not to do news because corporate media has consciously decided not to recognize African Americans as a people or a polity with our own set of collective experience and political will. In a media regime that lives and dies by advertising alone, black commercial radio will only recognize black communities as marketing contraptions, as audience segments whose ears and eyeballs it can deliver to sponsors. The owners and managers of commercial black radio and TV are not the least concerned about our past or future, our housing or health care crises, the black imprisonment rate or the digital divide or the education of our young or the dignified security of our elderly. To them we are just a market, passive consumers to be sliced and diced according to marketing industry guidelines. A hip hop station, an oldies station, an easy listening urban station, a gospel station, all under the same ownership with no news on any of them, forever and ever, amen. If this is what Joyner meant, and we think it was, when he described the current state of black commercial radio, he was right. Except the “forever’ part. Except when he told fans ‘…there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.”

Commercial black radio and TV have not always been hostile to and incompatible with journalism. There was a brief period, back in the early and mid 1970s when journalism flourished on commercial black radio. Local teams of African American journalists competed with each other to report and package non-entertainment news directed at black communities. News gathering and reporting operations on commercial black radio played a key role in the black conversation, enabling African American communities to define themselves as more than passive masses of consumers and voters. They heyday of black broadcast journalism didn’t last long. News was never as profitable as entertainment, and as limits on how many stations one owner could have were removed, owners borrowed heavily to get more stations, and cut costs to reward themselves and repay the loans. News was the first casualty, reported Glen Ford six years ago.

There need not have been a contradiction between Black ownership and community access, including the maintenance of quality news operations. In a betrayal that, we believe, has been a major factor in the relentless decline of Black political power, many Black radio owners have adopted business plans identical to their white corporate peers.

Such is certainly the case with Radio One. “The company’s voraciousness mirrored the consolidation throughout the radio industry after rules limiting the number of stations one company could own nationally were lifted in 1996,” wrote the Washington Post, in a February 5, 2003 showcase article. Radio One boasts a 60-person research department that “randomly calls thousands of people and conducts 20-minute surveys of those who tune in to its radio stations.” Do the people want news? The subject isn’t broached by either Post reporter Krissah Williams or her main interlocutor, Radio One Chief Operating Officer Mary Catherine Sneed. Instead, the conversation is all about the sales value of entertainment programming. “If you’re not [at parties, clubs and grass-roots events], you’ll never be a big personality in the community,” Sneed said. “Those are the things that separate stations from one another.”

News isn’t even on the radar screen. Indeed, so insidiously have disc jockey patter and the talk show format been substituted for news that large segments of the Black public may no longer know the difference.

“Reclaiming commercial black radio would mean rediscovering the Freedom Movement’s traditions of disrespect for illegitimate authority.”

It may be that way now, but it doesn’t have to be. Contrary to Joyner’s wisdom, there’s plenty that African American communities can do to influence the behavior of commercial black radio. But seeing the way forward, much less actually organizing it, requires thinking well outside the boxes that the black misleadership class, of which Joyner and Tavis are a part, are used to drawing for themselves and for us. Today’s black notables are too respectful of illegitimate authority, too preoccupied with their own careers, too deferential to corporate power to acknowledge the true dimensions of the crisis, or help us solve it.

Reclaiming commercial black radio would mean rediscovering the Freedom Movement’s traditions of disrespect for illegitimate authority. It would mean confronting the white and black absentee owners of corporate black radio and TV, like Clear Channel and Radio One at their own public events, like live remotes, and demanding news for the people. It would mean mobilizing people from black journalism schools and black communities to demand the reanimation of black journalism. It would mean insisting on the establishment of local news gathering operations at black radio and TV stations as a condition of the continued good will of audiences toward their owners and advertisers. That is a tall order, well outside the vision of a Tom Joyner or even of a Tavis Smiley, who sometimes pretends to be a journalist.

Leadership is seeing a way where the wise and informed tell you there is no way, and organizing people to take that way. Neither of these guys is in the leadership business. Joyner and Smiley are in the business of marketing, assembling ears and eyeballs for delivery to sponsors. In Tavis’s case, those sponsors include Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of the nation’s biggest and most notoriously low-wage employers, along with payday loan and housing bubble profiteers Wells Fargo and Bank of America. This seriously limits the problems one can mention on the air, let alone the solutions.

Media are the circulatory systems of modern societies. Mass media can empower us. They can enable us to carry on our conversation about what we expect from society and from each other. Or mass media can distort our public conversations and our private lives, instilling anti-cooperative and antisocial values in young and old alike. Look at BET.

African American communities are not the only ones that suffer from the slow death of journalism. Civic engagement in the larger American polity is withering too, and for the same reason. Newspapers are folding not because they are unprofitable, but because even after cutting actual journalism to the bone, they don’t bring in the fifteen and twenty percent returns that the bubble economy has accustomed investors to. A well-run newspaper can consistently bring in a seven to nine percent annual return on investment, which in pre-bubble days was considered just fine. The very few newspaper corporations that remained family owned, or that went nonprofit are doing journalism as well as ever.

Forty-some years ago, Dr. Martin Luther wondered aloud that all his life’s work might have been the integration of African Americans into a burning house. King answered his own question by declaring that if that was the case, we would have to be the firefighters, not just for ourselves, but for the whole American polity. If the demand for news, news for the people, is ever to be raised inside corporate boardrooms and in the street at live remotes, it will happen first in African American communities. Or maybe not at all. There is no legal road to this. It can only be done by confronting owners of commercial black media and making the price of a no-news regime too costly for them.

We can be firefighters, struggling for a democratic, responsible media, trying to reanimate old and configure new models of journalism for our own and the larger American community. We can disregard Joyner’s advice, and struggle to free the black conversation from corporate gatekeepers who would monetize, militarize and privatize it. Or we can burn with the rest. And watch Black Evil Television.

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