Tagged: literature
‘Ecrasez l’infâme’
The Nature and Role of the Press and the Spreading of Public Ideas during the Initial Decline of the Old Regime in 1789, Together with Some Parallels Drawn into the Modern Period.
By Antarah Crawley | GWU ENGL 3481W | Spring 2012
Contents — I. Introduction: Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period — II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions: An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies? — III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels — IV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?
I. Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period
This is a time in which trends in world leadership are moving into an ominously monopoly-minded direction. Industrial and financial consolidation to the end of optimizing profit for those at the top of the corporate food chain, together with reckless investing and trading in the financial sector, is a reality that had led to near disaster—the 2008 recession. Such reckless habits of the American aristocratic class—that class that controls the means of production (footnote: what would be land in 1780s France)—has indeed sparked revolt from the lower classes, ineffective insofar as it has been. But the culture of dissent is present, just as it was in 1788 as the bourgeoisie began to find fault with King Louis XIV’s handling of the economy. We have in our society the broodings for a coup de tat of the industrial and financial superpowers that sway Americans’ lives. If the government cannot adhere to the wishes of the classes that serve as it’s support base—the small businessmen and entrepreneurs, or the modern bourgeoisie, as well as the large working class population—and break its ties with such entities, then as we can see from history, and overthrow of the symbolic corporate-monarchy is eminent.
Below this paper examines how the French Revolution unfolded and what factors contributed to its initial success, at the same time as it draws parallels between the events of 1789 and the current trends in the United States of America. With social media being a particularly effective and influential method of disseminating ideas in our modern society, it compels me to delve into the question of how the media of the 18th Century—the printed press and periodicals—affected popular opinion and reactions to the monarchy. Such answers may help us find similar trends in our own society of acute discrepancy between those that have power, both political and economic, and those who do not have it. And furthermore, 1789 is a perfect bookmark with which to compliment the modern period that I speak of here, 2012, because historians widely assert that the French Revolution ushered in the modern era with the creation of a “truly universal civilization…proclaiming the fundamental and inviolable rights of all people.”
It is the case, however, that the modern concept of politics, on which this country was based, is being eroded by government partiality towards big-business—we seem to be relapsing into a monarchal society. In this time of quasi-revolt, as Occupiers remove themselves from the system of economic and political abuse by the Haves, we should find value in looking to the ways in which 18th Century revolutionary figures confronted the monarchy and the aristocracy. What was the role of popular periodicals during the late 1780s, and can their impact be translated into modern trends like Facebook? What was the role of the Enlightenment—the elite, learned class—in influencing the popular revolt, if there were any influence there at all? How must a revolutionary, indifferent of his political opposition and bent only on self-improvement and social awareness—a “Voltaire-figure”—go about using the written word to combat an oppressive regime? What, if anything, can the history of the French Revolution teach us?
II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions: An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies?
The overarching significance of the French Revolution among historians had long been focused on its social consequences. In his introduction to the volumized collection of papers compiled for the annual conference on Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century (SVEC), Harvey Chisick patronizes the Classical, or Social, Interpretation of the French Revolution by saying, “[The Revolution’s] significance consists principally in the socio-economic disjuncture represented by the middle class or bourgeoisie overcoming the aristocracy and attaining the political power to which it’s economic strength entitled it. This process took hundreds of years and was accomplished only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to make good its demands by force.” Such an interpretation of the Revolution had been championed by authoritative historians on the subject such as Georges Lefebvre. In his 1939 now-classic The Coming of the French Revolution, he maintains a rigid and illogical model of French society as the basis for the dissent of the bourgeoisie and the result of 1789:
At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic. It showed traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when possessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and live. …The king had been able gradually to deprive the lords of their political power and subject nobles and clergy to his authority. But he left them the first place in the social hierarchy. Still restless at being merely his ‘subjects,’ they remained privileged persons.
Presently, however, a new class was emerging in prominence in France, whose wealth, in contrast, was based on mobile commerce. Called the bourgeoisie (or the Third Estate, inferior to the clergy and aristocracy in the three orders of old French law, but not too far removed from them), it proved useful to the monarchy by supplying it with money and competent officials, and through the increasing importance of commerce, industry and finance and the eighteenth century it became more important in the national economy. By the late 18th Century the bourgeoisie was beginning to usurp the aristocracy and clergy in terms of real economic power even though the latter retained its supreme legal and social status. Feeling as though it deserved more political power based on its economic contribution to the state, the bourgeoisie became discontent with the state. The Revolution of 1789 thus balanced the power of bourgeoisie with its real economic influence and eroded the prominence of the aristocracy. Thus, as Lefebvre states, “In France the Third Estate liberated itself.” But it’s not that simple, the author interrupts. Although Lefebvre separates the four stages of the revolution, characterized by the social classes involved, the respective measures of executing the Revolution were intertwined and made way for each other, all culminating in a victory for the bourgeoisie in which the regime of economic individualism and commercial freedom prevailed over the working class:
The privileged groups [the clergy and aristocracy] did have the necessary means [for forcing the king’s hand in appealing to the economic condition of the nation]… The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it. But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants—and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.
Chisick comments that the Classical Interpretation situates the French Revolution in France’s historical time as an “inevitable consequence of a long social and economic revolution,…following from scientific laws.” This would make the neither the press nor ideology a subject of interest. But it seems that bourgeois dissatisfaction would not have miraculously resulted in an organized revolt upon the state, an act of terrorism, as it were. Disseminated ideology must have had a place in rallying the organization of the greater Third Estate. And since Chisick is editing a collection entitled “The Press in the French Revolution,” his acknowledgment of the Classical Interpretation must ultimately be to set up a retort to it. While this Marxist-esque Classical interpretation went unchallenged throughout much of the history of the Revolution’s study, through Jaures and Mathiez to Lefebvre and Soboul, general acceptance of this formulation began to wane after the 1960s.
What then arose was a Revisionist Criticism of the Classical Interpretation of the French Revolution. The first body of criticism stemmed from Alfred Cobban and George Taylor’s conclusion that capitalism in France was not present enough or influential enough on the Bourgeoisie to be a motive for revolution. Furthermore, Taylor asserts that the nobility shared in equal part with the Bourgeoisie the most innovative and large-scale forms of economic activity. So, in contrast with the Classical Interpretation that the Third Estate rallied to establish themselves as the social superior to the aristocracy, the Revolution was “essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.”
“Conceptualizing the Revolution in political and cultural terms,” says Chisick, “also has broader implications.” Revisionist historians, in contrast to Classical historians who focus on the social discrepancies in the French upper classes, emphasize government incompetence and botched reforms which led to a virtual power vacuum and the emergence of public opinion as a powerful new political force.
Let us take a step back here and examine this interpretation within the context of our society: The American public had expressed dissentient views on the government as being incompetence under President Bush with the trouble resulting from the finance bubble / housing bubble that burst in 2008. Although we were hopeful of President Obama, many sectors of the right and well as some of his critical constituents have expressed their feelings of his incompetence when it came to listening to the American public and ending a several hundred-billion dollars war in the Middle East (and furthermore, of their general dissatisfaction with the Congress who seems to favor large corporations over the working/entrepreneurial class and the Supreme Court who allows immigration regulations and women’s reproductive rights to suffer). This brooding dissent has led to the organization of different protest rallies like Occupy and other virtual dissenting communities through new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The greater public, who call themselves the 99% in certain circles, are in a way equivalent to the Borgeoisie and the Popular/Peasant population of 1780’s France. Although they may not own the means of production (what would be the land in 18th C France) they feel that their political voice deserves more attention from the Congress and lawmakers, who currently only appear to be favoring the voices of large corporations like Monsanto, as opposed to the family farmer. Essentially, a corporation like Monsanto, who’s C-level administrators embody the 1%, is a stale form of political influence and legal exemption. Chevron has been dumping toxic oil-waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon and surrounding forests since the 1980s, yet the government had yet to take a serious action against the company until 2011 when a Federal Appeals Court allowed damages against Chevron for the Ecuador oil spill. In our present secular society, multi-million and -billion dollar corporations represent the clergy who benefited from “none of the ordinary direct taxes but instead…on its own authority a ‘free donation’ to the king”; the aristocrats are represented by those C-level administrators and shareholders who control these large companies which hold the market and lives of working and entrepreneurial Americans in their palm. The political power of the 1% in the minds of Occupiers and greater dissenters is disproportionate to their contribution to the greater good of American people. The question that arises at this point in our history is whether these present trends will develop into “long and silent social developments” that will erupt into another Western political revolution—and whether or not it will be successful!
Chisick summarizes the difference between the Classical and Revisionist interpretations with this:
The revisionist emphasis on politics and culture…tends to ascribe to the ‘people’ or working population a more marginal place in the Revolution. If politics, for example, are defined in terms of parliamentary assemblies, then the people will play only a small role in them. If culture is defined in terms of literacy, then a large population of the lower class will be eliminated from consideration altogether, and the rest will assume a passive role as an audience or public to which writes and publicists appeal.
What Chisick and The Press in the French Revolution focus on is not so much the marginalized place of the people in politics, but the new role, after 1789, of the people as a body through which writers, elite or otherwise, appeal radical ideas through printed media. Such a significant role in the common population could have only been accessed though the Revisionist Critique—thus arises the importance of the Press.
III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels
With public opinion being a new principle authority and a central component of politics in new Revisionist Interpretation, the role of the press and its shaping and influence of opinion takes on new importance during the coming of the Revolution. Yet even before 1789, the press was a tool that the monarchy knew it had to control, lest it lead to unwanted ideas spreading around the kingdom.
Daniel Roche in Revolution in Print explains the great extent to which the monarchy sought to control print media:
There was no freedom of the press under the Old Regime because from the earliest days of its power the Crown established surveillance of printers and booksellers and a mechanism for controlling the dissemination of ideas…. The royal power intervened at both ends of the chain that links creative writers to their public: readers and other authors. Before publication became a skillful exercise in censorship, applied through a policy of selective privilege that involved the prepublication inspection of manuscripts for content and the rewarding of publishers who, in return for their cooperation with the established order, enjoyed the advantages of a monopoly. After publication, control was further applied by police.
Such extreme and thorough action taken by the absolutist state indicated its keen awareness of the importance of the printed word. They saw it as the principle vehicle of radical knowledge and thought that it indeed would turn out to be in 1789.
Of course, no system of repression is one-hundred percent effective. The royal government was never able to wholly prevent the circulation of forbidden books, anti-monarchist pamphlets, and the writings, songs and satires that made up an entire body of printed criticism. This body, interestingly, was deemed by the monarchy to a dangerous dissemination of “philosophical” works, “philosophy” being all works deemed “dangerous” or “bad” (which may enlighten us to the monarchy’s unstable relationship with the Enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire). The Old Regime enacted every feasible method of control over print media that it could, including the practical monopolization of the system in 1699 when abbé Bignon became Director of The Book Trade. The role of the Office of the Book Trade was to examine all works destined for legal publication and to maintain that all such books be registered with the state. Under the direction of C.-M. Lamoignon de Malesherbes from 1750 to 1763, censorship defined the forbidden zones of literature as God, king, and morality. One can only imagine where that puts Enlightenment figures like Voltaire in the eyes of the government when such a “philosophical” a tale as Candide was published in 1759. Given, Voltaire did not admit his authorship until 1768 when he was not even within reach of the Office of the Book Trade and the monarchy. But notwithstanding that fact, neither the 1759 ban on the book by Paris officials or its ambiguous authorship deterred it from becoming one of the fastest selling books in history, selling twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions. So it can be said that there are notable examples of books that slipped through the cracks of the censors, but all in all, between 1660 and 1680, the beginnings of an increasingly close supervision of printed matter and the employment of “hard-nosed” Firemen arose and persisted until 1789.
After 1789, the most immediate and dramatic change in the way public opinion came to be formed and expressed was in complete freedom of the press. With the elimination of the machinery of State regulation of publishing and the sudden collapse of censorship in the Spring and Summer of 1789, Chisick writes, “writers and publishers found themselves free of the constraints that the monarchy had imposed upon print media almost from their inception. Books, pamphlets and periodicals could now be published without obligatory prior examination by a censor and without the publisher having to apply for a privilege or to ascertain that he was not infringing upon someone else’s legally established monopoly.” What resulted of this was an emergence of new career opportunities in writing, publishing and journalism, wherein more personal and more partisan expression could appeal directly to the public. Chisick writes that, “The periodical press that now emerged was far more political in content and far more engaged than was its counterpart of the old regime,” which was primarily devoted to the arts, sciences, and literature. In addition to the content of print media, its format also changed; journals treating art, plays, et cetera needn’t appear more regularly than every one or two weeks, however the new political papers that began to appear in 1788 had a popular readership to satisfy who were avid for the latest political news, and these papers came to be regularized in dailies in 1790 and 1791.
Continuing with the trouble-making habits that they used even before 1789, the Enlightenment figures also played an important role in post-censored France. What resulted of the absence of authoritarian filtering was a surge of political and social dialogue through print. The function of censorship had been to “impose an officially sanctioned consensus on public discussion, or, formulated negatively, to prevent the expression of opinions that deviated too widely from what the authorities defined as the accepted norm.” After the fall of the state—which was the filter of public discussion—political dialogue flourished, primarily through the work of Enlightenment figures. Chisick writes:
The literature of the Enlightenment was overwhelmingly a literature of dialogue. Its world of discourse, its political theory, social criticism, literature and popularization, was open and aimed at persuasion. Characteristically, even Voltaire’s cry of ‘Ecrasez l’infâme’ [‘Crush the infamous thing’] was moderated in practice, and the philosophe sought less the destruction of his ecclesiastical foes that that they moderate and modernize their beliefs and actions.
Often, the aim and influence of Enlightenment literature was painted in a less-than-humane light. Such writing was aimed at what the Enlightenment figures believed to be the realm of possible social and political reform—and such parameters often limited them to the learned classes. With respect to the audiences for which periodicals like the Ami du roi and the Journal de la Montagne were intended it cannot be denied that, both being descended from the Enlightenment, they were addressed to a cultural elite. But to be fair, the elite bourgeoisie was the class which was most concerned the goings-on of the years that immediately followed 1789, thus the Enlightenment writers would have felt it imperative to appeal to them first and foremost. In any case, no matter the Enlightenment’s targeted appeal group, a larger-scope popular press emerged after 1789 that sought to make a direct and regular political appeal to the people. For example, the more radical Ami du peuple and Pére Duchesne sought to speak directly to the working population. Jeremy Popkin even acknowledges the purpose of an anonymous Belgian journalist in launching the Esprit des gazettes in 1786 as being a reaction to the segmentation of the press market and a reaction to the “elite press.” Such “elite” papers were considered the “concerned papers, the knowledgeable papers, the serious papers…the papers which serious people and opinion leaders in all countries take seriously,” similar to The New York Times today. However, with the surge of uncensored popular publications in 1789, it proved exceptionally difficult for a stable elite press to survive. It nevertheless persisted that an exception to the rule existed, and the Dutch-based Gazette de Leyde, a French-language newspaper and one widely considered to be the most important serious news journal at the time reached the height of its fame at the outbreak of the French Revolution. It may have been the case that its being published outside of the control of the monarchy and its taking serious political issues of the day allowed it to transition well into the popular culture of revolutionary France, in which “sophisticated readers” liked to think of themselves as “students of events, rather than as mere consumers of information.”
So in general, there was a mixture of “elitist” and popular publication circulating through France after the Revolution began, and all of them were open-minded and political in nature with having to be constrained by a monarchy. Chisick defends the elitist publications stemming from the Enlightenment; even though they were not targeted at the public in terms of language, he says, “The Enlightenment may have been élitist, but it was humane, progressive, pragmatic and…committed to an open mode of discourse that worked on the principles of a free exchange of ideas, rational persuasion, and consensus.” In essence, the Enlightenment encompassed the spirit of the free press.
Here, I would like to take one more step back. By the transitive power, the dialectic, free-spirited passion of the Enlightenment also encompasses the essence of the Internet, or what John Man would say is the fourth turning-point in human contact in the last 5,000 years, after the explosion of the printing press in Europe. Using this model of long-term political revolutions paired with innovative information movements, can we say that the modern political trends referred to above, paired with the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and blogs for personal and political expression will evolve into some greater social revolution? Widespread use of social media could favor either the greater population or the Silicon Valley companies that control the means of disseminating the information. Either way, a change will erupt in the way all people conduce commerce, relationships, and protest. In fact, it may have already happened, with Amazon.com in control of commerce, Facebook.com in control of interpersonal relationships, social awareness and business promotion, Google.com in control of information dissemination, and the Apple Corporation in control of the method of accessing it all: the smart phone. What social media looks like on the outside is the power of dialogue and commentary in the hands of every individual person, but what we may actually have is a monarchy of the big four companies upon our entire civilization.
Be it internet-based social media or the physical spread of pamphlets in 1780s France, the spread of ideas sparks dialogue and makes people question the powers that govern them. The Old Regime recognized that and that’s why they so painstakingly censored the media. But the Enlightenment figures also recognized that and used it to the advantage of the people. Yes, they targeted their publications toward the elite, but could you blame them for trying to appeal to a more learned audience. Perhaps the “elitism” of Enlightenment periodicals actually helped to lend some authority to their positions. Surely no one takes every Facebook campaign seriously—that’s because so many people of such little intelligence use it. It may be the case that the modern person needs to filter what they read and believe through an Enlightened lens before they comment on current issues.
IV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?
What becomes clear after moderate research into the French Revolution is that even after 1799, books about the Revolution have been repressed by government who find the very notion of political dissent dangerous. Even authoritative writers on the topic who we revere today were repressed upon their initial publication. R. R. Palmer, the translator of Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution comments on the books history from its first publication in 1939: “The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945. No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France… The Vichy government therefore suppressed [The Coming of the French Revolution] and ordered some 8,000 copied burned, so that it virtually remained unknown to its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after the author’s death.”
Gaetano Salvemini’s highly revered book also underwent similar treatment. “[The French Revolution] has come to be regarded as a classic in its field,” says I. M. Rawson in his Translator’s Note. “It may seem strange that a work so well known on the continent [of Europe] should not have been made available to English readers long ago. The explanation lies in part in the fact that the author, an exile for over twenty years from his own country [of Italy] and actively engaged in the struggle against Fascism, as well as in writing a number of works on modern politics, had no time to give his study of the great Revolution a further revision in the light of recent historical research, and was unwilling to allow it to appear in English before this had been done.”
What we see here are Voltaire-figures who, even after the iron claw of the Old Regime had long fallen, still combated oppression and political injustice with that same passion. Like Voltaire, who was imprisoned in the Bastille twice and was constantly in fear of being jailed when he dared set foot in Paris, Salvemini contested the Fascist regime and honorably suffered more it. That is the kind of spirit I hope may come of this brooding internal political struggle in America. Perhaps the melting pot isn’t hot enough yet.
© 2012 by Antarah Crawley
D.R. 01-13: Israel-Hamas (II)
Volume 1, Issue 13
The Sense of the Congress:
A Special Report
Congress toes pro-Israel line, seeks resignation of UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories
By Antarah Crawley | Last modified 11/8/2023 9:28PM
WASHINGTON, DC — Today, November 8, 2023, the Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives (House) convened a hearing on “United Nations’ Bigotry Towards Israel: UNRWA Anti-semitism Poisons Palestinian Youth” in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2200.
Subcommittee Chairman Smith (R-NJ) presided. Antarah Crawley, Special Rapporteur on Historical and Materialist Dialectics for the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), reported to the proceedings on orders from the House Clerk’s Office of Official Reporters.
The witnesses for this hearing included Hillel Neuer, Executive Director, UN Watch; Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Senior Vice President for Research, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Jonathan Lincoln, Interim Director, Center for Jewish Civilization. Of these gentlemen, Mr. Lincoln had the most firsthand experience with the United Nations (UN) in the Palestinian territory, presented the most balanced testimony, and was asked the majority of the questions by the subcommittee, the other gentlemen advancing the painfully biased position that the “state” of Israel is not and has never been at fault since its “inception” on 14 May 1948. Mr. Neuer repeatedly remarked that comes from Geneva, the headquarters of the UN Human Rights Council.
The hearing was convened largely in response to statements made by Francesca Albanese United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. The Chairman submitted a Washington Free Beacon article by Charles Hilu to that effect into the Congressional record. Ms. Albanese, who serves as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’s Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, argued that “self-defense” has a narrow meaning under Article 51 of the U.N. charter. That definition, she said, does not give the Jewish state the right to self-defense against Hamas because the threat stems from an armed group within “occupied territory” and not “another state.” Thus, under international law, Israel’s actions in Gaza cannot qualify as self-defense, Albanese said.
Under Article 51, use of force in #SelfDefense is permissible solely to repel an armed attack by another State […] Threats from armed groups from within occ. territory give state the RIGHT TO PROTECT ITSELF, but not to wage war against the state from which the armed group emanates.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
“The attacks are clearly indiscriminate, disproportionate and violate the principle of precaution,” she said in an interview with the Guardian published Tuesday. “One cannot bomb hospitals hosting hundreds of patients and sheltering thousands of refugees. Sorry, we need to look for another solution, and not to bomb hospitals. Absolutely not. This is criminal.”
Mr. Hilu went on to report that Ms. Albanese condemned Israel’s “militarized settler colonial occupation” and violence against “defenseless Palestinians.” The UN also reports on the remarks of the Special Rapporteur:
[D]escribing the UN [Secretary General Antonio Guterres]’s words to the Security Council last Tuesday when he noted that the brutal attacks by Hamas fighters of 7 October “did not occur in a vacuum” as “brave”, [Albanese] stressed Gazans have “already suffered five deadly wars…during the period Israel has declared an unlawful blockade over the Gaza Strip, entrapping 2.2 million people.
The UN chief’s remarks that Palestinans have been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” drew criticism from members of the Israeli government late last month. Hamas is an acronym of Islamic Resistance Movement (حركة المقاومة الإسلامية Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah).
During the hearing, Mr. Bera (D-CA) remarked that “Israel has a right to prosecute a war against Hamas. They were attacked and they have a right to defend themselves, they have a right to make sure this never happens again, they have a right to dismember, dismantle, and to the best extent eliminate Hamas, but […] when you see tragic loss of innocent civilian life, you also feel that pain.”
The Chairman remarked that according to Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, “criticism of Israel is nothing less than Anti-Semitic when it passes over into demonization of Jews and Israel, delegitimizing the Jewish state, or applying a double standard, that is, one standard for Israel and one standard for every other country on the globe.”
The Chairman continued by discussing UN entities most involved in promoting Anti-Semitism, specifically the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which “was set up in 1949 to provide aid to refugees.”
74 years later it is still going, which is absurd in itself since nearly every Arab nation will not permit the former [Palestinians] to integrate into their societies. Why don’t they welcome the Palestinians? They simply won’t.
Chairman Smith (R-NJ)
Evidently, the Chairman and the pro-Israel caucus expect for the 1948-49 crisis that resulted in the citizens of Mandatory Palestine (and their patrilineal descendants) being expelled from their country, and the subsequent declaration of that country as the birthright of a colonizing state, to be resolved through the voluntary emigration of the Palestinian people into some other Arab nation (much like their father Abram). Talk about a double standard! Later, Mr. Schanzer even went to far as to testify,
[UNRWA] was originally created to assist Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war that the Arab states waged against Israel and subsequently lost. From early on, however, it was clear that UNRWA viewed the Palestinians as clients. They refused to permanently resettle them, and then they became the rationale for additional funding year after year. Over time, UNRWA’s clients grew old and passed on, but that was bad for business, so UNRWA expanded the definition of Palestinian refugees to include the descendants of refugees. So as a result, UNRWA’s registry has ballooned from 700,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today; mathematically impossible. Despite the fact that only few of the original refugees are alive today, UNRWA’s roster continues to grow, and all of them claim the so-called right of return to lands inside Israel. In other words, UNRWA has extended the Palestinian-Israeli conflict deliberately and indefinitely.
Dr. Jonathan Schanzer (emphasis mine)
It sounds like Dr. Schanzer is a eugenicist who cannot fathom why the Palestinians don’t just up and die already so that the Israeli colony can expand unchallenged; and is further concerned that they appear to procreate at rates that seem impossible to the white race. Dr. Schanzer also emphasized the attack on Al-Ahli hospital, noting what he called “an errant rocket by the Islamic Jihad that created the explosion there,” and remarked that the next likely targets will be the Al-Shifa Hospital, which apparently sits on top of Hamas’s multi-story command center, and the underground tunnels which Hamas allegedly uses to divert aid from the south to the north. To the ears of the instant Rapporteur, both of these targets sound like ripe opportunities for mass collateral civilian casualties, which is to say, a rationalized genocide.
The ardently pro-Israel witnesses and the Subcommittee expressed significant concerns regarding the indoctrination of “Anti-Semitism” among Palestinian youth by UNRWA. The Chairman remarked, “UNRWA provides education in hatred of Jews for the vastly expanded number of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees.” The Congress has previously voiced this concern. The Chairman claimed the UNRWA teachers and administrators “encourage children to martyrdom as suicide bombers” and cited an article reporting that “UNRWA staff celebrated Hamas’s massacre.” Mr. Neuer testified that UNWRA School administrator Hamada Ahmed posted “Welcome to the Great October” in response to the 7 October attack, that UNRWA officials posted “Allah is great […] Reality surpasses our wildest dreams” on Facebook, and that officials justified the massacre as “restoring rights and addressing grievances.”
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education reports that “14 UNRWA staffers […] publicly celebrated the actions of October 7. One UNRWA teacher in Gaza, Sara Alderawy, posted a video clip on the same day of the massacre, showing Hamas terrorists roaming Israeli streets with rifles while shooting at Israeli cars, and of rocket attacks in Israel. The video is accompanied by a Qur’anic verse stating: we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them in humiliation, and they will be debased.”
Ms. Wild (D-PA) sought clarity from Mr. Lincoln on the question of why there are still refugee camps in the Palestinian territory. “The idea that refugees of 1949 are continuing to be served by UNRWA, I think, is preposterous, so what we’re talking about is successive generations of people who are born into refugee status.” She continued by confirming that “70% of the population of Gaza is provided services by UNRWA.” Mr. Lincoln replied that “1.5 million beneficiaries from Gaza” are being served. The existence of these registered refugees in “camps” that look like “neighborhoods and towns” is a part of the “final political process of creating peace in the Middle East which, who knows whether that will ever come…” The words of the Member of Congress sound strikingly close to a Final Solution for “peace” in Israel.
Ms. Manning (D-NC) remarked upon a Hamas leader’s statement that “it was the responsibility of Hamas to fight against Israel and to protect its fighters with their underground tunnels. […] And […] that they do not have a responsibility to allow the Palestinian people to get shelter from attacks in those tunnels; that the responsibility of the Palestinian people was solely held by the United Nations.” The Member asked Mr. Lincoln to expound upon how the perspective the Hamas leader is wrong; that it is the responsibility of the elected government (presumably Hamas since the 2006 legislative election) to take care of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza. Mr. Lincoln replied that that is correct, but also that in a context like Gaza, “the work of UN agencies is often conflated with the work of governments.”
Mr. Schneider (D-IL) delivered these remarks:
In synagogues around the world this week, two things are going to be universal. On the one hand there are going to be armed guards outside every one of those synagogues for fear of Anti-Semitism and violence. […] But inside those synagogues […] they’re going to be reading from the Torah, and the Torah portion that they’ll be reading from is called Chayei Sarah … [which] means “The Life of Sarah,” but it starts with the death of Sarah. […U]pon Sarah, the wife of Abraham dying, Abraham buys […] a place to bury his wife […in the Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah in Hebron]. There was a deed; my point I want to make is that the Jews have connection to this land. Hebron […] is a city in the West Bank. Jews lived in that city from the time of Abraham until 1929 […when] Arabs massacred the Jews of Hebron; those that weren’t killed left. […] Jews have lived in the land of Israel for 3,000 years, and I think that’s an important thing to note. These are not colonialists who came from Europe. In fact, today, many of the Jews […] can trace their roots, not to Europe, but to countries like Libya and Iraq, Yemen, other places, but they have a connection that goes back 3,000 years.”
Mr. Schneider (D-IL)
Mr. Schneider concluded by remarking upon the Abraham Accords, which “recognize that both Jews and Arabs belong to the same land […and] that by embracing each other, by recognizing the humanity and the connection that both have to the same place, both can elevate the place and their peoples.”
At the conclusion of the hearing, in reference to the Washington Free Beacon article on Francesca Albanese, the Chairman asked each witness whether the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories ought to be fired for her remarks, and they all replied in the affirmative. Ms. Albanese is known to have said in 2014 that she believes that the United States is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”
After the hearing adjourned, the instant Rapporteur asked Mr. Lincoln whether the aftermath of World War III would see the UN establishment of a Palestinian reparations state in the legitimized state of Israel. Mr. Lincoln replied that my question is a misinterpretation of history, since the UN suggestion for a two-state state solution in Israel and Palestine (Resolution 181) was accepted by Israel and rejected by Palestine, therefore rendering it null and void. What subsequently occurred was the new Israeli population (which had been protected by the British until this time) declared a state of Israel which was only then recognized by the Soviet Union, the United States, and other UN member states. Ergo, the Palestinian people and its allies have never recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
Wikipedia relates the Arab reaction to the adoption of Resolution 181 (II) by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947:
Arab leaders and governments rejected the plan of partition in the resolution and indicated that they would reject any other plan of partition. The Arab states’ delegations declared immediately after the vote for partition that they would not be bound by the decision, and walked out accompanied by the Indian and Pakistani delegates. They argued that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny. The Arab delegations to the UN issued a joint statement the day after that vote that stated: “the vote in regard to the Partition of Palestine has been given under great pressure and duress, and that this makes it doubly invalid.” On 16 February 1948, the UN Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council that: “Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.”
Wikipedia
As to the land currently called Israel and Palestinian territory, Wikipedia relates:
Israel is located in the Southern Levant, a region known historically as Canaan, the Land of Israel, Palestine and the Holy Land. In antiquity, it was home to several Israelite and Jewish kingdoms, including Israel and Judah and Hasmonean Judea. Over the ages, the region was ruled by imperial powers such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. During Roman rule, Jews became a minority in Palestine. The region later came under Byzantine and Arab rule. In the medieval period, it was part of the Islamic caliphates, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman Empire. The late 19th century saw the rise of Zionism, a movement advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, during which the Jewish people began purchasing land in Palestine. Under the British Mandate by the League of Nations after World War I, Jewish immigration to the region increased considerably, leading to tensions between Jews and the Arab majority population. The UN-approved 1947 partition plan triggered a civil war between these two peoples. The British terminated the Mandate on 14 May 1948, and Israel declared independence on the same day.
The majority of biblical archeologists translate a set of hieroglyphs from the Merneptah Stele (Egypt, 13th century BCE) as “Israel”, the first instance of the name in the record, Wikipedia says.
Sources
Agassi, Arik (COO). White Paper, 2 pgs. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se). 8 November 2023.
Hilu, Charles. UN Official Says Israel Has No Right to Self-Defense. Washington Free Beacon. 7 November 2023.
TimesOfIndia.com. Hamas’s top 3 leaders are worth staggering $11 billion. The Times of India. 8 November 2023.
Additional References
Abraham Accords from State Department website.
© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
The Fire in the Belly
A Short Story for Edward P. Jones
By Antarah Crawley
12 September 2012
I don’t know what day it is. I awoke this morning with my head on the belly of my companion Shams. I am a boy in a country which isn’t familiar to him anymore. The only boy I know is Shams here, whose situation just twelve hours ago I knew nothing of except that he, like me, had been on a bus to Cairo. From where, again, I don’t know.
I sat on one of the chairs reading the menu while I waited for Shams to wake up. The merchant didn’t seem to be preoccupied with us, as his business was filled with men and women—workers, other merchants, mechanics, students, elders, young men like myself—whose collective voices were loud and mesmerizing. Shams and I were just two of them, and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones who slept here last night. The sun was now coming in through the street windows and the atmosphere in the café was grey with smoke on which lingered smells of honey, coffee, apple, tobacco, eggs and fal. The tinkering of cups and spoons and the bubbling of pipes accented the voices of organizers and unsettlers. Shams, however, continued sleeping as though he was born into this place.
Not eleven hours ago he had asked me if I had a cigarette while Altair Sawalha stood atop an overturned van and shouted for the end of the regime. He smiled at me, recognized me as his friend, another boy in belly of the madness. I gave him one from the pack I had in my pocket and watched him light up and then turn back towards Sawalha and shout with the crowd. I felt like I had known him before, and that that fist in the air with a butt sticking out smoldering between knuckles was something I was responsible for.
He finally awoke, subtly shifting up and wiping his eyes. “Shams,” I said. He looked and smiled at me with his eyes still half closed.
“These fuckin’ beds, huh,” he said putting his hand in the arch of his back and stretching.
“Yeah. Let’s get a move on then, right.” And we got up and waded our way through the crowded cafe out to the street.
I heard them blocks away: chants of “Go! Go! Leave! Leave!” and “He shall leave!” I listened to them. Shams listened too. He had heard enough that he knew what it meant, and he joined in with his fist up. Then he looked at me and smiled and we laughed as we walked toward where the sound was coming from.
We found ourselves on a particularly crowded section of one of the big streets; I think it was Ahmed Ourabi. The noise had become monotonous—crashes, sirens, yelling. It was all atmosphere now. As we walked we talked about how much we despised Mubarak. It was mostly recounting things we had heard at the rallies and what we had learned from talking to other protesters, but it was liberating nonetheless. Shams had never heard of the other world revolutions, so I took great joy in recounting the uprisings of the French and the Russians and at seeing the looks of astonishment on his face as he learned they we were not alone in this cycle of revolution.
I said, yelling above the crowd, “You see it was all a matter of time. Revolution is inevitable; you can’t keep the people down and oppressed indefinitely. All dictators make that mistake. Ali made it. And he paid. Now Mubarak is going to pay.”
“Right on!” he said. He would always yelp in agreement. He was childlike and I loved him for it. I loved to see him grow, like a young schoolboy learning his alphabet. I wanted him to know as much as me.
Every now and then as we walked we’d see a pile of debris, charred sticks and bricks. Shams would go into the pile and pick out a stick with a charred end, then go to a building or concrete wall and inscribe some amusing message like “Fuck Mubarak” or “Down with the fascist regime!” I felt proud seeing him do that. I feel proud knowing I spread the revolution to another fellow countryman. After each message we eagerly tried to alert passers-by of our accomplishment while many cheered laughed in amusement.
As we walked, I would muse things over with him, ideas that I had been thinking about. I felt like a great outlaw leader telling him these ideas; he seemed to absorb them like a sponge.
I said, “It seems to me that there are certain tools that every human needs—that they should be equip with from the earliest parts of their life until they get old and wise. How to eat, how to breathe, important things. But people don’t talk about another really important skill that people need. And if they’re not going to use it, then they should at least be well versed in it.”
“Yeah, what is it?” he’d interrupt, eager as ever.
“I’m getting to that. This skill—the ability to revolt—I believe every person should have!”
“Yeah! Of course!”
“Yeah, I believe every person should live through at least one revolution. And it doesn’t even have to be violent. It can be like, changing your hair color to red when you and everyone around you has natural black hair. You should be able to say ‘fuck them!”
“Fuck ‘em!”
“I think revolution is a natural and organized process in the grand scheme of things. If everything is smooth and level where you are, and everyone is living the same and indefinitely, then something’s wrong! You’re being oppressed and lied to.”
“Well we’ve been being oppressed and lied to for decades!” He was getting it.
“That’s right, Shams; that’s why it has to go. That’s why this revolution is so important. Man, it’s probably the greatest thing to happen to this country.”
“Yeah,” he screamed, and he screamed loud and jumped in the air with his fist up. Our fellow protestors, walking around us, with us, would sometimes join it. I don’t know if they heard what I was talking about or not, but their common cry of agreement made me happy. I turned back to Shams:
“You ever heard of Daoism?”
“No what’s that?” he asked, not surprisingly.
“In China they have this thing called Daoism—I don’t know why more people don’t know about it. In Daoism, the world and the universe and the people and animals are all one and this whole entity is always going through revolutions and transformations.”
“Wait, what’s an ‘entity’?”
I laughed. Why go to school, huh, if you’re not going to learn about the world or Daoism, or simple vocabulary. Shams was like every other kid in 6th of October City before he met me: wasting his time at technical college. Being taught the expendable things in life. While he was doing that I was learning the good stuff. Before I left for Cairo, before I knew anything about the revolution, I was already on my way to stirring up trouble.
About ten months ago I lived with my uncle In 6th of October City. All while living with him we would leave the house every morning and walk in opposite directions. He went to the auto-body shop where he was the manager and, to his knowledge, I went to Al-Khamsa Technical School every day to learn mechanical engineering so that one day I could work in his exciting shop. And that was true for a while.
About a year ago I met Alex, an American who worked at October 6 University. We had got to talking on the street because I was wearing a Smiths tee shirt. I didn’t know much about international history then, but I was big on American and English rock. We talked Smiths, Adolescents, Mott the Hoople, Patty Smith, Libertines, Strokes, Moldy Peaches, everything. He seemed to like me. I guess I wasn’t like my classmates, whose hair was shorter and who wore Polos and Levi jeans. I looked like a young tanner Kirk Hammett, with straighter hair. He asked me if I was busy; he said he had had some 45s at his apartment which was a couple blocks away on No. 27 street. I told him that I didn’t have anything to do even though it was Monday and I know I didn’t look any older than nineteen.
I’m grateful now that he was so unsupportive of my technical education. If I hadn’t gone with him I’d probably be in my uncle’s auto shop right now, learning how to change a transmission or whatever you do there.
Alex’s apartment was in a nicer building than I’d seen some of my friends live in. We went in the ground entrance and walked up the steps to his flat.
It was also nicer than where uncle and I lived. It was more ethnic—more Egyptian, I guess. He had several hookahs and a painting of the flag’s crest, an eagle, on the ceiling. When you walked through the door there was a window right across from you looking out to the dusty street you just came off of. I saw a counter with some bar-style chairs with no backs—stools—to the left of me. That was where the kitchen was. When I turned to the right I saw his living room, the walls of which were lined with shelves, some of them makeshift, mounted with more books than any household or institution I’d ever been in. I didn’t even know what one would need with so many books. I suppose Alex saw my astonishment at his collection:
“Do you read much?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
I went over to the shelves. To the right of the window on the wall opposite the door were two bookshelves separated by a television on a stand. There was a whole bookshelf with a makeshift annex on the wall to the side of that. I walked, briskly perusing the titles; I had a fine grasp of English for a mechanics student. There was A People’s History of the United States, Naked Lunch, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Nietzsche Reader, Walden, law primers, Chemistry books, the theory of relativity. When I got through browsing both walls I turned back and began browsing them again.
Alex laughed as he shut the door and turned into the kitchen. “Here’s the finer parts of the entire Western World. Right at your fingertips.” He went into the refrigerator and brought out two beers. You-eng-ling. “Want one,” he asked rhetorically as he handed me the freshly opened bottle. I walked over and lifted the cold beer, putting it too my lips. Terrifically watery, but I suppose that was America.
“I might just substitute school for this,” I joked.
He laughed, “Hey, by all means. Make yourself at home,” he smiled. And turned with his beer and went down the corridor gesturing something like he’d be right back. “Oh,” he cried back, out of sight, “Feel free to look through the records and put on any one.”
I turned to look. On the wall of the entrance door, to the farthest side, there was a stereo with a cassette/CD player and a turntable sitting atop four milk crates of vinyl records and CDs. Beside it was a worn in looking leather couch. But it wasn’t worn in like a poor family’s like some of the kids I knew. It was ripped and duct-taped real cool-like. It was a red couch with black trim with white cotton sticking out where it was ripped. It sat low and broken-in in front of a black chest that served as a table, facing the television that I realized was covered in dust. On the trunk-table were Rolling Stone magazines, jars of shisha, a pack of cigarettes—an American brand, Parliaments—a cereal bowl housing a fern of some sort and a zip-lock bag of what looked like densely packed nuggets of green herbs. There were text books on the floor, I suppose for teaching.
I walked back over to the books and looked up and down the shelves, sipping at my beer. I saw two titles that looked intriguing—The Story of American Revolution and The Catcher in the Rye. I took the books and my beer and sat them down on the trunk-table. I took the liberty of lighting a new coal for one of the hookahs that was out and reclined on the couch while I read.
I read whole books on days when Alex was home all day, working as far as I knew. Eventually, when we got to know each other better, he’d let me stay in while he went off to the university. He trusted me not to steal anything. And in fact I never took anything of his out of the house except a cigarette or two. He never let me smoke his cigarettes. He said it was because he only had half a carton left, but I think he was peculiarly suspicious of Arabic cigarettes. But not Arabic shisha for whatever reason. We talked about the world and its revolutions; I was fascinated by that stuff. I read or skimmed about half of the books on the shelves—more than I think any working countryman under 50 has ever read in their lifetime. I listened to every record he had, from the Cure and Fugazi to Cat Power and Adele. Ramen and Parliaments, revolution and rock and roll. Day in and day out for nine months.
“An entity is…um,” I had to think about how to describe it. “It’s a body of matter and meta matter, I suppose.”
“I still don’t get it,” Shams said. But I don’t think he cared.
The street we were on was getting agitated. The people were getting rowdier, but the street itself felt like it was heating up. I told Shams I thought we should turn off onto another street when we saw one. We were trying to move out through the crowd of excited men to the sidewalk so that we could get onto a less intense street when we heard shots. The shot of an automatic rifle was followed by shots of voices. They were chastising and cheering, for what, I don’t know. I was shaken up by the rousing of motion around me. People were jumping up and knocking into each other, screaming and yelling at whomever. I tried to use the wave of the crowd to see who the agitators were, ‘cause Johnny Rotten said the pit was always in front of the stage. I caught a glimpse of green cameo uniforms and beige vests. It was the military. I caught another wave. They had their tanks with them. I was going to join in with provoking them, but it seemed like the crowd was commending them. I couldn’t see if anyone had been shot. They might have shot a pro-Mubarak type, which by all means would have been grounds for commending. But they were the army; I didn’t get it. I was being railed in the head by another man’s elbow, and at this point I was being dragged along. The voices and the crowd where all one, but I remembered Shams. I looked back and saw him, integrated with the crowd. He was chanting what they were chanting, something I didn’t pick up.
I called to him: “Shams! Shams!” He was in a trance; he kept on moving with the men around him with their fist in the air shouting as gasoline spittle flew from their inflamed tongues. Then I realized I had stopped moving as one with the crowd. It had stopped moving as a unit and I could break away from the current to go back and tap him. “Shams, Shams, come this way!” I led him by his hand to the sidewalk, which was no less crowded but closer to one of the side streets. We turned and stumbled to the ground. Shams panted furiously and turned to look at me.
“What energy! Whooh!”
I lay against a building catching my breath as he and I continued to witness the power rising up off of the crowd. They were turned towards the middle of the street responding to the army that was marching through. Others, the mellow ones, where around us watching on; periodically screaming something I wasn’t listening to.
I continued to sit even after I had caught my breath. Shams came over closer and sat cross legged.
“Lemme get a cigarette,” he said.
I pulled the battered pack of Parliaments out of my pant pocket and handed him one.
“Why do they have these open parts?” he asked, looking at the end of the filter.
I looked out into the street at the men and women with their signs: He Shall Leave. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you know who was ruler before Mubarak?” Alex had asked one day, at the time when I had completely stopped going to school.
I was lying back on the couch as usual, with a book on Lenin and the Bolsheviks on my face. Alex was working on his computer at the kitchen counter. I didn’t look up from the page as I tried to think. “Nicholas II,” I joked.
“No, really.” He wanted an answer.
“Um,” I tried to remember but I couldn’t find the answer. “I don’t know; I don’t keep up with that scene.”
“That scene?” he laughed. “You mean your scene.”
“I don’t know, man.” I continued reading about Russia, far away.
“Well when did he take over?”
“Mubarak?”
“Yeah”
“Um, I told you, I don’t know. Why do you need to know?”
“My students. I’m trying to brush up on my Egyptian history so they don’t think I’m a total outsider.”
I put down the book and got up and went over to peruse the bookshelf again. “Maybe if you had some books on Egypt you’d have better luck,” I teased him.
He responded, “Maybe if I had some books on Egypt you’d actually learn about your own country.” I looked back at the book I was reading, sprawled out on the table.
“Uncle’s probably wondering where I am by now,” I said.
“Alright, that’s cool. I’ll be out tomorrow morning, so I’ll leave the key under the mat.”
“Thanks.” I left.
About a week ago, before I left the city for Cairo, I went to Alex’s place. I walked down No. 27 Street and saw him in his raggedy Circle Jerks shirt and sandals smoking a cigarette, looking intently at nothing in particular.
“What’s up? Can I get one of those?” I asked. He offered me the pack in silence. I took one and tried to see into his eyes as I lit it. “What’s going on?”
He took a drag. “You been watching the news?”
“We don’t have a television.” I looked to where he was looking, at a bar across the street. Then I turned back to him, “But you don’t watch television either; your set is covered in dust.” I smiled at him.
“I was at Gazura. They had Al-Jezeera on. People are getting wild. They’re calling for Mubarak to leave. I was there yesterday and today. It’s getting wild in Cairo.”
“What do you mean? Rioting? What did Mubarak do this time?” I turned back and chuckled taking another drag.
“It wasn’t about this time.” He squinted his eyes looking up at the sun. “I suppose it’s a culmination of everything. The past thirty years of his bullshit. And they saw Tunisia speaking out so…why not, huh?” He flicked the butt into the street and turned to go back into the building.
“What happened in Tunisia?” I took a last drag and flicked the butt too, following him in. We got up to his flat and I plopped down on the sofa. I picked up a book I had laying there—Stranger in a Strange Land.
Alex was in the kitchen with his hand over his mouth in thought. He was staring at a boiling pot of water. I could smell the steam after a while and feel the room getting hotter.
“Making Ramen?” I asked.
“I got a call from my mom in Cleveland. Ohio. She said the US government was strongly suggesting for American citizens to get on the very next plane back.”
“Oh, you’re gonna be a frightened cat now?”
“Fraidy Cat?”
“Yeah.”
He stayed silent, looking at the boiling water. Then he walked back through the hall to his room and closed the door. I continued reading, not offset in the least. It was a normal day at Alex’s until I left at the usual seven o’clock, biding “goodbye” to the house, and shuffled back home.
The next day, I got over to the flat at around noon. The door wasn’t unlocked like it usually was. I flipped up the dusty map and used the key underneath to let myself in. I walked up the building’s steps and went into Alex’s apartment. It looked deflated. Most of everything was still there except several books on the shelves, making the remaining titles fall diagonal into each other in a real depressed scene. The records had been taken from the milk crates. The trunk-table was cleared except for a note on a piece of loose-leaf paper that read: Went back to USA. Be back when the shit subsides. I could read it from the threshold where I was standing.
I walked into the kitchen and looked through drawers. I don’t know what I was looking for. I found half a pack of parliaments and put them in my pocket, then I went back over to the couch and sat down. The television was still there. The stereo and most other things a sane person would cherish remained. I told myself he was probably coming back.
The next couple of days I tried to tell my uncle I was sick so I could stay home. He didn’t buy it. Nevertheless, when I parted with him in the morning I’d just lap the block and go back into the house using a copy of his key that I made. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling wondering what to do.
A couple days ago, before I left the city, I was in Gazura Café having a hookah. Two men were sitting immediately in front of me, a little to the right:
“I’m convinced the day has finally come,” said one. “There will be a large protest tomorrow in Tahir square. I’m going to go into the city with Madhat and his woman and little girl. They have a fair sized van if you’d like to come. If I were you I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“Madhat has never been a man of good judgment. Why bring your woman and child to such a ruckus of an event? They’re sure to be knocked up,” said the other man.
“No, no. That’s the thing; this is no riotous complication. This is organized. Delicate and thirty years in the making. It’s so precise; Mubarak has to go.”
The other man took a sip of his beer and crossed his arms and scratched his dark beard. “Mubarak has to go because of the uprising, or he has to go because he has to go?”
The first man leaned in: “this is the end of the line. Everything will be different in several days. We have no idea how, but it will change. Undoubtedly for the best, whatever happens.” The rumbling bubbling of the hookah sounded, and the man bellowed a great cloud that rose into the dark ceiling and diffused into the grey atmosphere.
The other man continued to muse, scratching his beard and rubbing his neck. “I’ll need to talk to Alimah.”
“She’s a wise girl. She’ll understand if she’s been watching. This is momentous. Every countryman should attend. I know Anwar in Alexandria is organizing.”
“Okay,” said the second man.
“Okay what?”
“Well, you go with Madhat tomorrow. But I will surely be there in the next day. I’ll look you up when I get there.”
“I’m glad to hear it! You will have no trouble finding me or anyone else you know that’s going in a group. The community will be strong! He will leave!”
The next day I left uncle a note; I knew he wasn’t going to take a day off of work. I went down early, before uncle was even up, to Gazura, where I had heard a group was gathering to go into Cairo. I saw a group of them around a van: beautiful people, men and women, elders and young workers. Some of them I had seen before and some I hadn’t, but they all had this sort of reflexive quality. It was as though these people who I had known my whole life were more real now, so real and concrete, solid, finely built men, graceful old women with faces like stone statues, each wrinkle precisely placed and eroded, deep like the Nile. I greeted them as I approached and professed my deep love of the revolution. They graciously invited me aboard their party. To fit everyone into the van, I sat on the roof as we drove onto the highway towards Cairo. I felt like I was in one of Alex’s books—like Che in the company of Castro and the party. We were on our way into the heart of the struggle.
After five hours of driving, as the sun was just rising, we finally got to the city, but the traffic was already congested to the point of stagnation. I was anxious. I had never been to Cairo, and now I would be there in the midst of the greatest event in Egyptian history! A fantastic urge came over me and I jumped off of the roof of the sitting van. I knocked on the window in a gesture of thanks and walked off towards the center of the city winding between the vehicles. Many others had taken this course of action, too. I imagined them unapologetically abandoning their vehicles to go be with the masses. They waded and hopped over caravans and at that moment, whether you were in a car or not, we were all one, and I felt it.
* * *
I called to Shams, “Let’s go find an open restaurant or hookah.” He got up real excitedly; I’m sure he was hungry. I hadn’t seen him eat, at least for four or five hours, from the moment I offered him a cigarette in one of the squares. I got up and we walked away from the busy street toward a section I had heard was still serving food for the protesters.
We walked until we ended up on Al Sabaa Banat, about four blocks from the square where a place called Jawhar was open. It was fantastically crowded, or at least it seemed that way because many people were standing in the middle of the establishment talking in high voices to each other and to no one in particular. Shams and I found our way to the back of the place and took the only two empty seats. We sat beside a quite, content looking man who wore American sunglasses—Ray Bans, like Alex had—and kept his arm folded in an authoritative fashion with his hose in his hand but not lifting it. His head lay against the wall and I couldn’t tell of he was asleep or awake and simply observing. There wasn’t much light coming in through the street windows by now and the weak lamps hanging from the ceiling and the small candles on the tables in front of us made for a sedative environment. Even the whirr of voices like gears of a machine became monotonous and a part of the atmosphere.
A woman brought us a hookah and two beers. Shams said, “and a fal in aysh baladi.”
“Two,” I added.
The woman gestured in acknowledgement and went back behind the curtain next to the bar. I took my beer and sipped; Shams tapped his foot rhythmically with his hands folded in his lap. He seemed to be interested in the debate that was occurring in the middle of the restaurant.
“I didn’t know we were living under such conditions, you know,” he said to me, or to himself. I’m not sure.
Whichever it was, I respond, “Well, to tell the truth, neither did I.”
“I wish I could join in,” he said. There was desire in his voice.
“You—we are joining in.”
“I mean in talking and debating.” He took his beer and put it in his lap. “I saw this man fighting with a pro-Mubarak type when I first got here, you know. Someone on the bus had told me there were clashes and people were beginning to get violent. And this man was wrestling with this supporter. And he was yelling that the supporter was just propping up a corrupt government, distant or something from the people.”
I sipped. “You want to fight? Physically with them?”
“I don’t know. I want to…know.”
“Well we may not have been following it before, and that was our fault. But we can show our full support now by adding to the numbers. And adding to the voices.”
“But what if we need to do more than that?”
I looked at him. “Non-violence prevailed in the American South.”
He chuckled. “America sounds cool. They know how to handle situations.” He was quiet for a while and we both just sipped on our beers. “Revolution, man,” he said, and shook his head in apparent disbelief. “We’re in it. It’s just surreal.”
“Yeah,” I smiled into my glass.
“We’ll never get this rush again. I’m just trying to a make it last, you know.”
The ambiguous man beside us joined in, moving nothing but his mouth. “Revolution!” We turned to look at him; Shams leaned over. “Revolution is life!”
“Right on,” Shams said.
His staccato declarations were prophetical: “Revolution is life! In this grand cycle, it is the facilitator. It disrupts monotony. Monotony is silence. Silence is death. Revolution is life.” And like that he seemed to resolve back into peace and silence. Any other time, I’d have thought he was crazy, but the eccentric tend to be revered more in eccentric times.
His words resonated with my own. “I’ve been saying that too! I was talking to my friend here about that, and how in Daoism revolution is natural and is a part of the way.”
“Right on, man,” he said still looking forward through his glasses, “We’re all one, man. Us, the revolution, the country. Even if you don’t know it. Even if you don’t know why it’s going on. Even if you’re supporting the ones in power. You’re a part of it all. In revolution, the conservative are progressive. It’s all good, you know.”
“It’s all good, you know,” Shams smiled at me.
“This violence was no accident. They had to react, the government and their puppets.” I leaned in. The man went on, turning to us for the first time, “The peace will prevail over this setback, no question about it.” And then he paused like he remembered something, and turn back looking out into the restaurant in his original position. “But even so, at this moment it’s dangerous out there. Where are you boys staying?”
Shams and I looked at each other.
Shams turned back to the man: “We’ll let the Revolution handle that.” He turned to me and smiled. “We’ll let the Dao handle that, huh, Aalam?”
The man laughed heartily. “You boys. You boys are blessed by your naivety. True revolutionary minds. Natural, with your age and temperament. Leaned, no doubt, but naïve all the same.” He turned and tilted his head to us so that he could see us with his eyeballs. He then turned back around: “Truly one with the way of world. But also at its mercy.” Then he took the first drag of his pipe that we’d seen him take since we sat down.
“What a cool old fellow,” Shams smiled as or waitress brought out our food. Shams dove in.
It took him all of three minutes to inhale the plate and scarf down the rest of his beer. I was still shoveling fal onto the aysh as he lay back with his hand on his stomach. He reached over and took the hose of our hookah and started bubbling. The great dark grey cloud moved throughout the room; there was now almost no light coming in through the street windows.
I was only about three-quarters of the way done when Shams tapped me and said in a low voice, as if to conceal his desire, “Let’s go out.”
“Well…we will. I gotta finish.”
“I’m feeling it tonight, Aalam.”
I just looked at him and continued eating. I heard some glass break from out in the street. The voices of yelling pulled out of monotony and I heard conflicts.
“We need to be careful, you know,” I said.
“I know. But this the real thing here.”
“What? The real what?”
“Nothing,” he said. He was looking outward with a real content look. Finally I finished and Shams and I left the establishment and went back out into the street.
We stood outside of Jawhar for a minute as we looked up and down the block. At the end of each corner I saw activity.
“Let’s go this way,” Shams said leaning to the right. He was walking with a bounce, almost skipping. I pulled out my pack which was dwindling down to the last few cigarettes. I lit one up and surveyed my surroundings. For some reason, this cigarette was burning my nose and eyes with a heavy smoggy smell. I looked at it, then looked up to see Shams on the corner pointing down the street where I couldn’t see.
“Look!” he yelled. He was illuminated.
I got to the corner and looking to my right saw a fire on an overturned car igniting the block and protesters in orange glow. Silhouettes of men in battle danced on the ground in front of the burning vehicle which was situated in front of a warehouse about thirty feet tall. There were protesters yelling and throwing bricks up at what I guess were pro-Mubarak types up on the roof of the warehouse. And I suppose some of the Mubarak supporters were also down in the group of protesters because there were fistfights, group beat downs and confrontations on the street.
“Shit,” we said in unison. My brain crippled with emotion, I was frozen.
So I didn’t know what to say when Shams ran out towards the debacle screaming “Fuck you, Mubarak Fuckers!” at the top of his lungs. I watched him, my cigarette hand still frozen in front of my face in disbelief as he sprinted two hundred feet, jumping and plunging feet first into a man who was beating on another man with a piece of debris. He got up and kicked the assaulting man in the face. He then raised his fist and screamed along with the other protesters at the pro-Mubaraks on the roof. I saw a man come up behind him as he shouted and choke his neck from behind in an arm-lock. I dropped my butt and started to run over, slowly and hesitant at first. Shams slammed the man with his elbow and blood flew from the choker’s nose. As he held it, Shams reared back and smashed into the man’s temple with his fist with the force of a tank. The man fell limp. Shams turned back. I ran faster. I ran towards that boy with his fist in the air as he screamed in euphoria into the night. At a star.
Then I don’t know if I slowed down or if the world started going in slow motion but I saw that star, a bright flame in a bottle hurled from a supporter on the roof, arc and fall, smashing into Shams and engulfing his torso in fire. That torch raged, and fell to the ground, and I had stopped and fallen to my knees. I watched that fist I was responsible for, smoldering.
© 2012 by Antarah Crawley
The Undermining of the Heart of Vandals
By Antarah Crawley
For Professor McRuer,
Critical Methodologies
9 November 2011, GWU
WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you drive or walk or, more likely, ride your fixed gear down the city’s busiest thoroughfare New York Avenue past 7th street you’ll see an imposing mural of a young brown boy with a cap depicting an upside-down DC flag peeking up out of a dystopian landscape reminiscent of Mew Mexico’s Bisti Badlands. The painted caption, “Welcome to Dystopia City” invokes the notion that all is not well here. Indeed, within the city there is a conflict of interest between a young, browning generation and the established hegemony, between corporations and small business, between those who have a voice and those who don’t. And the artists, whose hands are also colored with paint and adhesive, have largely taken up the cause to make the corporate hegemony accountable to their disruptive actions. In this paper I look at the actions of DC artists, who use the most symbolic city in the western hemisphere as a canvas for social correction, and the responses it stirs among those in power. And furthermore, in the very notions of power itself.
In fall of 2010, corporate oil-giant Chevron planned to execute a campaign that sought to fix public opinion of them after attention was drawn to their crude waste removal tactics in Ecuador. According to a team of professionals suing Chevron (formerly Texaco) for their human rights violations in multiple locations across the world, and specifically in Ecuador, the oil giant has been deliberately disposing toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon—an estimated 18.5 billion gallons from 1964 to 1990, or 4 million gallons per day at the height of their operation. Even though they had managed to elude liability costs (a potential $27.3 billion) their public image had been damaged, thus they sought to repair it with a campaign that utilized a gritty street-art aesthetic and phrases that showed their corporate executives agreeing with “everyday, working class” Americans (e.g., “Oil companies should put their profits to good use—We Agree”, “Big oil should support small business—We Agree”, etc.)
In an effort to make their message more accessible to the public, Chevon reached out to local artists to put their posters up in an authentic, street art way, using wheatpaste and paint rollers. Cesar Maxit, a DC-based street artist, was one of the artists targeted to execute this operation. However, Mr. Maxit is not one to comply with the wishes of big oil. He has a long history of social activism and of using art, legally and illegally, towards that capacity. He says in an interview:
…I had started working with environmental and human rights groups, I wanted to write messages about social justice. My first burner was a piece that said “Free Tibet.” My second was one that had a line of white-hooded Klansmen with the city skyline behind it, and in the negative space between it said “FREE MUMIA” followed by “amerikkka racist.” This was in 2000.
Cesar Maxit
Thus, when Chevron sent him the files for the campaign, which still contained their original messages, he called his friends in The Yes Men (tagline: Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Our targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an environmental activist organization begun in 1985 (mission statement: Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action), to collaborate on a counter-campaign. Maxit, in a documentary short about the counter-campaign, says the aim of Chevon in its efforts is to “confuse the public.” He, along with The Yes Men and RAN, altered the original Chevon files to read messages that were more precise, more radical (e.g., “Oil companies should clean up their messes.”). Instead of retaining the images of working class Americans, he used the faces and words of the Ecuadorian peoples that the corporation actually affected, thus radicalizing the campaign in a way that Chevron had not intended.
The questions that this counter-attack (which resulted in Chevron pulling the campaign completely) raises revolve around the mythologies surrounding responsibility and authenticity. Could the campaign have been authentically “agreeable” without the help of actual street artists? What does a campaign like this symbolize, even when Chevron has not actually committed to cleaning up its mess in Ecuador? At the base of it all, what is the role of the street artists in this scenario? Is his role to help corporations get back on track, or to call attention to their faults? If Chevron had actually continued with the campaign (and even with the altered versions already up on the street), whose campaign is it? Who is the author? And lastly, why DC?
Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author would have anticipated such response from the street art/activist community. Mr. Maxit has physically done what the reader in Barthes does every time he reads a text—he deconstructs it; he takes the text and, without considering what the author intended, which is ultimately futile because the author is a confused self-destructive entity, he reassess the “blends and clashes” inherent in the text (1324). Barthes writes, “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (1324). Chevron acts as the “Author-God” that has been abstracted out. With the remaining text, which reads, for example, “Big Oil should get real”, the author, Mr. Maxit, RAN, and so on, detangles what is being said. In an interview, Mitch Anderson, a spokes man for the San Francisco-based organization, Amazon Watch, asks rhetorically, “Does Chevron think that we’re stupid?” As the author, they are putting words on a page that come in contact with other entities, actions surrounding their statements. The reader takes all of these aspects inherently into consideration when analyzing a statement like “Big oil should get real.” Cesar Maxit asks, “‘Get real’? Well, what does that mean? Of course we all agree with that. But what about ‘Oil companies should clean up their messes?’ Do you agree with that? I think most people would agree with that, but I think Chevron doesn’t.” Here, the reader has destroyed the voice. It epitomizes Barthes’s statement that, “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody [and] contestation…” (1325). In the end, this campaign has actually served to promote further scrutiny into Chevron’s actions. It’s authorship has written its own rebuttal. By getting street artists to interact with the campaign, it has entered the reader into the execution of the text. This puts multiple hands on the “original” message and renders is read before it actually goes public.
This actually brings up another level of readership. On one level, Maxit and the activist community are reading the ads. Yet they put them up in the public sphere, thus entering the text into another, secondary level of readership. Though it’s not as well documented or extensive as the primary reading, we still see the artist entering into his own death. The product will now be read at face value—as a Chevron ad that shows the corporation explicitly admitting to wrongdoing. This may lead the secondary reader to believe that the company is actually trying to get its act together. Once again, the message of the author—now the artist—is obliterated and the reader assumes the power of interpretation. The text never becomes the product of one author; it is always a collaborative space. As Barthes writes, “Writing [or in this case, art/publicity/advertising] is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative space where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing” (1322).
Antarah, you’ve chosen a really interesting focus that’s, I think, much clearer than it was in the first draft. You’re also going in an unexpected and interesting direction with it–I’d have expected you to perhaps go after Deutsch or Foucault, but I think this is really interesting. As noted in the margin, you will need another theorist from class besides Barthes. It sounds like Derrida might be a good one. Or, if you want to think more about the larger frame of discourse, DC as a symbolic city, whose discourse on the level of architecture is disrupted by street art, then Foucault (or Deutsch) might help. At any rate, it’s a fascinating project!
Grade: A
© 2011 by Antarah Crawley
D.R. 01-12: Masjid &c.
Volume 1, Issue 12
CONTENTS — ART. 1. MASS PROTEST…MASJID… — ART. 2. SDACS
High Holy Days Special Edition
All Praise be to God/Allah to whom all praise is due! Let us pursue Him in the righteous path. Yes it is true; “seek and ye shall find.” Only through Him can we know the most wondrous bequeathal.
Blessed Saint Nat’s Judgment Day, the day on which Freedom Fighter Nat Turner was tried and sentenced to death in Jerusalem, Virginia, after inciting the Southampton Insurrection on 22-23 August, 1831, and going into exile for 70 days until his capture on 30 October, 1831.
Article 1
300,000 attend mass protest for Palestine in Washington; masjid al-maghrib established
By Antarah Crawley
WASHINGTON, DC — Approximately 300,000 people from every corner of the United States converged for a “truly massive National March on Washington D.C.” on Saturday, November 4 at 12:00 p.m. at Freedom Plaza. Co-organizer ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition writes on their website:
Israel, with the full backing of the U.S. government, is carrying out an unprecedented massacre in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians are being killed with bombs, bullets and missiles paid for by U.S. tax dollars. This is the latest bloody chapter in the colonial project of Israel, founded with the objective of dispossessing Palestinians from their land; Now is the time to stand with the besieged people of Palestine! Gaza is being bombed by the hour. Its people are denied food, water and electricity by Israel. Tens of thousands more people are likely to die. We must ACT! People are in the streets everyday in their local cities and towns.
ANSWER Coalition
NOVUS SYLLABUS (N∴S∴) Executive Producer (EP) Antarah Crawley (@DCxInfinity) said of his coverage of the event:
This is a video of my favorite band performing some of my favorite songs. This band’s members are frequently changing, as does the reason for which they band together, and they often only perform in the nature of a direct action of civil disobedience or of expression of constitutional rights [in public spaces]. The band is called decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and on November 4th 2023 they performed to Free Palestine in a moving concert of 300,000 people in downtown Washington DC. A revolutionary, empowering, peaceful, spiritual, and historical time was had by all. The band performed such classics as #freefreepalestine #ceasefirenow #shutitdown #thisiswhatdemocracylookslike and #ourstreets
Antarah Crawley
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has reported on the escalating trend of mass protests:
Toward 7:00 p.m. on the evening of the fourth of November, as the march of the mass protest made its way to the White House grounds from 17th Street NW via Pennsylvania Avenue, to the right side of the Avenue in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a ways after the Secret Service guard post but before the inner barrier colonnade, muslims congregated to pray Maghrib, one of the five obligatory daily prayers, or salah. The Maghrib prayer begins when the sun sets, and lasts until the red light has left the sky in the west, according to Wikipedia. Masjid ar-Rahman provides this guide to praying daily salah, which are Fajr (dawn), Dhur (noon), Asr (afternoon), Maghrib (evening), and Isha (nightfall). See the complete source.
The EP was riding past on his trusty steed when he observed the congregation facing toward mecca in diagonal rows; so he backtracked and stood at end of one of the rows to participate spiritually, although he did not know the manner of making rakah nor salah. The EP did feel the presence of God, so he remained there in meditative prayer. Other muslims came to pray, so the EP extended the footprint of the masjid to make room for them in the prayer line while he continued to stand at attention in meditative prayer. Other protest aids assumed the position of the doors and walls around the masjid, guiding the onstreaming crowd around the congregation; together, the EP and these aids ensured that the worshippers were not unduly disturbed by the surrounding masses. This arrangement continued until evening redness in the west went out and the last muslim ended their salah; and the masjid disbanded. After the last protest aid left, the EP himself got onto his knees to better commune with God/Allah, and he supplicated himself to God/Allah like the muslims had done in that place. He felt in his heart that during those past moments a divine thing had transpired there.
Article 2
Synchronized Decentralized Autonomous Command System (SDACS)
By Antarah Crawley
Level 7: Decentralized Autonomous Organization DAO = root level system administrator = United international corp = FLF
Level 6: Commission on Information and Community Intelligence = Concilium Plebis = National Corp
Level 5: Ombudsman = Tribunus Plebis = Collegium Ecclesia
Level 4: Regional Central Processing Unit = multi-corp processor = Party Boss System
Level 3: Collegium = Community-Centered Cooperative Corporation = regional multi-syndicate Corps
Level 2: Syndicatus = a committee of at least 8 bytes = Union Boss System
Level 1: Syndic = Bit = individual; plural: bytes, Syndici
This CS is subject to amendment.
© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
D.R. 01-11: DOL & UBS
Volume 1, Issue 11
CONTENTS — ART. 1. DOL NOPR… — ART. 2. PARTY LINE: UBS
Article 1
Department of Labor notice of proposed rulemaking could upset labor-management relations
By Antarah Crawley
WASHINGTON, DC — In September 2023, the Wage and Hour Division of the United States Department of Labor (DOL) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) to amend 29 CFR Part 541, to wit, Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales, and Computer Employees.
The Summary section of the proposed rulemaking reads:
In this proposal, the Department of Labor (Department) is updating and revising the regulations issued under the Fair Labor Standards Act implementing the exemptions from minimum wage and overtime pay requirements for executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, and computer employees. Significant proposed revisions include increasing the standard salary level to the 35th percentile of weekly earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region (currently the South)—$1,059 per week ($55,068 annually for a full-year worker)—and increasing the highly compensated employee total annual compensation threshold to the annualized weekly earnings of the 85th percentile of full-time salaried workers nationally ($143,988). The Department is also proposing to add to the regulations an automatic updating mechanism that would allow for the timely and efficient updating of all the earnings thresholds.
Summary
This means that employees of covered employers who make less that $55,068 will no longer be exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLRA) minimum wage and overtime regulations as “white-collar” or executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) employees. The NOPR Executive Summary reads:
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA or Act) requires covered employers to pay employees a minimum wage and, for employees who work more than 40 hours in a week, overtime premium pay of at least 1.5 times the employee’s regular rate of pay. Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA, which was included in the original Act in 1938, exempts from the minimum wage and overtime pay requirements “any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity.” [1] The exemption is commonly referred to as the “white-collar” or executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) exemption. The statute delegates to the Secretary of Labor (Secretary) the authority to define and delimit the terms of the exemption. Since 1940, the regulations implementing the EAP exemption have generally required that each of the following three tests must be met: (1) the employee must be paid a predetermined and fixed salary that is not subject to reduction because of variations in the quality or quantity of work performed (the salary basis test); (2) the amount of salary paid must meet a minimum specified amount (the salary level test); and (3) the employee’s job duties must primarily involve executive, administrative, or professional duties as defined by the regulations (the duties test). The employer bears the burden of establishing the applicability of the exemption.[2] Job titles and job descriptions do not determine EAP exemption status, nor does merely paying an employee a salary.
Executive Summary
This proposed rulemaking is causing some employers to reclassify employees who have historically been salaried full-time employees (FTE) with “white collar” exemption to wage-hour employees.
These changes are agitating labor-management relations, creating sharper contradiction in the employer-employee dialectic (“struggle of opposites”). Some employers are electing not to raise the compensation of historically EAP employees above the 35th percentile of weekly earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region, even if those employees live in the most expensive regions of the country.
The sharpening of this historical and materialist dialectic is resulting in a proportional increase in union activity and may very well catalyze the decentralized autonomous organization of the Office of the Plebian Tribunes as well as shore up the 1st Memorandum of the College of the Ancient Mystery.
Source(s)
Article 2
Party Line re: Union Boss System
By Antarah Crawley
NACOTCHTANK, OD — These planks are hereby promulgated for acceptance into the party platform by the general membership of the Third Wave Antimasonic Party of the United States, from the Village of Nacotchtank-on-Potomac, Ouachita District, which sits on the river bank east of the federal city of Washington:
PLANK NO. 5
The Union Boss System (UBS) is the fractal organization of the regional Party Boss System (PBS) into industrial syndicates.
PLANK NO. 6
The official position of the party with respect to the organization of labor in general (unions) is favorable.
© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
D.R. 01-10: Gateway &c.
Volume 1, Issue 10
Contents — Art. 1. …Gateway Process — Art. 2. …Party Line
Article 1
40th Anniversary of U.S. Army Intelligence analysis and assessment of Gateway Process
By Antarah Crawley
WASHINGTON, DC — On 17 February 2021 the Daily Mail reported, “TikTokkers discover declassified 1983 CIA report investigating if people can leave their physical bodies to travel through space and time using Gateway Experience’s low frequency sounds and relaxation techniques.” The present author recalls that he researched the report and identified a PDF copy on the CIA’s website after seeing such a video being shared on Instagram sometime that year. This author first read the report on 30 October 2023.
The 9 June 1983 U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (USAINSCOM) report, Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, was declassified by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on 10 September 2003. It is therefore presently four decades since this report was penned in top secrecy by Army Intelligence officer LTC Wayne M. McDonnell, and two decades since it was quietly released into public domain.
The Gateway Process is a technique for applied consciousness expansion designed to better enable practitioners to achieve out-of-body experiences, among other objectives. It also appears to provide the theoretical foundations of interdimensional espionage and interdimensional counterintelligence using remote viewing and other techniques related to interdimensional time travel. It may also acclimate practitioners to encounters with “intelligent, non-corporeal energy forms” (pg. 27). This particular iteration of the practice was developed by Bob Monroe of the Monroe Institute.
It is notable that the official PDF, which is found on the CIA’s website, is missing page 25 (after PDF page 26), a page which may prove even more valuable than the declassified document as it currently exists.
The present author recommends that every free-thinker, truth-speaker, and light worker print a copy of this report and read it and reread it whenever necessary, as it presents a most accurate recitation of the very source information which informed the New Syllabus. This author is so stricken by the equivalence of research findings and information between the New Syllabus Curriculum Suite Repository (C.S.R.) that he is convinced that the Gateway Process was involved in the carrying out of the Novus Syllabus Seclorum through his body in this space-time continuum.
In hindsight, this author recalls his education in the Daoist (Taoist) philosophy while attending The George Washington University in 2010/2011, and his silence-filled sessions of deep, meditative thought in which he explored the elementary composition of “reality” and “nature.” These sessions led directly to his authorship of Origends: A Primer on Singularity and Space-Time Progression, which comes down to us at 1 C.S.R. 57-77.
Furthermore, this author has come to the understanding that the development of the fictional character of Walter Kogard as a (very) thinly veiled alter ego of the author in 1 C.S.R. and the mission undertaken by this character at 3 C.S.R. has caused the experiences of Walter Kogard to “quantum-leap” from fiction into the reality of its closest analogue, the author himself. However, the original ending at 3 C.S.R. (in which Kogard “decompresses” into a beam on light in the InterZone), while remaining the true and original conclusion to Kogard’s hero-myth, projected an alternative ending involving the “Secret School of Ancient Mystery” to 4 C.S.R. and beyond. This “alternate reality” is actually a transmission of the Kogard signal from the silent depths of the O-Zone back into the KnownZone as a hologram of himself to build new holograms in the main holographic matrix. Therefore, unbeknownst to this author at the time, the New Syllabus Mystery School was manifest into reality via decentralized Gateway Process after he moved back to “Federal City” (Washington, D.C.) from “Empire City” (Brooklyn, New York).
In addition to illuminating the operative mechanism in the Curriculum Suite Repository, the Army Intelligence report predicts the New Syllabus discovery and development of Mindsoft and the InterZone of 3 C.S.R. 27-28.
Regarding Mindsoft, LTC McDonnell reports at 15. Brain in Phase:
The consciousness process is most easily envisaged if we picture the holographic input [the appearance of physical reality] with a three dimensional grid system superimposed over it such that all of the energy patterns contained within can be described in terms of a three dimensional geometry using math[e]matics to reduce the data to two dimensional form. Bentov states that scientists suspect that the human mind operates on a simple binary “go/no go” system as do all digital computers. […] In states of expanded consciousness, the right hemisphere of the human brain in its holistic, nonlinear and nonverbal mode of functioning acts as the primary matrix or receptor for this holographic input while, by operating in phase or coherence with the right brain, the left hemisphere provides the secondary matrix through its binary, computer-like method of functioning to screen further the data by comparison and reduce it to a discreet, two-dimensional form.
LTC McDonnell, pg. 9 (emphasis added)
Regarding the InterZone, LTC McDonnell reports at 21. Dimensions In-between:
[…I]nside the dimension of space-time where both concepts apply in a generally uniform way there is a proportional relationship between them [time and space]. A certain space can be covered by energy moving in either particle or wave form in a certain time assuming a specific velocity virtually anywhere in the space-time universe. The relationship is neat and predictable. However, in the intermediate dimensions beyond time-space the limitations imposed on energy to put it into a state of oscillating motion are not uniform as they are in our physical universe. […A]ccess is opened to both the past and the future when the dimension of current time-space is left behind.
LTC McDonnell, pg. 14 (emphasis added)
The present author can no longer consider it a coincidence that in this time of all-pervasive “conspiracy theories” being advanced on both the far left and the far right of the political spectrum, a foreign social medial platform with a majority population of Generation Z youth is circulating a once-concealed U.S. government intelligence briefing which vindicates virtually every “fringe theory” pertaining to the existence of, and means of travel through, multiple concurrent (simultaneously occurring) dimensions of time and space.
This rise in the tide — this sea change — in what has been coined “the collective consciousness” appears to be the work of interdimensional agents the Third Wave of the Antimasonic Party of the decentralized autonomous organization of free-thinkers, truth-speakers, and light workers united, although Washington politicians assert that TikTok is a tool used by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil and control American citizens.
Source(s):
MEGAN SHEETS FOR DAILYMAIL.COM. TikTokkers discover declassified 1983 CIA report investigating if people can leave their physical bodies to travel through space and time using Gateway Experience’s low frequency sounds and relaxation techniques. Published: 16:26 EDT, 17 February 2021.
Article 2
Toeing the Party Line
By Antarah Crawley
NACOTCHTANK, OD — These positions (planks*) are hereby promulgated for acceptance to the general membership of the Third Wave Antimasonic Party of the United States, from the Village of Nacotchtank-on-Potomac, Ouachita District, which sits on the river bank east of the federal city of Washington:
Plank No. 1
The historical dialectic of Freemasonry is to be condemned, and individual freemasons should be invited to renounce their oaths and affiliations with the fraternity, but may otherwise be tolerated. Pan-Hellenism is to be likewise considered.
Plank No. 2
Everything which is concealed must be revealed.
Plank No. 3
Take no action unless sincerely moved by conscience and belief and such action is carried out in good faith. Therefore, unless there arises a compelling reason to take a certain action, no action should be taken.
Plank No. 4:
Party Boss System for Political Action Coalition
Individual natural people called regional and state bosses shall receive and disburse donations as trustees for the general membership (GM) of the party domiciled in a certain region or state. For example, if a party boss buys a building with donated funds then the building is held in trust for the benefit of the GM. The boss shall conduct the party’s finances on the advice and counsel of a majority of the GM. The GM shall also constitute the national nominating convention.
*Note
A “plank” is a main axiom of the party platform. See:
(last modified 2 Nov. 2023)
© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
Nacotchtank lands recognized by DC government
By Antarah Crawley
WASHINGTON, DC — On Thursday, October 26, 2023, the District of Columbia (DC) Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) held a regularly scheduled open public meeting via Webex which streamed via YouTube. The “October Full Commission Meeting” agenda which was circulated prior to the meeting included a certain item business:
“2. LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT | Recognizing the ancestral homelands of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway Peoples.”
As to this item of business, DC CAH Chairperson Reggie Van Lee remarked:
Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgement are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference.
We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth: we stand on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank and the Piscataway People[s]. We pay respect to their elders past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together here today, and please join us in uncovering such truths in any and all public events and to use such truths to guide the legacy of this arts commission.
Reggie Van Lee, Chair, DC CAH
The laudable remarks of Chair Van Lee resonate like a monolithic bell from a mountaintop monastery throughout the diocese of N∴S∴ — they sound like they could have been written by the Director himself. Furthermore, the Director does not think it a coincidence that just earlier this month — right before the declaration of the Nacotchtank estate in Fides Publica Populi Mauretani (FPPM) — he was honored with a grant and Fellowship from this selfsame government agency.
The Director thinks it highly probable that ever since the deposit of Title 23 C.S.R. General Policy into the Library of the United Grand Lodge of England in September of 2018, the allies of the international masonic conspiracy have been monitoring the party of the N∴S∴ (which at that time was called the Moorish National Socialist Party); and perhaps they are attempting to incorporate the positions of the Third Wave Antimasonic Party platform in order to prevent a split in the Democratic party come 2024.
The Nacotchtank People, by and through its trustee N∴S∴, established the Public Trust of the Moorish People of Nacotchtank Village, Ouachita District, through the registered notice of 12 October 2023.
In other news, earlier that same day, the Third Wave Antimasonic Party Boss for Ouachita District, Antarah Crawley, met with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans of the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans on the occasion of the swearing-in of the Commission by the Vice President in the Indian Treaty Room (former Navy Dep’t Library and most expensive room by sq. ft.) of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Later that day, the Ouachita Party Boss attended a virtual “Free Masterclass” on Exclusive Equity Jurisprudence presented by Amyr Samah El of Matisse Academy which came on at 7:00 p.m. via Zoom. It was a very well-attended and informative session and the chat room was active with discussion (including much promotion of newsyllabus.org, the UA, and the TWAP). During the session, Party Boss Crawley declared the Matisse Academy a collegium of the Universitas Autodidactus, and Amyr Samah El the Preceptor of said collegium.
D.R. 01-09: TWAP
Volume 1, Issue 9
N∴S∴ establishes third wave of the Antimasonic Party in the United States
by Antarah Crawley
WASHINGTON, DC — The First Anti-Masonic Party, established February 1828 in upstate New York, was the earliest third party in the fledgling United States of America. The party emerged as a strong opposition force to the Jacksonian Democrats and Van Buren’s Albany Regency during the House of Representatives election of 1828. Originally a single-issue party, Anti-Masonic sentiment in the American Northeast was spurred by the disappearance and alleged murder of William Morgan, a former Mason who became outspoken against, and voiced his intent to publish a book critical of, the fraternity. Following these statements Morgan was arrested on “trumped-up” charges, and his subsequent “disappearance” was believed to have been committed by Freemasons from Western New York.
In [September] 1831 the Anti-Masonic Party convened in Baltimore, Maryland to select a single presidential candidate agreeable to the whole party leadership in the 1832 presidential election. The National Republican and Democratic parties soon followed suit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_nominating_convention#History
The Anti-Masonic Party conducted the first presidential nominating convention in the United States history for the 1832 elections, nominating William Wirt (a former Mason) for President and Amos Ellmaker for Vice President in Baltimore. Wirt won 7.78 percent of the popular vote and the seven electoral votes of Vermont. Soon the Democrats and Whigs recognized the convention’s value in managing parties and campaigns and began to hold their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Masonic_Party#Conventions_and_elections
The major paradox and triumph of Antimasonry is that although it declined rapidly as an independent political entity after 1833, it achieved its major success as a social or reform movement in the nearly total, albeit temporary, destruction of Masonry in those states where it was an active force. Politically, Antimasonry’s greatest achievements were the introduction of the national nominating convention to American presidential politics and contributions to the formation and development of the Whig party.
Vaughn, William Preston. The Antimasonic Party in the United States 1826–1843. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press; 1983
The Second Anti-Masonic Party, of tenuous affiliation to the first, was active from 1872 until 1888. It is therefore in this tradition that we establish the Third Wave Antimasonic Party (TWAP) of the United Stated of America.
Anti-Masonry was deeply committed to conspiracy theories, primarily the claim that Masonic elites were trying to secretly control the government […although] opposition to Masonry was not the Anti-Masonic movement’s sole issue. […] The Anti-Masonic movement gave rise to or expanded the use of many innovations which became accepted practice among other parties, including nominating conventions and party newspapers. […T]hey made direct appeals to the people through gigantic rallies, parades, and rhetorical rabble-rousing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Masonic_Party#Legacy
Similarly, the revelation and denunciation of the international masonic conspiracy (and allied power systems) is the primary platform of the TWAP; however, a party member need not necessarily harbor ardently Antimasonic sentiments. “The fact that William Wirt, their choice for the presidency in 1832, not only was a former Mason, but also defended Freemasonry in a speech before the convention that nominated him indicates that opposition to Masonry was not the Anti-Masonic movement’s sole issue,” Wikipedia relates.
It is probably not a coincidence that the First Party Convention in Baltimore was held in an Odd Fellow stronghold. Whatever the reason for touting the Antimasonic platform, it provides a broad and adaptable alternative to the ostentatious and disingenuous displays of the present Democratic-Republican party system.
Party Platform
Freemasonry is an ancient international conspiracy manifest through a subversive organization whose members have deceived the public for over 300 years and which operates behind the curtain of the deep state. Through mercantilism and control of international commerce, they are the most organized crime syndicate in the history of the world — but they are only the hidden hand and avant-garde of an even more elitist and secretive cabal of temporal rulers.
Our foremost demand is the abolition of Freemasonry, and a federal interdiction against the gathering of any secret society in any state of the Union.
We seek to unite the far left and the far right 180 degrees from political center which is squarely within the sphere of international Masonic control. It is time for the working people to unite against the rulership (the archons), the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the landed gentry, and receive the return of the disbursement of the accrued value of their labor power which has been stolen over the course of their life through usury.
A bastardizarion of Templar Knights, pirates, mystery schools, and merchants guilds, Freemasonry has become a bane of civilization, and a scourge upon the moral fabric of our society. This scourge pervades both political parties in our two party system, in addition to the whole cabal of Greek organizations, professional societies, bar associations, medical systems, and international insurance and business concerns. The deep state society of Freemasonry must be eradicated, its veil of evil unveiled, its associations dissolved, and its property conveyed to the People, so as to prevent it from exercising its convert and subversive control over the vital forces and mechanisms of our civilization.
RESOURCES
http://utlm.org/onlinebooks/captmorgansfreemasonrycontents.htm
(last modified 5 Nov 2023)
© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
D.R. 01-08: Israel-Hamas…
Volume 1, Issue 8
The Sense of the Congress:
A Special Report
Israel-Hamas proxy for U.S.-Iran dialectic: tensions rise between Allied and Axis powers as the beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born
By Antarah Crawley
WASHINGTON, DC — Today, October 19, 2023, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives (House) convened a Markup (M/U) of several bills and resolutions in House Visitors Center Room 210. Those bills and resolutions included:
- H.Res. 559, Declaring it is the policy of the United States that a nuclear Islamic Republic of Iran is not acceptable;
- H.R. 340, To impose sanctions with respect to foreign support for terrorist organizations, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad;
- H.R. 3266, To require the Secretary of State to submit annual reports reviewing the curriculum used by the Palestinian Authority, and for other purposes;
- H.R. 3774, To impose additional sanctions with respect to the importation or facilitation of the importation of petroleum products from Iran, and for other purposes;
- H.R. 5826, To require a report on sanctions under the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, and for other purposes;
- H.R. 2973, To require the Secretary of Defense to develop, in cooperation with allies and partners in the Middle East, an integrated maritime domain awareness and interdiction capability, and for other purposes;
- H.Res. 599, Urging the European Union to designate Hizballah [Hezbollah] in its entirety as a terrorist organization;
- H.R. 1809, To require the development of strategies and options to prevent the export to Iran of certain technologies related to unmanned aircraft systems, and for other purposes.
Committee Chairman McCaul (R-TX) presided. Mr. Crawley reported on the proceedings through the House Clerk’s Office of Official Reporters.
The Markup comes on 12 days after news that “thousands of armed Hamas fighters breached a border security fence and indiscriminately gunning down Israeli civilians and soldiers taken off guard” (ABC News). The Associated Press (AP) reported on 7 October 2023, “Hamas surprise attack out of Gaza stuns Israel and leaves hundreds dead in fighting, retaliation.” As of today, Israel has been given the green light to move into Gaza, marshaling into all out war in the Holy Land and escalating Jihad.
Regarding H.Res. 559, the Chairman remarked that he spoke last week with the Israeli Ambassador who told him about “the horrible war crimes that Hamas committed.” He said that “dozens of babies were murdered, many were found decapitated and burned, Holocaust survivors were kidnapped, and 250 people at a music festival were slaughtered. These ISIS-like atrocities will haunt the world forever.” The Chairman held a moment of silence for “the victims of this massacre, in honor of the lives that they lived.”
The Chairman said that as Israel responds in “self-defense,” the United States stands strongly with its “friend and ally” as it protects itself from “Iran-backed terrorism.” Iran’s nuclear posture is a growing cause of concern to U.S. Representatives. On 4 September 2023, Stephanie Liechtenstein of AP reported, “UN nuclear watchdog report seen by AP says Iran slows its enrichment of near-weapons-grade uranium,” but Ranking Member Meeks remarked today that since President Trump’s hasty withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) which capped Iran’s nuclear enrichment program at 3.67% (among other restrictions), “Iran’s nuclear program has now surged to extraordinarily dangerous levels. In August, the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] reported that Iran’s stockpile of 60% enriched uranium has grown since its May report. Iran now possesses more than 15 times the amount of enriched uranium allowed under JCPoA.” “We are living in, and this is, a very dangerous moment in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program,” the Ranking Member said.
Across the pond, A United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) spokesperson said: “18 October 2023 [yesterday] marks ‘Transition Day’ under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA), when certain restrictions on Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes are due to lift, including: 84 UN and 112 UK designations on individuals and entities involved in nuclear or ballistic missile activities; and sectoral measures including arms and missile embargoes on Iran.” President Biden has since imposed new sanctions aimed at Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programs, acting to keep up pressure on Tehran after the expiration of United Nations restrictions on those activities (New York Times).
Mr. Wilson (R-SC) stated that the 18 August 1988 “Hamas Covenant” of the Islamic Resistance Movement contains the provision that “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then the Jews will hide behind the rocks and trees. And the rocks and trees will cry out, ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.'” The Representative remarked that “we need to take that seriously.” Mr. Crow of Colorado stated that he finds the language “all means necessary,” with regard to the U.S. suppression of “Iran-backed terrorism,” problematic, and he does not believe that the U.S. should have nuclear force on the table in this debate. He emphasized that the measure did not constitute an Authorized Use of Military Force (AUMF).
The Council on Foreign Relations writes:
Signed in 2015 by Iran and several world powers, including the United States, the JCPOA placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, claiming it failed to curtail Iran’s missile program and regional influence. Iran began ignoring limitations on its nuclear program a year later. Washington and Tehran have both said they would return to the original deal but they disagree on the steps to get there.
Kali Robinson, 21 June 2023
Regarding H.R. 2973, Mrs. Wagner of Missouri remarked that “Israel is locked in a generational fight for survival against genocidal Hamas terrorists. The United States stands with Israel as it grieves the unthinkable loss of more than 1400 innocent civilians and it stands with Israel in its fight to eliminate the brutal terrorist group Hamas, period, full stop. … As we saw on October 7, when Hamas launched the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Israel is facing a complex range of threats across all domains. On the bloody front and that tragic day, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israeli communities by air by land and by sea to unleash bloodshed against civilians on a scale that Israel has not seen in its history.”
Mr. Wilson remarked that “Taking hostage is a murderous tactic in a war between dictators’ rule of gun opposing democracy’s rule of law. The Axis of Evil – Putin [President of Russia], Rezaee [Major General (Ret.), Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and former Vice President of Iran], and Xi [President, People’s Republic of China]– must be stopped by peace through strength. Sadly, the September 11th announcement – of all days – of the release of $6 billion to the terrorist regime in Tehran in exchange for five Americans detained confirms this tactic works.”
Regarding H.R. 3266, Mr. Mast (R-FL) and Ranking Member Meeks (D-NY) engaged in a spirited dialectic on popular and national ideologies. Mr. Mast remarked that “there needs to be [a coming to Jesus moment] among many of our colleagues that Hamas is literally Palestinians. Young people, from the time of grade school in the Gaza strip, are given the pedigree to become Hamas, trained to become Hamas, from their algebra and arithmetic to their reading, writing, and geography. The gentleman read some examples from a document he had in his hands which was never moved into the record:
Palestinian 6th graders grammar exercise requires them to add the correct verb to the sentences: the jihad warriors fought in defense of their homeland and the believers rushed to respond to the call to jihad.
Another example, 4th grade Palestinian math problem: the number of martyrs in the First Intifada is 2,026 martyrs and the number of martyrs in the al-Aqsa Intifada if 5,050. The number of martyrs in the two intifadas is how many martyrs?
7th grade physics problem: Newton’s second law; during the First Palestinian uprising, Palestinian youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist occupation and defend themselves from their treacherous bullets. What is the relationship between the elongation of slingshots’ rubber and the tensile strength affecting it?
Geography question, Palestinian 6th graders: to define the borders of Palestine, which completely erases Israel’s existence.
Mr. Mast (R-FL), quoting unknown Palestinian source
Mr. Mast concluded, “People need to move away from this idea of saying that the Palestinians are not Hamas and Hamas is not the Palestinians.”
In response to the gentleman’s remarks, Ranking Member Meeks asked, “Mr. Mast, are you Ku Klux Klan?”
Mr. Mast replied, “No.”
“Because,” the Ranking Member continued, “it was Ku Klux Klan that raised white people to hate black people. And the Ku Klux Klan, today, they’re still here. I get remarks, I get phone calls in my office from people calling me […] and teaching other kids that I’m less than a human being. I don’t say all white people are Ku Klux Klan. I don’t put them all in one category. All Palestinians don’t belong to Hamas just like all white people don’t belong to the Ku Klux Klan.” A heated dialogue ensued, in which the Ranking Member protested engaging in further debate on the matter.
“Let’s have this conversation,” said Mr. Mast.
“I’m not having this conversation with you; you’re not worthy of having a conversation with on this,” said Ranking Member Meeks.
“I would argue differently,” said Mr. Mast.
Order was restored by Acting Chair Kim of California (R-CA), and Ranking Member Meeks reclaimed his time.
The Acting Chair then recognized Mr. Mast, who remarked that he believes he is worthy to speak, and stated further that he is half-white and half-Mexican and is not a member of “that hate organization which I would absolutely despise,” presumably referring to the Ku Klux Klan. “But,” he continued, “let’s recall, they’re not our government.”
The Ranking Member responded that “many of them [Ku Klux Klan members] were elected, they were Senators, they were members of the House, they were judges, so they were part of the government.”
Regarding H.R. 1809, Mr. Keating remarked, “12 days ago the world witnessed the horror unleashed by Hamas against the state and the people of Israel, almost 50 years to the day after Yom Kippur War.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, having postponed further proceedings on several measures (it being the sense of the Minority that the Majority is biased to roll call over voice votes in committee), reconvened after a recess to vote via roll call using the new electronic voting system for the first time of any House committee. The Chairman and the Ranking Member agreed that this process saves at lot of time. Provided continued success, the electronic voting system will be used by the chamber to vote for the Speaker of the House, the Chairman said.
Sources
Crowley, Michael. U.S. Issues New Sanctions Targeting Iran’s Missile and Drone Programs. New York Times. 18 Oct 2023.
Hutchinson, Bill. Israel-Hamas conflict: Timeline and key developments. ABC News, 19 October 2023.
Liechtenstein, Stephanie. UN nuclear watchdog report seen by AP says Iran slows its enrichment of near-weapons-grade uranium. Associated Press. 4 September 2023.
Robinson, Kali. What Is the Iran Nuclear Deal? Council on Foreign Relations. 21 June 2023.
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Supreme Exchange 