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19 October 21
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So far the Democrats are approaching their negotiations with Manchin on bended knee. The strategy is to appease, mollify and persuade. But Joe Manchin will not be persuaded. His objective is to derail what he sees as a Progressive agenda on the rise and he has launched a one-man vendetta to do just that. He’s not just holding out for concessions, he’s plotting a campaign of destruction.
The numbers don’t lie, there are 270 Democrats on Capitol Hill and 268 are ready to move ahead with badly needed Progressive legislation. That leaves Joe Manchin vying to be the greatest lone-wolf obstructionist in Senate history. The time has come for Democrats to confront Joe Manchin and his backers in the fossil fuel industry in more direct terms, speaking a language that they will be sure to understand.
The great fear for Democrats is that Joe Manchin will walk across the aisle and hand the majority to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans. The reality is that Manchin has become the most effective tool of obstructing Biden’s agenda McConnell has. He has already rendered the Democratic majority moot. That’s bad because the Democratic agenda is thwarted, but it is good because the Democrats have, or should have nothing left to fear by using much harsher negotiating tactics on Joe Manchin.
Manchin’s Prized Chairmanship
The fact that the Democrats allow Joe Manchin from the last bastion of coal state of West Virginia to Chair the Senate Energy Committee speaks volumes about the Democratic Party’s lack of commitment to fighting climate change. Joe Manchin is Coal’s Senator, he’s fossil fuel through and through. There will be no legislative progress on climate change or green energy as long as he chairs the very committee climate legislation must pass through.
The Democrats need to stop worrying about Manchin handing McConnell a majority and go to work on what Manchin values most, his precious chairmanship. Let him know in no uncertain terms he will not remain as the chair of the Energy Committee if he continues to obstruct the Democratic agenda. He can walk, but it’s not clear that McConnell would even give him the same chairmanship in a Republican controlled Senate.
The People Joe Manchin Really Works For
Joe Manchin is quick to say he represents the hard working people of West Virginia. But his campaign finance records and his voting record on Capitol Hill tell a different story. He is as one Exxon-Mobile lobbyist put it, “The king maker” for the fossil fuel industry. He’s their go to guy and it is his job to make sure the get what they want.
If Joe Manchin’s benefactors are the ones actually calling the shots the Biden Administration can and probably should circumvent Manchin and negotiate directly with them. From a regulatory standpoint the Biden administration has a wide array of carrots and sticks it can use to negotiate effectively with the fossil fuel executives. Manchin is merely a lobbyist in Senator’s clothing. Take the negotiation directly to the decision makers, and let them know you mean business, thier business.
The time has come to negotiate with Joe Manchin and those he works for in direct terms, using the full power of the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and Executive Branch to move Biden’s still very Progressive agenda forward.
Joe Manchin does not help the Democrats at the polls he and his policies do not inspire Democratic voters. He’s a liability not an asset electorally. If the democrats loose the Senate Majority for a year to rid themselves Joe Manchin’s bad baggage the Democrats might actually fair better in 2022.
Take off the kid gloves with Joe Manchin and the fossil fuel industry and use all the levers of power the Democrats have to force the issue. The risk of inaction far outweighs the risk of a potential Manchin defection. Put everything in play. Now.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Colin Powell gives a briefing on Jan. 17, 1991. (photo: Rick Maiman/Sygma/Getty Images)
As secretary of state in 2003, Powell lied at the United Nations about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.
Raised in the South Bronx by immigrant parents, Powell was a graduate of the City College of New York and rose through the ranks of the U.S. military to become chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush during the Persian Gulf War. After that — and most famously — he served as America’s first Black secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush.
His contemporaries in the U.S. cannot find enough words of praise. “Colin Powell was the North Star to a generation of senior American military officers including me,” wrote retired Adm. James Stavridis. For Richard Haass, who heads the Council on Foreign Relations, Powell was “the most intellectually honest person I ever met.”
It’s a different story in Iraq, where millions of people likely share the sentiments of Muntadher Alzaidi, who memorably threw his shoes at George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. Reacting to Powell’s death today, Alzaidi expressed sadness only over the fact that he did not face a war crimes trial for his pivotal role in the invasion of Iraq. “I am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him,” Alzaidi wrote on Twitter.
Powell’s friends in America tend to briefly note, in the soft glaze of his own regret, the most consequential act of his life. On February 5, 2003, Powell made a 76-minute speech to the United Nations Security Council in which he argued the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq. He insisted that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was overseeing a secret program to make weapons of mass destruction. Powell brandished satellite photos of what he confidently said were decontamination trucks, aluminum tubes, and other WMD paraphernalia. He even held up a vial that he said could contain anthrax.
There was, of course, a big problem with all of his assertions: They were lies. The intelligence behind his speech was the opposite of emphatic — it was false, manipulated, and fabricated. The trucks were just trucks. The tubes were just tubes. There was no anthrax. There was, more fundamentally, no reason to invade Iraq. Nonetheless, thanks to Powell’s presentation, the Bush administration went ahead with its plans, and in the ensuing catastrophe, at least several hundred thousand Iraqis lost their lives, as well as more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers.
There is no shortage of senior officials in the Bush era who had a higher quotient of intentional malignance than Powell. We know their names well: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, and, of course, Bush himself. But Powell was unique in a way that does not flatter his legacy: He was perhaps the only public figure who could have stopped the White House from going ahead with its lunatic invasion, and he failed to do so. In a lengthy article published last year, writer Robert Draper traced the what-if of Powell, the most popular member of Bush’s post-9/11 Cabinet, telling the truth when it mattered:
What if that same voice that publicly proclaimed the necessity of invading Iraq had instead told Bush privately that it was not merely an invitation to unintended consequences but a mistake, as he personally believed it to be? What if he said no to Bush when he asked him to speak before the U.N.? Powell would almost certainly have been obligated to resign, and many if not all of his top staff members involved in the Iraq issue would also have quit.
Dominoes would have continued to fall. The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, would have almost certainly followed Powell’s example, which meant that the crucial British support for the invasion would have cratered. In the U.S., Draper noted, “Doubters in the upper ranks of the American military — there were several — would have been empowered to speak out; intelligence would have been reexamined; Democrats, now liberated from the political pressures of the midterm election, would most likely have joined the chorus.”
That was the path not taken, because Powell would not stand up to Bush.
“I didn’t have any choice,” Powell told Draper feebly. “What choice did I have? He’s the president.”
The ironic twist of not just Powell’s career but also the careers of so many American generals is that they abjectly lacked, when the moment called for it, the one thing that soldiers are supposed to possess in abundance: courage. The history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is filled with U.S. generals who were lauded as heroes but lacked the guts or honesty to stand up to the whims and dictates of their superiors. Millions of people have been killed and injured on their failed watch since 9/11.
Powell resigned from the Bush administration in 2004 and never really owned up to what he had done. He recognized that his U.N. speech was inaccurate and described it, in an interview with celebrity journalist Barbara Walters, as “painful” and a “blot” on his career. Those comments, not long after he left office, were pretty much as far as he would ever go in terms of introspection or criticism. He was unable to admit the truth that his chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson now acknowledges. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council,” Wilkerson has said.
The “blot” did not matter that much to Powell’s reputation in the U.S., because after the Iraq disaster, he continued to blaze a lucrative path in the corporate world, joining the board of directors of Salesforce and Bloom Energy and becoming a “strategic adviser” to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. (He was already very rich — he had received a $6 million advance for his 1995 memoir “My American Journey.”) He was a trailblazer, in this way, for a generation of retired generals who have coasted into 1 percent status thanks to the flattering reviews they receive in cultural and political circles no matter the actual consequences of their government service.
In fact, there are many levels on which Powell can be described as trailblazing, and it’s complicated to consider them together. As reporter Terrell Jermaine Starr and columnist Karen Attiah noted within hours of Powell’s passing, he was an important and inspiring figure to a large number of Black Americans, particularly before his service in the Bush administration. “I am genuinely sad about Colin Powell’s death — while acknowledging his role in America’s reckless decision to invade Iraq,” Attiah wrote on Twitter.
Scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill struck a similar balance in his assessment today. “At the personal level, Colin Powell was a nice man,” Hill wrote. “He was also a trailblazer. But he was also a military leader and key strategist of an empire that killed countless people and undermined the sovereignty of multiple nations. In our memorials, we must be honest about all of this.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal. (photo: Graeme Jennings/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)
Was she sure, I wanted to know, that progressive resolve wouldn’t blow up in all our faces?
She insisted she wasn’t worried. “We’re going to get both bills done,” she said.
A hand typing on a computer keyboard. (photo: Westend61/Imago Images)
Daniel Baker’s calls for armed defense against possible far-right attacks led to a much harsher sentence than that facing most insurrectionists.
Baker will, nonetheless, face considerably more prison time than most January 6 defendants, including those who crossed state lines, small arsenals in tow, with the aim of overturning a presidential election.
It goes without saying that a United States federal court is no place to appeal to ethical grounds for militant anti-fascist resistance. Yet Baker, while prone to hyperbolic and sometimes paranoid rhetoric, was certainly not alone in fearing that there could be January 6-style events in statehouses nationwide ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration and that local police could hardly be trusted as a bulwark. The Federal Bureau of Investigations warned of the potential for armed protests at state capitols. Florida is home to over 60 far-right, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and there are well-reported links between Florida police departments and far-right militiae.
If there are moral arguments for physically confronting fascists — and I believe there are — they would have been of scant relevance in Baker’s case: zero such confrontations took place or appeared on the horizon, and no far-right mobs amassed at the Florida Capitol around Biden’s inauguration. This should have been a straightforward First Amendment case, with Baker’s online speech, albeit bellicose, judged as constitutionally protected. Instead, the formerly unhoused veteran has been made a victim of government efforts to draw false equivalences between fascistic far-right forces and the anti-fascists who would see them opposed.
“The American government has chosen to side with white supremacists, except when their own bureaucracy forces them to prosecute the most blatant offenders, albeit gently,” Baker told me in an email from prison. “They criticized me for supporting Black Lives Matter, Feminist Liberation ideologies, Global Revolutionary movements and direct democracy. … The government has made its stance clear throughout my hearings.”
During his sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Baker’s attorney highlighted the case of a Georgia man who drove to Washington, D.C., with guns and ammunition and sent private texts threatening to shoot Rep. Nancy Pelosi in the head. The Trump acolyte had missed the storming of the Capitol by one day due to car trouble. Like Baker, he was charged with the interstate communication of threats. Unlike Baker, he had a history of hideous, racist online speech, and direct threats. And unlike Baker, he could leave prison soon: He will be sentenced in December and faces between six months to two years in prison; his eight months of pretrial detention will count as time served. Taking into account time served, meanwhile, Baker will spend another 34 months — almost three years — in prison.
“Dan’s case speaks volumes about how the state represses the left much differently than it treats the far right,” Brad Thomson, civil rights attorney at the People’s Law Office, who did not represent Baker, told me. “Here, Dan was sentenced to three and a half years for online posts opposing another January 6 incident. But for actual participants from January 6, we’re seeing charges and sentences far below that.” Thomson added that “every case is unique, but the overall message people will get from this is that online speech calling for militant antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer than actually taking militant action with fascists.”
Baker was convicted at trial earlier this year on two counts of “transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure another person.” The threat of kidnapping charge stemmed from a feverish public Facebook post in which Baker put out a general call for anti-racists and anti-fascists to encircle the state Capitol, should far-right groups attack it “on or around inauguration day,” and “trap” right-wingers inside with cops. In the very next sentence, though, he wrote, “we will drive them out of Tallahassee with every caliber available!” The right wing militiae were thus to be trapped in and driven out at once, on an unspecified day, by an unnamed collaboration of counterprotesters.
The “call to arms” posts — of which Baker posted a number — were reflective of his genuine and rightful rage against white supremacist violence, but were disorganized and inchoate. Other social media posts that prosecutors pointed to as evidence at trial included memes featuring Homer Simpson, Baby Yoda, and a picture of a kangaroo. “It was truly a surreal experience being in a literal kangaroo court,” Baker told me. His prosecution, conviction, and sentencing exemplify the government’s commitment to conjuring a left-wing extremist threat when none is there.
Baker, slight and sinewy at 5 foot 8, lived in Tallahassee at the time of his arrest — just over one week after January 6. Federal agents raided his apartment with guns drawn and a flashbang grenade. “I thought we were going to die when the FBI broke down our door, the whole experience has been excruciating and traumatizing,” said his best friend and roommate Eric Champagne, an artist and former Hindu monk who had traveled with Baker to support Black Lives Matter protests around the country last year — a fact that was cited by the prosecution as proof of Baker’s extremist bent.
With his knowledge as an EMT trainee, Baker would, Champagne told me, run to the aid of injured protesters. In their hometown, the friends regularly brought food and necessities to the unhoused community, Baker having previously experienced homelessness himself. “My heart is about helping people who are homeless. I know how bad it can be,” he told me on a phone call from prison.
There can be little doubt that Baker’s online posts were reckless at a time when federal law enforcement had made clear its desire to demonize radical left-wing politics — to conjure extremist forces equal, if not greater, to those very real and deadly threats from the far right. Following Baker’s arrest on January 15, U.S. Attorney Larry Keefe, who led the prosecution, pronounced, “Extremists intent on violence from either end of the political and social spectrums must be stopped, and they will be stopped.”
It would be naive and ahistorical to hope that the U.S. government would draw a moral distinction between militant acts carried out in the service of genocidal white supremacy on the one hand and militant resistance to such acts on the other. Even a week after January 6, when it seemed that racist Trumpians had made undeniable their singular role as an extremist threat to this country’s already diminished democracy, the government once again doubled down on its baseless two-sidesism.
This came as no real surprise. The far right has for two decades been responsible for the vast majority of deadly extremist attacks, while both Republicans and Democrats have endorsed the targeting of leftists on the flimsiest of grounds — all the more so when righteous, Black-led uprisings swept the nation last summer. It was among the defining qualities of Donald Trump’s presidency, to condone neo-Nazis and condemn with theatrical fervor the dangerousness of anarchists and antifa. The Biden administration, while making greater overtures to the dangers of the far right, has been no less keen to make fallacious “both sides” claims about the threat of far-left extremism.
After January 6, national security experts and liberals urged Biden to take on right-wing extremism through a strategy of counterterrorist law enforcement. I noted at the time that it would be misguided to treat the state’s law enforcement apparatus as an ally in the struggle against white supremacist violence.
As Branko Marcetic argued in Jacobin after Baker’s arrest, cases like this exemplify how the invocation of domestic counterterrorism efforts against the right will inevitably harm the left, given the state’s reactionary ideological tendencies. The government made much of Baker’s “dangerousness,” citing his ownership of two firearms and the fact that he had placed an order for one more — hardly proof of a planned attack: Gun sales jumped 80 percent nationwide in January following the Capitol riot.
The prosecution focused, too, on Baker’s brief military training. He had joined the U.S. military in his late teens but refused to be deployed overseas. “His conscience prevented him from deploying with people he didn’t trust to uphold human rights in a far off corner of the world,” his friend, Champagne, told me. Baker then received an “other than honorable” discharge, receiving no benefits.
Baker would later choose to use his military and medical training for a cause he believed in. Like dozens of other anarchists, communists, and socialists from around the world, Baker spent his savings to fly to Syria to join the feminist-led, environmentalist, and directly democratic political project in Rojava. There, he fought with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units against ISIS. From his Kurdish comrades, he told me he learned the concept of “welatparazi,” which, he said, “denotes a sentimental feeling of loyalty and obligation of service towards one’s community which shelters and nourishes us.”
The internationalist involvement in Rojava has been compared to the communist International Brigades who fought against Francisco Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the fact that the U.S. had backed the very same Kurdish units in their fight against ISIS, Baker’s participation was consistently cited by the government as proof that he poses a terror threat.
At his sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump nominee whose appointment was vehemently opposed by a coalition of over 200 civil and human rights groups, said that Baker had intended to commit acts of violence, “like he went to Rojava to do.”
“The government’s case relied heavily on the fact that Dan is anarchist,” Thomson, the civil rights attorney, noted. “There is a long history in this country of police, prosecutors, and courts targeting anarchists for trumped up charges and excessive sentences. This legacy goes back to Haymarket and continues to today, with Dan’s case being the most recent example.”
Baker described his first months held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee as harrowing. “I was placed in a cell covered in feces and rotated to other tainted cells every three weeks,” he wrote via email. Another man held next to him in the Special Housing Unit — solitary confinement — was severely mentally ill, traumatized, and autistic. “He was soiling himself and throwing his waste all over the cells and out under the door several times a day,” Baker told me, noting that the “crueler guards” would consistently taunt and abuse the man. “I eventually contacted his family with the help of a sympathetic guard,” Baker said.
The quotidian cruelties of prison life abounded. Baker had to plead for weeks to get vegan meals; as a Hare Krishna, he does not eat meat as a point of respect for human and nonhuman life and is lactose intolerant. “It took nine months to get them to stop sending me dairy products,” he said. He’s had equal trouble accessing prayer beads and says his legal mail was opened by prison staff, which is illegal. He has filed a civil suit against the prison and a number of named guards in relation to the alleged violations. The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Baker’s lawsuit or the conditions of his confinement.
Baker’s friends in Tallahassee are concerned for his emotional and psychological well-being. Music teacher Desiree Gattis described herself as playing “sisterly/motherly role” to Baker. She met him while he was unhoused and helped him get back on his feet. Gattis, who has helped organize Baker’s legal and financial support, is less interested in his lionization as a political prisoner and would rather he be primarily recognized as a vulnerable person, who has suffered serious trauma from seven months in solitary confinement. She called the government’s treatment of her friend “cruel and absurd.” “This is not a threatening person,” she said.
Gattis said that prior to his imprisonment, Baker helped her “a great deal” with her regular work with the city’s unhoused community. ”When you remove one person from that sort of support network, it creates a great burden on the people who are left,” she said. In a separate conversation, Champagne echoed the same message: “For each person in jail, a community suffers.”
Baker worries that, because of his felony conviction, he “won’t be able to find work or continue to rescue injured people” and that he will face far-right violence after his release and possibly while in prison too. He will be appealing his conviction, but the likely venue — the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals — will not be a welcoming one. In the meantime, he told me that he plans to read and learn more about liberation movements and abolitionist histories.
At the end of our phone call on the day following his sentencing, he hurriedly read off a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell, which he had recently come across. “‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind,’” he said. “That’s how I feel.”
Activists rallying to defend DACA in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
Sally Rooney. (photo: Patrick Bolger)
Baseless claims of antisemitism and allegations of hypocrisy have been leveled for decades at anyone who rejects the fiction that Israel is a normal state.
That’s why the attacks on Sally Rooney this week, for refusing an Israeli publishing firm’s request to produce a Hebrew translation of her new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” to honor the Palestinian-led cultural boycott of Israel, were so predictable.
Rooney explained in a written statement that she was convinced that Israel’s unequal treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories was akin to the former apartheid regime in South Africa, justifying an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions like the successful one against that state.
“Earlier this year, the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a report entitled ‘A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’. That report, coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israel’s most prominent human rights organization B’Tselem, confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israel’s system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law,” Rooney wrote.
“Of course, many states other than Israel are guilty of grievous human rights abuses,” she continued, preempting one of the most common objections to the boycott campaign raised by supporters of Israel. “This was also true of South Africa during the campaign against apartheid there. In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers’ unions.”
But before Rooney released the statement explaining her reasons for joining the boycott, she was accused of being either an antisemite, for singling out the world’s only Jewish state for criticism, or a hypocrite, for not taking similar actions to prevent translation of her work into the languages used in authoritarian nations.
“Sally Rooney’s novels are available in Chinese and Russian,” the literary critic Ruth Franklin tweeted. “Doesn’t she care about the Uighurs? Or Putin-defying journalists? To judge Israel by a different standard than the rest of the world is antisemitism.”
A London correspondent for i24 News, an outlet based in Tel Aviv, Israel, chimed in, asking, “Will she refuse Russian, Arabic and Chinese publishers, too?”
The next day, an app used by Israel’s government to coordinate the outrage of its supporters on social networks directed them to like a Facebook comment “saying that her decision reflects her antisemitic behaviour!”
The self-described Zionist music journalist Eve Barlow tweeted, despite a lack of evidence that Rooney had ever expressed any anti-Jewish sentiment: “I fully expect people like Sally Rooney to be antisemitic. It’s not a surprise. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t.”
Judea Pearl, an Israeli American computer science professor whose son Daniel was murdered by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002, responded to Barlow by baselessly accusing Rooney — who was an international debate champion before she turned to fiction — of having adopted an anti-Israel position without having given the matter any thought at all.
As one stunned Irish observer noted, Pearl added that he might have expected Rooney to be antisemitic based on his offensive, and shockingly inaccurate, caricature of what her background must have been as a typical Irish person: “alcoholic parents, fanatic teachers, bad neighborhood etc.”
Ignorance about the Irish was a factor of much of the criticism of Rooney’s decision on social networks. The thought that something other than antisemitism — like the sympathy of one formerly colonized nation for another — might explain widespread Irish support for the Palestinians seemed to be utterly lost on most of those dismissing Rooney’s stance.
More knowledge of Irish history might have made Rooney’s decision less shocking to her critics. None of them, for instance, seem aware that the battle of an indigenous population to regain control of its land from settlers who seized it as part of a violent process of colonization is far from abstract to the Irish. Just last month, Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, turned down an invitation to join the British queen at an event to commemorate the creation of Northern Ireland through the partition of Ireland along ethnic lines 100 years ago.
Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement, observed in an email interview that the “first significant instance of cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa was a 1964 declaration signed by twenty-eight Irish playwrights who committed not to permit their work to be performed before segregated audiences in South Africa.”
Barghouti also observed that the demand for Rooney to make her work available in Hebrew, or be branded an antisemite, “attempts to center the oppressor community and its privileged entitlement to read world literary works in its language intentionally de-center the oppressed, the Indigenous Palestinians, and our fundamental entitlement to freedom, justice and basic human rights.” (He might have added that the outrage at Rooney’s decision to not license a Hebrew translation is particularly odd given that just 8 percent of Jewish Israelis do not speak English.)
Then there’s the fact that Rooney is from Mayo, the Irish county where the term boycott was invented in 1880, during a popular struggle to regain control of the land from the descendants of English settlers.
It is also absurd to claim that Rooney somehow arrived at her decision on a whim. In 2019, she added her name to an open letter deploring a decision by the city of Dortmund to rescind a literature prize from the writer Kamila Shamsie “because of her stated commitment to the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.”
Earlier this year, she signed a “Letter Against Apartheid” that called on artists “to exercise their agency within their institutions and localities to support the Palestinian struggle for decolonization to the best of their ability. Israeli apartheid is sustained by international complicity, it is our collective responsibility to redress this harm.”
As the writer and activist Omar Robert Hamilton observed, Rooney was simply “following through” on those principles when she announced that she would stop working with the Israeli publishing house Modan, which published Hebrew translations of her two previous novels but also prints books for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, including an ethics guide for soldiers by the moral philosopher Asa Kasher, who helped craft the Israeli army doctrine that killing civilians in Gaza is acceptable to protect Israeli soldiers.
There was also support for Rooney. The novelist Michael Chabon told The Associated Press that “as a proudly Jewish writer who wants Israel to survive and thrive, and (and therefore) supports the Palestinian people in their struggle for equality, justice and human rights, I say yasher koach (Hebrew for ‘Good job’ or ‘More power to you’) to Rooney.” Chabon added that he might consider joining the boycott of Israeli publishers in the future.
On Twitter, Chabon responded to a defender of Israel who called Rooney’s boycott “silly” and ineffective by writing: “I commend her experimental spirit; intractable evils demand no less. Who knows what effect it will or won’t have? Not us.”
Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, mocked a claim from a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, who said that Rooney’s stance “impedes peace, dialogue, or any meaningful change.”
Because Rooney achieved fame in her 20s and has been marketed in ways that draw attention to her youth, such as “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,” supporters of Israel have also attacked her as a self-obsessed millennial, a young woman too naive to understand the conflict.
Jake Wallis Simons, deputy editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, accused Rooney of “making a statement against Jews” in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph headlined “Sally Rooney’s Israeli boycott is nothing but a futile millennial gesture.” On Twitter, he added: “if Sally Rooney really cared about human rights and the values of democracy, free speech, and the rights of women and minorities, she would *support* Israel and prevent her books from being translated into Arabic or Chinese.”
But Simons has been making exactly the same argument since at least 2014, when he was celebrated by pro-Israel activists for describing calls to boycott Israel but not China or Saudi Arabia as “ridiculously naive and even hypocritical.”
Because these same arguments have been made since the BDS movement was created by Palestinian activists in 2005, the late historian Tony Judt had time to debunk them thoroughly before his death. In 2010, Judt told the London Review of Books:
If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state.
In the same interview, Judt explained that economic and cultural ties to European nations were very important to Israelis. “The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East,” Judt said. “Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe.”
In 2006, Judt, who had been an idealistic supporter of Zionism in his youth, had warned in the pages of Haaretz that decades of occupation and military rule over millions of Palestinians had been “a moral and political catastrophe” for Israel.
“Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country’s shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world,” Judt wrote. “Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, ‘targeted assassinations,’ the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish – which means that Israel’s behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel.”
“The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts,” Judt added, while warning that such accusations, when made baselessly, would only erode Israel’s moral credibility.
Judt, who taught at New York University, also sensed that Israel’s brutal occupation was alienating younger generations. “Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust,” Judt observed. “Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint.”
Fifteen years later, Rooney, who was born in 1991, argued this week that the most relevant historical frame for understanding the Israeli occupation is apartheid-era South Africa.
Barghouti points out that Jews in Israel and abroad who support the BDS movement “play a significant role in exposing Israel’s regime of oppression and advocating for isolating it.”
“Younger Jewish activists there and elsewhere are increasingly abandoning Zionism and supporting Palestinian liberation,” Barghouti added. “They understand that there is nothing Jewish about Israel’s siege, ethnic cleansing, massacres, land theft and apartheid, and therefore there is nothing anti-Jewish per se in supporting BDS to end these crimes.”
One of the most prominent Jewish writers to endorse the BDS movement is Intercept contributor Naomi Klein. Klein explained in 2009 that in order to respect the boycott, her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published in Hebrew by a now-defunct publisher called Andalus which she found with the help of BDS activists. Andalus, as Klein explained, was “an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew.” In that way she was “boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.”
Barghouti also notes that the boycott of apartheid South Africa was “a key reference” for Palestinians who first called for cultural boycotts against in 2004. “This reference is neither coincidental nor rhetorical,” Barghouti says. “It stems from the many similarities between the two cases of colonial oppression, and it aims to highlight the effectiveness and moral unassailability of using the boycott in the cultural sphere to resist a persistent oppressive order that enjoys impunity and ample complicity from the powers that be around the world and to increase the isolation of oppressive regimes, like apartheid Israel.”
Rooney’s use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of the captive Palestinian populations in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which was repeated on news sites worldwide this week, comes five years after the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee defined that term on the closing night of the 2016 Palestinian Festival of Literature in Ramallah.
Coetzee, who had just completed an intense weeklong fact-finding mission across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, began by saying that he had always been reluctant to use the word apartheid to describe what was happening in Palestine. “Like using the word genocide to describe what happened in Turkey in the 1920s, using the word apartheid diverts one into an enflamed semantic wrangle which cuts short opportunities of analysis,” Coetzee explained.
“Apartheid was a system of enforced segregation based on race or ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group in order to consolidate colonial conquest, in particular, to cement its hold on the land and on natural resources,” Coetzee said next. “In Jerusalem and the West Bank, to speak only of Jerusalem and the West Bank, we’ve seen a system of enforced segregation based on religion and ethnicity put in place by an exclusive self-defined group to consolidate a colonial conquest, in particular to maintain, and indeed extend, its hold on the land and its natural resources. Draw your own conclusions.”
An official with Malaysia's Department of Wildlife and National Parks holds one of 50 rhino horns that it seized in August 2018. Together, the horns were worth $50 million. (photo: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images)
Why buzzy tech often fails to protect wildlife.
The idea sounded simple: Hunters are killing rhinos for their valuable horns, so flooding the market with synthetic but otherwise identical horns could undermine demand for the real thing. It’s a creative approach to the plight of rhinos, a problem that conservation groups have long struggled to solve. “Can we save the rhino from poachers with a 3D printer?” read one headline in 2015.
Fast-forward to today and neither Pembient nor any other tech firm has disrupted the market for rhino horn. The startup is out of money and far from developing a commercial product. A few other similar efforts have popped up here and there — most recently in 2019, when scientists said they could make synthetic horns out of horsehair — but these products have yet to catch on.
At the same time, companies like Pembient have stoked a debate among scientists over the value and ethics of synthetic animal parts in the campaign against poaching. Some researchers argue that selling fake horns could disrupt the market and help save rhinos, while a more vocal group of organizations says doing so could subvert law enforcement and prop up illegal trade.
The debate also raises questions about the role of tech in wildlife conservation. Though often perceived as a scientific problem, the biodiversity crisis is equally a social, political, and economic issue. Experts told Vox that high-tech approaches sometimes overlook the roots of the crisis, from the economic drivers of poaching to the political underpinnings of habitat loss. Cutting-edge tools can help, they say, but only if they’re developed to address the whole picture of biodiversity — and in partnership with those who are directly involved in conservation.
The big idea: Flood the market with fake rhino horns
Earth is home to five rhino species, three in Asia and two in Africa, and most of them are threatened with extinction. The number of Africa’s critically endangered black rhinos, for example, is down more than 90 percent, from around 70,000 in 1970 to roughly 5,500 today. (That’s up from an all-time low of about 2,400 rhinos in the 1990s.)
Poaching is a major force behind these declines. Hunters kill rhinos and saw off their horns, which are incredibly valuable in the underground market, selling for roughly $4,000 to $8,000 per pound, raw, according to one 2019 report. Many horns, which can weigh several pounds each, are sold in China, Vietnam, and other East Asian countries. Some people consume rhino horn powder as a salve for various ailments, such as hangovers and cancer, or carve them into valuable trinkets that tend to signify wealth, according to Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, an economist and wildlife trade expert at the University of Oxford.
For decades, environmental groups have sought to fight poaching with law enforcement and campaigns to change consumer behavior around rhino horn in East Asia. Some of these efforts have helped — poaching rates are down from their peak in the mid-2000s — but rhinos, which play a key role in the ecosystem and help maintain African grasslands, continue to perish.
Pembient sought to tackle the problem head-on when it launched in 2015. “By creating an unlimited supply of horns at one-eighth of the current market price, there should be far less incentive for poachers to risk their lives or government officials to accept bribes,” Matthew Markus, Pembient’s founder, wrote on Reddit not long after the company launched.
The company originally focused on developing synthetic rhino horn powder — the substance that some consume for its perceived medicinal properties — but it eventually pivoted to developing physical synthetic horns with 3D printing techniques. Solid rhino horns are much harder to replicate than powder, Markus told Vox, and people looking to buy carvings are less likely to care whether they’re sourced from the real thing.
A handful of other companies with similar ideas have sprung up over the years, including US-based firms Rhinoceros Horn LLC and Ceratotech. None seem to have infiltrated the market in a serious way.
Huyen Hoang, the co-founder of Rhinoceros Horn LLC, which set out in 2012 to make a synthetic horn powder, told Vox his company “pioneered” the concept of synthetic horn and actually got its product into stores. He declined to say how much of it the company sold or whether it's still on the market. The company has no online presence. Hoang suggested that Rhinoceros Horn LLC clashed with conservation groups, which saw the poaching crisis differently. “Too much politics for me and my co-founder,” he said.
The founder of Ceratotech, Garrett Vygantas, said his company still plans to grow rhino horns from scratch in a lab, but it needs more money to develop the product. “A viable prototype will require a sizable investment, which is where I’m held up,” he told Vox.
Meanwhile, in 2019, researchers at Oxford and Fudan University in Shanghai published a paper showing that synthetic rhino horns can be made by bundling together tail hairs from a horse. “We leave it to others to develop this technology further with the aim to confuse the trade, depress prices and thus support rhino conservation,” Fritz Vollrath, a professor at Oxford and a study author, said in a statement.
Would synthetic horns curb poaching?
There’s not a ton of research into this question, but two studies suggest that identical fakes could, in fact, lower the cost and undercut the supply of authentic horns.
“Economic principles tell us that the availability of synthetic horns can reduce the supply of wild horns — and even drive out wild horn sellers completely from the horn market,” Frederick Chen, an economist at Wake Forest University, wrote in one of the studies, published in the journal Ecological Economics in 2017. (Chen is also a co-author on the other study, along with ‘t Sas-Rolfes, which similarly suggests that synthetic horns could reduce poaching under certain conditions. It was published earlier this year.)
According to Markus, trust among consumers would erode if they learned the market was full of fakes, which in turn would reduce the value of authentic horns. For example, if a would-be buyer thinks there’s a 50 percent chance that a horn product might be fake, they might pay 50 percent less for it. “They are going to be much more hesitant to transact,” Markus said — and that could ultimately limit the incentive to kill rhinos.
But many conservation and animal welfare groups aren’t convinced. They say the situation on the ground is far more complicated than what economic models can tell us — and that making fake horns, let alone with 3D printers, is simply a bad idea.
One of the most compelling arguments against the technology is that it could stymie law enforcement and possibly even provide a legal cover for illicit trade.
Under a global treaty called CITES, which regulates the trade of thousands of plants and animals, transporting rhino horns internationally is illegal. It’s not clear whether the treaty would apply to synthetic horns, if they’re indistinguishable from the real thing. And if it doesn’t, enforcement officers would need a way to tell real horns from fake ones in order to determine what is and isn’t illicit. Poachers trying to transport wild horns could otherwise claim that their haul is fake.
“It gives a cover to poachers,” said Jonathan Kolby, a wildlife trade consultant and former wildlife inspector at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “Their alibi can be, ‘Oh, it’s a fake and therefore not a crime.’
One possible way around that issue, according to Markus, is to insert a biomarker, or hidden signature, into fake horns that customs officials can detect. But, as he acknowledges, that opens up an avenue for consumers to tell them apart, too. Research suggests that those consumers are willing to pay more for wild horns.
Major conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also worry that even fake horns could fuel the market for wild animal products and thus fuel poaching. “Creation of a synthetic rhino horn still props up the demand of rhino horn,” Colby Loucks, vice president of WWF’s wildlife conservation program, told Vox. In other words, it’s hard to say if more fake horns would truly shrink the market for the real stuff.
According to the conservationists and scientists who spoke to Vox, so-called high-tech solutions often neglect the intricate web of social and political forces that they exist in.
When tech does and doesn’t work
Over her 20-year tenure at the nonprofit Save the Rhino, Cathy Dean, the group’s CEO, has reviewed a number of ideas proposed by tech companies to stop poaching. From making rhino powder to building secret cameras to hide in horns, these products are often disconnected from the reality on the ground, and from the needs of people who manage rhino populations, Dean said.
“I have a rather cynical belief,” she said, “that the rhino poaching crisis has created a commercial market for companies to try to come up with solutions that desperate and possibly gullible rhino site owners feel compelled to try, because they hope it might be the solution to all of their problems.”
In one case, she explained, a company contacted Save the Rhino with an idea for a tracking device that would be inserted into rhino horns. Dean asked the company for some additional information on their product — how big was the device, how long did its battery last, etc. — that she said would help determine whether something like it could really work. In response, Dean went on, the company simply pointed her to a rendering of the device. “It was literally a computer drawing of a doughnut,” she said, with no measurements or sense of scale. “I use it in lectures as an example of how science needs to be better informed by people on the ground.”
The good thing is that tools developed in collaboration with local communities, law enforcement, and park rangers — that is, people who actually face the challenges of conservation directly — can help limit poaching.
Take, for example, WWF’s work in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Originally, the group had planned to use small surveillance drones to help park rangers prevent poaching. After spending a few nights with rangers in the reserve, however, Eric Becker, a conservation engineer at WWF, realized that drones wouldn’t be that helpful after all. What the rangers needed instead was simple night vision, said Becker, as poachers tend to operate under the cover of darkness.
WWF provided the thermal imaging equipment — and it worked. “Parachuting into a place with a solution and trying to fit it around their problem,” he said, “doesn’t ever work.” Broadly speaking, drone technology has largely failed to deliver on the promise to help curb poaching, WWF’s Loucks added.
Groups hoping to help should also consider that poaching, like other drivers of biodiversity loss, is a social issue, not a matter of science or technology, according to ‘t Sas-Rolfes. If people consume wild rhino horn because they believe it has medicinal properties, then a synthetic version may not be an adequate replacement.
Patronizing those who consume rhino horn based on their beliefs — as Western media sometimes does — is probably not helping either, ‘t Sas-Rolfes added, noting that negative attitudes toward using rhino horn can provoke a backlash. “You’ve seen some consumption that’s almost conspicuous,” he said. Trying to transform the views of people who believe in traditional medical systems, such as traditional Chinese medicine, is not only challenging but risks “charges of insensitivity, cultural imperialism, or even racism,” Hubert Cheung, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia, wrote in a 2020 paper. Conservation would be more effective if scientists had a stronger understanding of traditional Chinese medicine and engaged with people who practice it, he wrote, “to ensure that interventions are culturally appropriate and socially compatible.”
At least for now, the prospect of flooding the market with synthetic horns remains a hypothetical scenario. Pembient doesn’t have enough money to invest in the next stage of development, Markus said, and so far it hasn’t seen “great results” in the lab. That’s to say nothing of the controversy surrounding these products and the regulatory hurdles they’d have to clear. “It doesn’t leave us in a very good position,” Markus said. “But, you know, we’ve yet to call it quits.”
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