Over 500 Scholars Launch Fightback Against Israel Lobby’s Antisemitism Smear of UK Academics

 

The question, raised by the petition and letter of complaint, is whether universities like Glasgow will continue to submit to such attacks on academic life under the cover of false or evidence-free claims of anti-Semitism.

by Jonathan Cook

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — Hundreds of international scholars have begun a fightback against pro-Israel lobbyists who have been scoring increasingly high-profile victories on UK campuses as they seek to curb academic freedoms under the guise of stamping out antisemitism. 

Glasgow university officials have found themselves in the eye of a storm this week, accused of “capitulating” in two separate cases that have undermined academic research into the activities of Israel and its supporters.

More than 500 scholars from around the world, including a Nobel prize winner, Royal Society fellows, and former and current presidents of major academic bodies, signed a petition delivered to the university this week in protest. 

They called it “extraordinary” that Glasgow had recently apologised and labeled as “hate speech” a peer-reviewed article on the Israel lobby in the university’s postgraduate magazine. The scholars warned that Glasgow’s actions could have “potentially very damaging” consequences for research on Israel. 

They pointed out that the university’s stance “implies that other groups, states and corporations can all be the subject of critical academic analysis, but commentary on pro-Israel advocacy must be limited”.

Separately, the main body representing Middle East academics in Britain wrote to the Scottish university last week after its politics department took the unprecedented step of demanding the right to vet a talk on Israeli and Palestinian politics. 

The university had invited a Danish professor to speak about his latest book but then insisted on new conditions – apparently after caving into pressure from a Jewish student body. 

Concerns have also been raised that the university appears to have intended to seek the Jewish students’ approval before agreeing to the talk going ahead.

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff

Antisemitism redefined

Both incidents follow Glasgow’s adoption last November of a controversial new definition of antisemitism that has been aggressively promoted by pro-Israel lobbyists. 

Most UK universities have now adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition following threats from the rightwing government of Boris Johnson last year to inflict financial penalties on any that demurred.

There were early warnings, including from the main author of the IHRA definition, that it would be weaponised and critical research on Israel curtailed. The IHRA’s definition turns the focus away from hatred or fear of Jews. Instead most of its 11 illustrative examples of antisemitism relate to Israel. 

The severe threat to academic freedom posed by pro-Israel lobbyists and the IHRA definition were highlighted earlier this month when an expert scholar on propaganda and Islamophobia, David Miller, was sacked by Bristol university. 

The lobby had accused him of antisemitic “harassment” after he highlighted its role as one of “five pillars” supporting the promotion of Islamophobia – or hatred towards Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians. 

Bristol university dismissed Miller, even though documents leaked last week showed that the senior lawyer it appointed to investigate the case found there was no misconduct by Miller and that there was “no basis for any disciplinary action”. 

 

Twists and turns

Glasgow university has become a key battleground in the fight to protect academic freedom after its public twists and turns over an academic paper published in its peer-reviewed online journal, eSharp, in 2017. 

Jane Jackman, who was then a scholar at Exeter University, published the paper, titled Advocating Occupation, examining the evolution and role of Israel lobby groups in the UK, in the immediate wake of a 2017 documentary aired by Al-Jazeera on the lobby’s interference in British politics. 

Footage filmed by an undercover reporter showed an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, covertly colluding with Zionist groups to undermine senior UK politicians – especially the then head of the opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn – who were seen as too critical of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

To pre-empt a diplomatic incident, Israel hurriedly recalled Masot. 

The hundreds of scholars supporting Jackman’s research have described it as an “account of public relations, lobbying, advocacy and information management” in what “is a well-established area of academic study”.

Nonetheless, in an observation that would become all too prescient for Jackman herself, she concluded in her paper that “critics of Israeli policy expose themselves to the possibility, indeed the probability, of being smeared as anti-Semites”. 

However, the university dismissed initial complaints against Jackman’s paper shortly after it was published.

Corbyn sits on stage while audience members wave Palestinian flags during the Labour’s 2018 Party conference. Stefan Rousseau | PA via AP

‘Moot’ point

But last December, a month after the university formally adopted the IHRA definition, a prominent pro-Israel blogger revived the pressure campaign. David Collier marshalled fellow activists to write to Sir Anton Muscatelli, Glasgow’s principal, complaining that Jackman’s paper was “laden with conspiracy, antisemitism and errors”. 

He accused Glasgow staff of demonstrating “heavy antisemitism” in clearing it for publication.

Jackman’s paper, he claimed, was a “poison spreading through our universities. With malignant cells in place such as Exeter, [London’s] SOAS and Warwick – it acts as a cancer – with new academics, freshly dosed with antisemitic ideology, leaving the nests to spread the sickness elsewhere.” 

Paradoxically, Collier had been identified by Jackman as particularly adept at characterising critics of Israel as “haters” and antisemites. Collier, she had noted, was a favourite of the Israeli embassy. Officials there had invited him the previous year to help train more than 100 representatives from British pro-Israel groups on advocacy tactics to burnish Israel’s image. 

But this time, the university reversed course, apparently fearing that it might fall foul of the illustrative examples of the IHRA definition it had signed up to. 

The journal’s editors subverted their own peer review processes – four years after the fact – and issued an apology in May in a lengthy online preface to the article. 

They claimed the paper failed to meet academic standards and caused “considerable offense”, concluding that it promoted “an unfounded antisemitic theory regarding the State of Israel and its activity in the United Kingdom”. 

In a response to inquiries from the Jewish Chronicle weekly newspaper, Glasgow university suggested that action had been taken against Jackman’s paper in accordance with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It also implied that her research was an example of “hate speech”.

The Chronicle was at the forefront of a years-long, evidence-free campaign to tar the British Labour party under its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as beset by antisemitism. Corbyn was a well-known champion of Palestinian rights. 

Astonishingly, when Jackman demanded to know what “antisemitic theory” she had promoted, the university backed off. In an email sent to her last month and seen by MintPress, the university’s complaints resolution office called her paper “thought-provoking” and added that whether her argument could be “described as antisemitic is also a moot point”. 

According to the dictionary, “moot” means either “subject to debate, dispute or uncertainty”, or of “little or no practical relevance”. 

In other words, the university appears to have conceded that casually and without evidence it defamed the work of an academic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for her personal and professional life. 

Jackman told MintPress: “It’s not so much the personal offence these allegations caused me, bad as that was, it’s the chilling effect this will have on early career academics, and the consequent silencing of debate.”

 

Ideological zeal

Jackman’s case neatly illustrates the use to which the lobby has been able to put the IHRA definition, both as a way to stifle criticism of Israel and, more recently, as a way to cover its own tracks as it does so.

There have been very obvious problems with many of the IHRA’s 11 examples. 

Two of them, in particular, have been regularly cited by the lobby. They claim it is antisemitic to describe Israel as “a racist endeavor” or require of it “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”. 

But even Israeli scholars have long defined Israel as a non-democracy, terming it instead an “ethnocracy”. They note that Israel mimics a democratic state while actually according rights and privileges to one ethnic group, Jews, that it denies to another, Palestinians. 

And the New York-based Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, Israel’s most respected human rights organisation, have both recently issued reports characterising Israel as an apartheid state. 

Nonetheless, Israel’s lobbyists have doubled down on another IHRA example, which suggests it may in certain contexts be antisemitic to accuse “Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations”. 

Indeed it would be antisemitic, if such an accusation were made collectively about Jews or solely because activists were Jewish. 

As Jackman and others have pointed out, many non-Jews are also Zionists and actively lobby to shield Israel from criticism.

But ardent pro-Israel activists appear to have found in this IHRA example the perfect cover for concealing their own activism on behalf of Israel – activism that is determined not by their Jewishness but by their ideological zeal in promoting Israel and Zionism as political causes.  

 

Apartheid Week

Jewish activists in the Israel lobby, in particular, are not shy to say that Israel is at the core of their identity – and that they view a self-declared Jewish state as a vital safe haven for them in the face of a supposedly rising tide of antisemitism on the left. Tangible antisemitism on the right, which is much less critical of Israel, appears to be of much less concern.

These activists also belong to groups that declare themselves committed to lobbying for Israel. 

In her paper, Jackman documents parts of the network of pro-Israel groups in the UK that advertise their commitment to Israel and their collaboration with it in organising advocacy, such as the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom). 

And she sets out Israel’s own efforts to mobilise these groups to better serve its interests, such as against the international boycott (BDS) movement. At major Israeli establishment forums, such as the annual Herzliya Conference on Israel’s security priorities, discussions centre on ways to recruit Jewish and Christian supporters abroad to “win the battle of the narrative”. 

Jackman further highlights that Bicom has established a satellite organization, We Believe in Israel, “with the explicit purpose of mobilizing and resourcing an army of loyalists to challenge detractors, promote Israel and defend its actions”. 

Its director, Luke Akehurst, is also a senior figure in Labour First, a right-wing section of the Labour party that worked to undermine Corbyn for supposedly indulging antisemitism in the party.

We Believe has subsequently made private a Youtube video in which, according to Jackman, Akehurst says many thousands of supporters, nearly half of them non-Jews, have been recruited to serve as “allies in the battle for Israel’s reputation”. 

Replicating the situation in the US, Jackman notes, British Christian fundamentalists – who view Israel as part of divine prophecy to bring nearer a supposed end times – have become a particularly vocal part of the lobby. 

 

Activist from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign protest Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights outside the Glasgow Sheriff Court, Scotland on July 10, 2017. (Photo: Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign/Facebook)

 

‘Hate crimes

She also points out that, well before the IHRA redefined antisemitism to focus on Israel, university campuses were being targeted by the lobby in a bid to silence activism in support of Palestinian rights. 

A popular public figure, comedienne Maureen Lipman, became the face of claims that British universities were failing in a duty of care to Jewish students by allowing other students to mark Israel Apartheid Week.

 

The argument glossed over the question of what duty of care the universities owed to Palestinian and Muslim students who wished to draw attention to Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians.

Friends of Israel groups picked up Lipman’s theme in letter-writing campaigns to universities, calling Israel Apartheid Week “hate crimes” and evidence of antisemitism.  

As a result, a number of universities hurriedly closed down Palestinian solidarity activism, including the University of Central Lancashire, Exeter, and Central London.  

 

Immune to criticism

And yet, despite all these highly visible pressure campaigns to stop criticism of Israel, the lobby groups behind them have decried as antisemitism any effort, such as Jackman’s, to analyse or record how such lobbying works in practice. 

With the assistance of the IHRA definition, they are not only making it even harder to criticise Israel but also ever harder to criticise themselves for making it so difficult to criticise Israel.

As occurred in the Labour party under Corbyn, any attempt to analyse how antisemitism is being weaponised by the lobby is itself ascribed to antisemitism. The lobby has thereby made itself immune to all criticism.

As Jackman noted in her paper, the lobby used precisely these tactics to avert the normal fallout from the revelations of Israeli interference in UK politics made by the Al-Jazeera documentary. That, she pointed out, would have been unavoidable “had Russia, Iran or indeed any other state been caught behaving in a like manner”.

In backing Collier’s description of Jackman’s paper as “hate speech”, Glasgow University has sent a chilling message to academics: examine Israel and its lobbyists at your peril.

In response, the petition – signed so far by more than 500 academics from 28 countries – was sent to Prof Muscatelli and made public on Monday. One of the organisers, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist, stated: “The capitulation by the University of Glasgow is a serious blow to academic freedom that should not be allowed to stand.” 

The signatories warn:

“Others [states, corporations or groups] may be described as organising, planning or seeking influence, and even disseminating propaganda or misleading accounts. But it is falsely asserted that description of such behaviour by Israel or its advocates cannot be neutral observation or analysis; a racist meaning and intent is imputed and assumed without evidence.”

The petition organisers also point out that “it is unusual for a case to attract so much international attention from academics across such a wide range of disciplines.” 

They include a Nobel laureate, George Smith, two fellows of the Royal Society – physicist Malcolm Levitt and the mathematician David Epstein – and the acclaimed historian Sheila Rowbotham. 

Two former presidents of the British Sociological Association, and the current president of the International Sociological Association, have also signed, as well as the president of the Latin American Studies Association. There are 20 signatories from major universities in Israel, as well as Salman Abu Sitta, President of the Palestine Land Society.

The petition notes that making false claims of antisemitism “weakens the struggle against actual racism”.

 

Self-censorship

Where this is likely to lead is highlighted by another incident at Glasgow that has similarly disturbed leading academics. 

Last week, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes) wrote to Glasgow university expressing concern that its politics department had sought to vet a talk by Somdeep Sen, a professor at Roskilde University in Denmark. The department had invited Sen to speak on his new book, Decolonising Palestine, published by Cornell University Press.

Brismes is the largest national academic association in Europe focused on the study of the Middle East and North Africa. 

According to the letter, Sen was contacted by the department to say it had received “a message of concern from the University’s Jewish Society” about his forthcoming talk and that he would need to “provide information” on the main points and any slides he intended to use.

According to Brismes, it was also intimated that the information would be shared with the Jewish Society to assess whether it would have “negative repercussions” for Jewish students.   

The letter – sent by Brismes’s president, Baroness Afshar – warned that Glasgow’s treatment of Sen was illustrative of “the pernicious effect of the IHRA definition of antisemitism” and “its conflation of criticisms of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism”. 

Additionally citing the university’s apology over Jackman’s paper, Brismes warned that Glasgow’s decisions were having “a chilling effect when it comes to public debate and research on Israeli government policies, pro-Israel advocacy and Palestinian groups” and would lead to “self-censorship on the part of individual scholars and students”. 

A spokesman for the university told MintPress that Glasgow had “not prohibited any academic from speaking at the University… nor do we intend to prevent Dr Sen from doing so”.

He added that the university was separately “considering [the petition] fully” and would “respond to the signatories in due course”. 

 

#MeToo moment

Self-censorship by academics appears to be very much the goal of the lobby. The Community Security Trust – yet another pro-Israel lobby group –published a report into what it claimed was “widespread antisemitism at British universities” last December – just as Collier and the Jewish Chronicle began their campaign to pressure Glasgow university to disown Jackman’s scholarship. 

The Trust was also central to the pressure campaign to get Bristol university to sack David Miller, a sociologist and expert on Islamophobia. Leaked documents revealed by Electronic Intifada last week show not only that Bristol university’s investigation concluded that there was no misconduct from Miller but that its findings suggest that the Community Security Trust and two unnamed Jewish students colluded to smear Miller. 

The pair described Jewish students as “terrified” of Miller, but the investigation showed neither had attended his classes and they had not spoken to students who had. 

The only complaint about his teaching related to an optional essay question set by Miller on lobbying that made no mention of Israel, Zionism or Jews. One of the two students, however, claimed that answers to it might lead to “antisemitic tropes”.

Nonetheless, despite the findings of its own investigation, Bristol dismissed Miller – apparently to avoid the increasingly loud noise the lobby had whipped up over the case, including a letter harshly criticising the university for “inaction” from more than 100 British parliamentarians.

The Community Security Trust’s report highlights as an example of “widespread antisemitism” at British universities an incident in which a lecturer at Warwick university made a complaint against a Jewish student who accused her of making an antisemitic comment. 

Exploiting the #MeToo moment, both the Trust and the Union of Jewish Students have pushed for Jewish students “to be believed” – whatever allegations they make. 

James Harris, until recently the president of the Union of Jewish students, observed at the time of the Trust’s survey: 

“It is evident that certain universities have woefully disregarded their duty of care to Jewish students. … When antisemitism does arise, Jewish students rightly expect that it will be taken seriously and dealt with effectively.”

Lord Mann, the government’s antisemitism czar, stated of the Trust’s report: “All students should have the right to be who they want to be on campus. That is as true for Jewish students as anyone else. Those rights must not be dictated by fellow students, academic staff, students’ union officials.”

But, of course, Jewish students and organisations that want criticism of Israel off-limits, or their own pro-Israel activism immune from scrutiny, are denying “the right to be who they want to be on campus” to many Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and leftwing students. 

The question, raised by the petition and letter of complaint, is whether universities like Glasgow will continue to submit to such attacks on academic life under the cover of false or evidence-free claims of antisemitism. 

The signs so far are not promising.

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Author | Jonathan Cook is an award-winning journalist and MintPress contributor. Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

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American Sadism and the Mob I Married Into

 

BY KIM C. DOMENICO

In 1977 when Orin and I married, I gained a grandmother out of the deal, Lucy (Mecca) Domenico. Little did I know at the time how profoundly this acquaintance would affect me; I mourned her death more than my own grandparents, or, truth be told, in terms of intensely felt grief, more than my parents. I entered her life at a time when hers was winding down, her large size alone an indicator that she would likely not be one of those who would live into her nineties. But she did live, entirely vital and healthy, to 86.

The summer after we married, Orin and I painted Lucy’s house in Rome, NY. On the days we came to work she fed us sumptuous lunches, joking about her habit of keeping her freezer full of prepared meals at a stage in life when company had become so rare, her kitchen now fully “applianced” when labor-saving was no longer urgent as it had been back when she was raising 5 sons. And so on. She clearly loved to laugh and it could be said of her, as of Santa Claus that when she laughed the whole bowl of jelly shook. Life, she concluded had been good to her, her sons all successful in various careers, despite the fact she’d had to go to work in the kitchen at the Rome School for the Deaf to make ends meet.

Later, much after the painting job had been completed, while our kids watched her color TV in the living room, she told us her stories as we sat around her kitchen table, the stories of a poor, plain, pious “Basiligata” girl married into a family of Sicilian mobsters. I think her sense of it was she’d been selected; on her own she would have held no illusion that such a handsome man from a well-off family would have given her a second glance. Likely the marriage had been arranged to provide a virtuous, well-behaved woman to raise children the correct American way and “whiten” the family’s notorious image. From the start, her in-laws were mean to her – likely because they knew no other way. She told us she ended up in tears after every visit to her father-in-law’s house. Her husband took her side in these instances, but overall her marriage caused her much pain. She cried, as unselfconsciously as she laughed – when she told us of her husband’s philandering – never calling it that in so many words, but clearly she knew. She told us as well of her sisters-in-law, two of whom had been put in mental institutions. She did not say why, but we were told by someone in the know, one had been put away for being a “loose woman.”

I, who had never known an adult so willing to speak her truth, to share her grief with me, felt as if touched by a good fairy’s supernatural wand. To have someone reveal her soul was the greatest gift anyone had ever given to me. When Lucy died, it was in the night, unexpectedly, of a heart attack. My father-in-law, when he told us of his discovery of her where she’d fallen, managed one last unkind jibe at the mother he remembered mainly for her cruelty, and lovelessness. This was also a first for me – a vivid instance of the fact one’s life can be viewed so differently – even oppositely – depending on who’s narrating it! Time after time, I heard my father-in-law’s take on Grandma Lucy – a complete nullification of mine – faithfully repeated among his children. Not that I couldn’t imagine her being capable of harshness toward the children she was expected to render law-abiding and successful in conventional professions. But for me the experience of being allowed to glimpse the soul of another, coming as I was from a home where emotions were never visible, except in the tantrums and tears of the very young (“crybabies”) was a call to which my own fairly “armored” heart could respond.

Despite her great sorrow, her advice to me as a new wife was conventional: “Make him think he’s the boss,” wink-wink, etc. This advice, which I dismissed of course, made a striking contrast with her self-revelations: a disconnect between truth and the familial ideal she was committed to preserving.

Not until after her death, Orin discover the fuller truth of the Domenico family secret; his banana importer great-grandfather was indeed a murderer who’d been a defendant in two trials locally, in 1902 and 1920, without convictions. The ruthlessness and hardness was real, and yet the distance between knowing that and changing behaviors because of knowing that, was the distance yet to be crossed, as it has to be crossed in America as we come to grips with our shared history of violence, genocide, barbarism. And mostly will not be.

Almost everyone I know, myself included (excepting the Italian-Americans who fear being unfairly stigmatized), has a fascination for the mafia that allows them a loophole in the moral rule against inhuman hardness and, well, murder. Just think of the salivating news headlines when a mob boss goes to jail, or the ambivalent regard for killers like Al Capone, Scarface I & II, The Godfather, The Sopranos, etc. (Recently Orin’s niece’s boyfriend, whom we’d just met, when we told him about Orin’s writeup of the Domenico ancestors’ escapades – The Bad Bunch – eagerly took a copy. He told us his father, a doctor in France, eats up everything about the American mafia.)

This “Mafia exceptionalism” is not partisan, like rightwing approval of the January 6 hooliganism in the Capitol. It does not overtly partake in an attitude of vengeance; its appeal, rather, is pornographic. Like drug dealers killing other drug dealers, mafia murders do not evoke our sympathy for the murdered. Rather the jokes are about concrete shoes and sleeping with the fishes. In The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote that in their place and time the Sicilians were gods. The near- universal fascination points to an archetype, the Killer, completely forbidden at the conscious level but ever present in the psyche’s vast cast of numinosities.

In any case, Orin is currently coming to grips with the-soul deforming consequences of his cultural inheritance. He is taking it on in the only way one grapples with an archetype – that is, creatively, artistically. The hardness, translated to American soil and no longer serving an approved function, like a language that has nearly died out, exists still in his family as an active, and subtle misogyny belonging to a vestigial patriarchy. His mother, like Lucy but lacking Lucy’s deep Catholic faith, had to survive in this untender environment, be deformed by it and at the same time struggle to keep alive the ideal of “la famiglia.”

Orin writes poems attempting to forgive? transform? the misogyny in his own soul disguised for many years under anger at his mother – through poetically investigating the sexual libertinism of his youth in the 1960’s. This period and these behaviors have largely gone uncritiqued in liberal society – the sexual libertine falling under the same pornographic fascination as the mafia killer – but bequeathed real harm in the web of relationships in his life, and, he extrapolates, in society as a whole.

The pervasive fascination for mafiosi that parenthesizes its harm to actual people in order to be titillated by it, is yet another way that fear of and anger at the (feminine) soul can remain unresolved. For anyone willing to look, the fascination for the Killer exposes the vast systemic defense upheld in all segments of liberal bourgeois society against the power of the soul. Whereas identity politics wants us to be offended by “everyday” sexism, (or “trans-ism” in comedian Dave Chappelle’s case), misogyny – animaphobia may be a more accurate term for it – is far more determinative in producing the harder, meaner, racist and exploitative society we have. If the Sicilian model is a particularly explicit expression of it, it exists, implicitly, in the entire society of – as Chris Hedges unfailingly reminds us – American sadism.

Archetypal psychology teaches the gods are not dead, but existent in the amoral “multitudes” in our souls. In our liberal rejection of the “religious sense” that is organic in our human make-up, the soul’s imaginative capacity, long subservient to power, is simply not up to the task of finding that unifying, protective, inclusive “Other” that can deliver us from moral bankruptcy and the macabre co-dependency of sadism/masochism. (Did I mention Orin’s sister is a dominatrix, making her living from this psycho-social dynamic as it plays out in people turned on by pain?)

In both men and women, in gay and trans people, in goddess-worshipers, atheists and pagans as much as in zealous followers of St. Paul, this fear/hatred of the soul’s otherness, the refusal to go within and meet it, exists and influences (dominates) equally. Individuals who have no experience of authentic soul- strength – knowledge of inclusion in a greater reality – cannot but treat the”feminine” realm of feeling, relatedness, compassion, creativity and sexuality – as prized-but-despicable. That is, we cannot help but swing back and forth, in the shallow identities we’re left with, between the twin poles of worthlessness and grandiosity, locked within our own flattened subjectivity, obedient to an unchecked ego, individualities (“othernesses”) stillborn.

Sadism is the inevitable consequence of the suppression of individualities. Absent our “otherness,” the “otherness” of others is near impossible to bear. (Hence, the near ”salvific” attraction to social media technology.) Sexual relationships come to depend upon keeping the mask on our projections, easily becoming addictive, obsessive (sado-masochistic), in effect, functioning like a non-aggression pact preventing the emergence of “otherness” and individuality. Unable to see through our projections (to individuate) we’re stuck with the projections as our media for relating with social others; they being either “friends” with whom we can easily identify, or as “persons of suspicion,” with whom we cannot.

Thus the central task in regaining/repairing the social aspect of humanness is that of allowing othernesses to emerge. All top-down policies and reforms that attempt to force others to behave in ways that respect the dignity of the other will fail. Re-humanization of society happens bottom-up and bottom-up transformation needs the “vessels,” the traditional relationships and loyalties to family, community and places that, contrary to popular belief, are neither disposable nor re-inventable.

And saying that of course gets me dropped directly into the dustbin of history.

A few days ago I looked out from within this “dustbin” at the young friend we had not seen since before the pandemic, in town to attend a funeral and visit family. Taking a lively interest, as always in Orin and my creative work, she asked him about the poems he’s working on currently, what are they about. When he said they’re about “saving his feminine soul,” she laughed, abruptly but good-naturedly. Her reaction showed me that in our social context, these words are just words, and as merely words, are justifiably objects for dismissal or even scorn, unless the “talk” is “walked.”

But, hey, that dustbin contains more than one useful idea for individuals having enough imagination to re-use, re-cycle, walk their talk. When I speak of reclaiming traditional relationships, I’m not suggesting anyone can or ought to return to patriarchal arrangements like the mob I married into. But I am saying we don’t end sadism by distinguishing ourselves from it as though we are not of it, nor by finding excuses for the meanness that has become routine. In my view, we have not advanced socially beyond the conditions that were so cruel to both Lucy and Toni. Moreover, one cannot expect the process of healing a violent, hardened, racist society – to be a quick fix. Questions such as “What about him/her, he/she isn’t willing to change” or “How long will this take?”- (unless he/she is beating you up!) – are self-serving and disingenuous from the viewpoint of the process that is not under one’s control. Professional help may be called for, but allowing the process to be, trusting it, is the real help we can give to it, and that is everything. The time table is not in our hands, but the power to creatively re-imagine our reality is!

Am I talking to myself? Most certainly I am! I write untiringly on this subject both because I have experienced in my life a transformative “before” and “after,” and to keep real what I know. My “before and after” is no triumphal “makeover.” Transformation, in my case, is in my changed capacity to keep the story going, living with its unfinished ultimacy, trusting (though ever imperfectly) in process (or “God-at-Work”). Forty-four years ago fate gifted me with a partner, a man of great spirit and personal magnetism whose deep mistrust of the Feminine was disguised for me by his vivacity and by my own naivete. The “warning signs” were loud and obvious but for me not actionable.

But what is meaningful action? In liberal reality, we have so many ways of dismissing relationships that, we conclude as we wash our hands, “should not have been.” We have so few ways of actually entering the deep waters of transformation. We – all of us, no exceptions- live within a catastrophe of sadism, of sociopathy, exemplified in every relationship, whether it is an incapacity for any relationship at all, or for only “serial” ones, whether the relationship is bland and untroubled, tempestuous or just “impossible.” The licentious, scheming, disloyal, vengeful gods are directing the show, basking in the freedom from moral concerns liberalism grants them!

The fact is, my husband’s misogynist mistrust and its related defenses was not and remains not my “problem.” My problem in short, is the same as his: it’s reclaiming my individuality, my otherness, through the testing and trials of experience, instead of allowing it to slip back into the patiently waiting death of banal sameness. Change, I’m convinced, begins at the bottom, and that means here, with the closest “others,” where the pain of social disintegration is personally experienced and for which there is no magic antidote.

One could say – and not be wrong! – Kim pays dearly for her voice. Is my life, then a mistake? But I believe to have one’s voice – the great prize – cannot come much cheaper.

Kim C. Domenico, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space),  and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side.  Seminary trained and ordained,  but independently religious. She can be reached at: kodomenico@verizon.net. 

   https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/29/american-sadism-and-the-mob-i-married-into/

What Big Oil Knew About Climate Change, in Its Own Words

 

BY BENJAMIN FRANTA

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Refinery, Ashland, Kentucky. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Four years ago, I traveled around America, visiting historical archives. I was looking for documents that might reveal the hidden history of climate change – and in particular, when the major coal, oil and gas companies became aware of the problem, and what they knew about it.

I pored over boxes of papers, thousands of pages. I began to recognize typewriter fonts from the 1960s and ‘70s and marveled at the legibility of past penmanship, and got used to squinting when it wasn’t so clear.

What those papers revealed is now changing our understanding of how climate change became a crisis.

On Oct. 28, 2021, executives from Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute faced questions from a Congressional subcommittee about the oil industry’s efforts to downplay the role of fossil fuels in climate change. The industry’s own words, as I found in my research, show they knew about the risk long before most of the rest of the world.

Surprising Discoveries

At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.

“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.

1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born. What else was out there?

In Wyoming, I found another speech at the university archives in Laramie – this one from 1965, and from an oil executive himself. That year, at the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the main organization for the U.S. oil industry, the group’s president, Frank Ikard, mentioning a report called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” that had been published just a few days before by President Lyndon Johnson’s team of scientific advisers.

“The substance of the report,” Ikard told the industry audience, “is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out.” He continued that “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate.”

Ikard noted that the report had found that a “nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.”

As I reviewed my findings back in California, I realized that before San Francisco’s Summer of Love, before Woodstock, the peak of the ’60s counterculture and all that stuff that seemed ancient history to me, the heads of the oil industry had been privately informed by their own leaders that their products would eventually alter the climate of the entire planet, with dangerous consequences.

Secret research revealed the risks ahead

While I traveled the country, other researchers were hard at work too. And the documents they found were in some ways even more shocking.

By the late 1970s, the American Petroleum Institute had formed a secret committee called the “CO2 and Climate Task Force,” which included representatives of many of the major oil companies, to privately monitor and discuss the latest developments in climate science.

In 1980, the task force invited a scientist from Stanford University, John Laurmann, to brief them on the state of climate science. Today, we have a copy of Laurmann’s presentation, which warned that if fossil fuels continued to be used, global warming would be “barely noticeable” by 2005, but by the 2060s would have “globally catastrophic effects.” That same year, the American Petroleum Institute called on governments to triple coal production worldwide, insisting there would be no negative consequences despite what it knew internally.

A slide from John Laurmann’s presentation to the American Petroleum Institute’s climate change task force in 1980, warning of globally catastrophic effects from continued fossil fuel use.

Exxon had a secretive research program too. In 1981, one of its managers, Roger Cohen, sent an internal memo observing that the company’s long-term business plans could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population).”

The next year, Exxon completed a comprehensive, 40-page internal report on climate change, which predicted almost exactly the amount of global warming we’ve seen, as well as sea level rise, drought and more. According to the front page of the report, it was “given wide circulation to Exxon management” but was “not to be distributed externally.”

And Exxon did keep it secret: We know of the report’s existence only because investigative journalists at Inside Climate News uncovered it in 2015.

A figure from Exxon’s internal climate change report from 1982, predicting how much carbon dioxide would build up from fossil fuels and how much global warming that would cause through the 21st century unless action was taken. Exxon’s projection has been remarkably accurate.

Other oil companies knew the effects their products were having on the planet too. In 1986, the Dutch oil company Shell finished an internal report nearly 100 pages long, predicting that global warming from fossil fuels would cause changes that would be “the greatest in recorded history,” including “destructive floods,” abandonment of entire countries and even forced migration around the world. That report was stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” and only brought to light in 2018 by Jelmer Mommers, a Dutch journalist.

In October 2021, I and two French colleagues published another study showing through company documents and interviews how the Paris-based oil major Total was also aware of global warming’s catastrophic potential as early as the 1970s. Despite this awareness, we found that Total then worked with Exxon to spread doubt about climate change.

Big Oil’s PR pivot

These companies had a choice.

Back in 1979, Exxon had privately studied options for avoiding global warming. It found that with immediate action, if the industry moved away from fossil fuels and instead focused on renewable energy, fossil fuel pollution could start to decline in the 1990s and a major climate crisis could be avoided.

But the industry didn’t pursue that path. Instead, colleagues and I recently found that in the late 1980s, Exxon and other oil companies coordinated a global effort to dispute climate science, block fossil fuel controls and keep their products flowing.

We know about it through internal documents and the words of industry insiders, who are now beginning to share what they saw with the public. We also know that in 1989, the fossil fuel industry created something called the Global Climate Coalition – but it wasn’t an environmental group like the name suggests; instead, it worked to sow doubt about climate change and lobbied lawmakers to block clean energy legislation and climate treaties throughout the 1990s.

For example, in 1997, the Global Climate Coalition’s chairman, William O’Keefe, who was also an executive vice president for the American Petroleum Institute, wrote in the Washington Post that “Climate scientists don’t say that burning oil, gas and coal is steadily warming the earth,” contradicting what the industry had known for decades. The fossil fuel industry also funded think tanks and biased studies that helped slow progress to a crawl.

Today, most oil companies shy away from denying climate science outright, but they continue to fight fossil fuel controlsand promote themselves as clean energy leaders even though they still put the vast majority of their investments into fossil fuels. As I write this, climate legislation is again being blocked in Congress by a lawmaker with close ties to the fossil fuel industry.

People around the world, meanwhile, are experiencing the effects of global warming: weird weather, shifting seasons, extreme heat waves and even wildfires like they’ve never seen before.

Will the world experience the global catastrophe that the oil companies predicted years before I was born? That depends on what we do now, with our slice of history.

This article was updated Oct. 28, 2021, with the congressional hearing beginning.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.  

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/29/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-in-its-own-words/

 

Benjamin Franta is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Stanford University.