Palestinian Solidarity? What's September 11 got to do with it?

Annoymouse's picture

A Truth Convergence "street action" took place in San Francisco this
last weekend (May 10/11), apparently organized - or "initiated" - by
the principals who operate this website,
http://truthaction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3374
prominent among them the internet persona who signs posts as "YT".

A piece of testimonial from how the action went was published by Carol
Brouillet, a widely known public personality, on her entry on this page
dated May 12, 2008:
http://www.communitycurrency.org/9-11.html

Here is a small excerpt, with a short sentence of extreme interest rendered by me in bold:

Carol Brouillet wrote:
May 12, 2008
"....people were dispersed on the street corners, and there seemed to
be no effort or desire to actually have a rally. At 4 pm or so we did
start marching to Market and circled the Civic Center where an actual rally, with lots of volume and music was taking place in support of the Palestinians.
The police kept us away from the rally. I was going to meet Chuck at
6pm at Mission and 16th, which is where we were scheduled to go, but
the organizers decided to go to Powell and Market and blow off going to
16th and Mission, so I went with the "Impeach the Terrorists"/Billion
Deception Dollar banner to rendez-vous with Chuck who was going to give
me the tabling stuff.
A few other 9/11 Truth activists also converge there. We passed out
some Deception Dollars and enjoyed meeting one another. My old friend,
Bob Gipson was there. We tried to find out where the "tba Activist
Summit" was taking place and were given the location of a pub near
Union Square. Three of us went via car and three by BART to the pub,
but we never found any other 9/11 Truth activists at the pub nor were
able to reach Cosmos or anyone else. So, Chuck, Bob and I just found a
Thai Restaurant and enjoyed having dinner together and went home."

Anyone who has ever attended or organized a march or rally can see from
this eyewitness description ...a real and total mess. Could this event
have been any more disorganized?

Worse than disorganization (which many activists worship as if it is the embodiment of Freedom itself), are terrible political failures.
What on earth led the Truth Convergence "initiators" to treat the
Palestinian Solidarity rally with such a lack of care? Does
internationalism, peace or justice mean anything to these people, or is
it all about just posturing?

There are only three possibilities:
1. An honest mistake, due to lack of experience.
2. A total failure to do the right thing.
3. A conscious decision to remain distant and divided.

Here's how these play out:
1. An honest mistake, due to lack of experience
The San Francisco Truth Convergence "initiators" may have made the
mistake (easily forgiven) of forgetting to check what else is happening
on that day. The question of "Who else, among our natural allies might
be on the streets?" may not have dawned on the leaders of the event.
But this also shows either a total lack of experience (forgiven, but
people should be honest about being novices when they issue a nation
wide "call" for a large West Coast action in the streets).

Or, it may show that the "initiators" simply have no political
connection with the Palestinian Solidarity movement. Not only in San
Francisco, but anywhere. Otherwise, if they did, the 60-year
anniversary memorials and protests going on all over the world over the
Palestinian catastrophe (nakbah) would have been on their minds. They
would have sought a local Palestine Solidarity event to join up with.

2. A total failure to do the right thing
Any mistakes due to inexperience or ignorance are excusable, as long as
the leaders who are responsible recognize them and take corrective
action.

As soon as they saw the Palestine Solidarity event on the street , the
Truth Convergence "initiators" should have said "oh shit, we goofed",
and then immediately run to the Palestine event organizers and say to
them: we're here in solidarity, please allow us to join your event for
a while and then we'll continue our march elsewhere. It would have been
real easy (and a joy!) for one of the Palestinian Solidarity organizers
to go to the podium and announce a welcome to the marchers (great
applause and enthusiasm usually ensues when marches in solidarity
converge in the streets!). The Police would have opened the barricades
and things would have continued with more alliances forged, better
contacts, and more warmth among these two somewhat distant sections of
the movement.
But no! Was it a lack of honesty (what, admit we made a mistake?) that
prevented them from doing the right thing when it was clearly
recognized by the "initiators" that they goofed? Was it a dose of
arrogance?

3. A conscious decision to remain distant and divided
Is this what fueled the decision to let the Police dictate who our
allies and partners on the street would be on the Convergence?

If it was not just an honest mistake, if it was not lack of honesty or
just plain arrogance that prevented the correction of the mistake right
there on the spot, what was it then? A conscious decision to keep the
September 11 Truth movement separate and distant from the Palestine
Solidarity movement?

* * *

Anyone equipped with a television set knows that within five minutes of the attacks on September 11 all the media were blaming the Palestinian resistance for those actions.
They kept showing over and over a video of Palestinians allegedly
"dancing in the streets in celebration" (which later on turned out to
be scenes from a wedding, cleverly mindfucked into the brains of a
population already numb and traumatized by the shocks of the World
Trade Center plane attacks, demolition and collapse). The Palestinian people were the first intended victims of the False Flag operation.

Mossad, the intelligence apparatus of the Zionist regime that rules
Israel, hellbent on the extermination of the Palestinian people, was
shown repeatedly by media and government reports to have direct
involvement in the September 11 events. Examples are many, some,
however, stick out like Flying Elephants. The BBC states that three
minutes after the Pentagon was hit, at
"0943 EDT, Abu Dhabi television reports it received a call from the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claiming
responsibility for crashing two planes into the WTC. However leading
officials later deny the claim."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537785.stm
Every possible dirty trick was tried in order to throw the blame on the Palestinian resistance!

And who can forget the Mossad operatives embroiled in the "Urban Moving
Systems" espionage scandal reported by the NY Post who were arrested by
Police and deported back to Israel, caught red handed while the
September 11 events were still unfolding? Here's some starting
materials for that:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/forget.html

Opposition to Zionism and anti-Semitism are important pillars of
everything we do in order to build the Truth movement. For a bunch of
Truth activists to encounter a Palestine Solidarity event in the
streets during an action and simply ignore it, or to leave it behind to
go "promote the Truth" in the Pubs is a grave offence. In this day an
age of a global Crusade War, in this anti-Arab and anti-Moslem climate
that we live and die, to abandon our natural allies without even an
effort to connect is a political blunder of enormous dimensions.
It's an insult not only to the Palestinian people and the
internationalist solidarity movement, it is also an insult to all of us
who are working hard to cultivate and maintain alliances of the Truth
movement with the antiwar and anti-imperialist movement.

Whose side are they on, these anonymous-eponymous "initiators" of the San Francisco Truth Convergence? Eh, "YT"?

Where is there openness and transparency, where is there a facility for
dialogue with them in order to discuss how we navigate the Truth
movement together, and also in conjunction with our allies? What
procedures are there for accountability?

Those who take on positions of leadership must make provisions for a
process of dialogue, evaluation and democratic accountability.
Otherwise, face up to the real possibility of being treated as part of
the problem.

Petros Evdokas
http://petros-evdokas.cyprus-org.net/Another-sort-of-Introduction.html

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casseia's picture

What a great blog entry, Petros

I also read the Carol Brouillet account but the significance of that encounter with the Palestinian solidarity activists just sailed past me. We're getting the benefit of your hands-on political perspective here.

casseia's picture

PS

I wonder if the police thought they were counter-demonstrators. Gaaah!

Tahooey's picture

more weirdness?

why don't these 2 relatively new comments by Cass show up under "Recent comments"?

And I swear I was able to access the Comment Queue as late as this morning... 

petros's picture

I think you're right, Tahooey

something's making the server "burp". It posted three copies of my
article at first, and then refused to let me delete the extra ones
until I repeated several times. It might be strained by Denial of
Service attacks, as Gretavo seems to be suggesting here:

http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/1147#comment-11067

Petros
_______

petros's picture

Counter-protesters?

Well, of course the Police would treat another march as
Counter-protesters, especially if the ethnic composition of the crowd
is visibly different, and since "everyone knows" that 9/11 is "all
about the Arabs". What's the Police in charge supposed to do beyond
just a glimpse of the banners? Read the literature and try to decide
who's on who's side?

Unless one of the leaders went up to the Police and said, "hey, we're with those people, please let us through", the Police correctly kept them separate.

Petros
_____

petros's picture

4 Comments

There were 4 Comments here last night. Now there are none. Is there someone familiar enough with the system who can repair it?

Thanks! 

 

petros's picture

4 Comments

Thanks, I see now that they've re-appeared!

gretavo's picture

argh argh issues

OK so I've undone the changes I made to user permissions, hopefully this means people can see this?

gretavo's picture

ARRGHHHH

testing testing?

larry horse's picture

Hey Petros (if that's what's become of the comments)

was it...
"A conscious decision to keep the September 11 Truth movement separate and distant from the Palestine Solidarity movement?"
yep. ask G and Toth about their experiences (shared here so no, it's not AN INSIDE JOKE). three choices for this question? too easy. next. am i being a prick? i'm just joking around...really.

gretavo's picture

yes, great post

I don't think we need to discuss too much the YT/Loose Change/etc. brand of sloppy activism and advocacy. What is more interesting is the phenomenon of the pro-Palestinian movement being brainwashed against 9/11 Truth by their Zionist supporters. That is, I think, the bottom line here. Zionist "supporters" of Palestinian rights tend to be of the "two-state solution" variety, a solution which is of course no solution at all, and what's worse is they encourage commemoration of the Naqba not so much out of sympathy for its victims (who the two state solution ignores) but because it is therefore manageable as "the Holocaust's little sibling", i.e. ultimately blameable on the evil Germans.