Greens must drop Jello, McKinney
Two leading lights of the US Green Party, Jello Biafra and Cynthia McKinney, have betrayed the party's platform and values by loaning support to Israel and Qaddafi, respectively. If the Green Party wishes to maintain any legitimacy, it must quickly repudiate them.
First, Jello Biafra. The former sneering superstar of the Dead Kennedys hardcore punk outfit, Jello makes much of his Green Party membership on his website. His Wikipedia page informs us that he sought the party's presidential nomination in 2000, finishing second to Ralph Nader. The Green Party's own platform states:
[W]e support the implementation of boycott and divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era, which includes pressuring our government to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel; and we support maintaining these nonviolent punitive measures until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law...
Yet, somehow, Jello has seen fit to buck the boycott of Israel by playing a gig in Tel Aviv on July 2. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has issued a statement to the lapsed punk pioneer, "Appeal to Jello Biafra: Do not cross our picket line." But Jello apparently intends to do so, condescendingly offering to "debate" the issue with his critics. In an open letter of his own to the critics, he wrote that "both the Israeli Left and the Palestinian Left are divided right down the middle as to whether this kind of a boycott is a good idea at all." As if we should give equal weight to the "left" wing of an occupied people and an occupying power.
Equally problematic is Cynthia McKinney, who was the Green Party's presidential candidate in 2008. Embarrassingly, since the NATO bombing campaign she has been openly shilling for blood-drenched dictator Moammar Qaddafi. Last month, McKinney spoke on Libyan state TV—in what appeared to be a live interview in Tripoli—to blast the NATO bombing, saying the "last thing we need to do is spend money on death, destruction and war." Such pacifistic sentiments might have some legitimacy—if McKinney were not speaking over a propaganda organ of the Qaddafi regime, or if she at least offered some recognition that Qaddafi is also guilty of perpetrating "death, destruction and war."
In March, McKinney penned an absurd screed, "Ghaddafi a Hero for African Rights and Liberation," published on the website of the Red Ant Liberation Army, in which she crowed about how "Libya’s Revolution brought free health care and education to the people and subsidized housing." Hmmm, if Qaddafi did all these wonderful things, why is he facing a popular uprising, one wonders? And does providing free health care and subsidized housing let him off the hook for massacring his own populace?
But it gets worse. She next went on to assert that "Libyans govern themselves by The Green Book, a form of direct democracy based on the African Constitution concept that the people are the first and final source of all power." Right, except when they protest the glorious leader. Then they're filthy traitors who deserve to be shot, tortured and raped.
Just a few days ago, when McKinney gave a presentation on Libya in Los Angeles, the event organizers, from International ANSWER, reportedly barred local outraged Libyans from attending. Just yesterday, a group of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the United States issued an open letter to McKinney expressing their "severe disappointment" at her support for Qaddafi.
How do McKinney's propaganda activities on behalf of a regime that slaughters its own populace, is accused of mass rape, and centralizes all power in a charismatic leader hold with the Green Party's "Key Values" of Nonviolence, Social Justice, Decentralization and Feminism? Yet the Green Party homepage at this moment has a photo of McKinney with a link to her latest absurd screed in which she blames all the suffering in Libya on "NATO's 'humanitarian intervention'"—as if Qaddafi and his key henchmen were not under investigation by The Hague for crimes against humanity!
The Green Party must forthrightly repudiate Jello Biafra and Cynthia McKinney until they halt their depraved conniving with oppressive regimes.
About the Author
Bill Weinberg is an award-winning 25-year veteran journalist in the fields of human rights, indigenous peoples, ecology and war. He is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, now available from Verso Books, and War on the Land: Ecology and Politics in Central America (Zed Books, 1991).
Comments
Bill Weinberg on Qaddafi
I am a bit surprised about Bill Weinberg's exaggerated negative take on Qadaffi. For sure Qafaffa has some very negative history and his control has been autocratic. But no way is he the likes of a Hosni Mubarak or Bashir Assad. I have not heard him to slaughter his own population, in fact it was the anti-Qaddafi resistance that was slaughting Black Libyans. It is my understanding that Qaddafi has helped his people have the highest per capita income in all of Africa. Unlike the United States he has made sure that revenues from oil go to help the poor people. He created a water pipeline that would bring fresh water to the populace only to be destroyed by NATO. Qadaffi signed a non-aggression pact with the United States and stopped any efforts to make a nuclear bomb. He has kept his word, his reward, utter destruction of Libya by NATO. Qadaffi has been pan-African and anti-Imperialist. I think such stances should be lauded as the west is no starting on its second ravaging of the African continent. No Libya has not been a democracy under Qadaffi and he could not be called innocent of repression of dissent, but I tell you now that Qadaffi has been murdered by NATO under the guise of liberation and democracy, keep you eyes peeled on this sad country. Western forces have degraded Libya and will continue on this path and Capitalism will be much more dominant that the so-called democracy that is being introduced there.
"exaggerated negative take on Qadaffi"
Will you please stop? If you "haven't heard" about Qaddafi slaughtering his own population, you haven't been paying any attention at all. Far worse than Mubarak, and probably worse than Assad too. Spend some time reading Amnesty International before you clutter up my website with ill-informed blather.