OMNI WAR WATCH
WEDNESDAYS, #193, SEPTEMBER 4, 2024. Compiled by Dick Bennett
Looking Back to Guide the
Future
1978: War Resisters League members
demonstrated simultaneously against nuclear weapons in Red Square, Moscow, and
on the White House Lawn. [I will be
citing notable historical events like this one in the future, drawn from the
War Resisters League Peace Calendars. –D]
THE NAKBA
AND US JEWISH DISSENT
Geoffrey Levin is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish
Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. Prior to joining Emory's faculty, Levin
was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies
after earning a PhD in Hebrew & Judaic Studies/History from New York
University in 2019. His first book, Our Palestine Question:
Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978,
was published by Yale University Press, 2023. [Jewish dissent continues
today, and I am glad to be a member of several Jewish anti-war
organizations. –Dick]
Monday, September 16th, 2024 at 6pm Dr.
Levin will be making a live video presentation with
questions & answers at the Fayetteville Public Library (FPL) in
the Walker Rm. He will be discussing Our
Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978. . . . “The Israeli
government covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s
to 1970s, and they did so to quash Jewish criticisms of the 1948 Nakba — the
mass dispossession and expulsions of Palestinians during Israel’s founding —
and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.” Intercept News Service,
March 3, 2024. Hoping you can join us
& please invite others. Dr Susan
Colvin & David Druding - co-founders of PIPE Edu Collective, NWA
Palestine Israel Peace & Equality (P.I.P.E.) support community 8-19-24.
IMAGINING THE FUTURE
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FROM
OUR EXPERTS... What
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Foundation experts share the issues they’re following at UNGA 79, and explain
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of the Future: What You Need to Know The
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From
its beginning, OMNI was inspired by the UN Charter. And OMNI
borrowed its mission statement from the Quakers. “We
seek a world free of war and the threat of war. We
seek a society with equity and justice for all....” The Friends
Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) is a national, nonpartisan Quaker
organization that lobbies Congress for peace, justice, and environmental
stewardship. Its sister org.—the
AFSC—has a similar mission statement. “The American Friends Service
Committee (AFSC) promotes a world free of violence, inequality, and
oppression.” --Dick
CONNECTING THE PAST TO THE FUTURE
TO ASSESS THE PRESENT
Joe Conason begins It Can
Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush with Sinclair Lewis’s sardonically
titled, dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935) that showed how fascism/nazism
might happen in the US. His dictator president,
Buzz Windrip, posing as “an exponent of traditional values—liberty, democracy righteousness,
godliness,” seizes an economic crisis to “arrogate more and more power to the
White House.” In It Can Happen
Here (2007) Conason describes how George W. Bush and his administration had
so diminished the US idea and institutions of democracy that the US was
becoming the police state Lewis had feared, which prepared the way for its further
perhaps terminal dismantling by Trump and his cronies. (All summarized in his Introduction.)
In The Last Independence Day:
Secession, the author Ray Niblock imagines the hard right takeover of the state of
Arkansas by a ruthless female governor named Landers, as part of a wider movement
to split the US into two nations, one struggling to evolve democratically, the
other embracing autocracy. We experience the political process of dismantling
the state institution by institution and the breakaway of Arkansas and
preparations by other states to join it.
A follow-up seems planned: The Epilogue ends with the words “To be
continued.”
And today I learned that Joe
Conason this year published another book on the US right wing:The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (2024).