Michael Riordon

the view from where I live


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‘Isawiyya.

From David Shulman in Jerusalem, January 4, 2013.  He teaches at Hebrew University, and wrote the book Dark Hope.

Issawiya

— I meet the drummers on the city bus to French Hill. They ask me: “Are you going there?”  Yes. Smiles.  I tell them I’m happy to see the big drum again; it brings up good memories of Sheikh Jarrah, the demonstrations two years ago and more. There the drums made all the difference.  They say to me: “You’re an honorary drummer.”  Now that’s worth putting on my CV.

— The Border Police are, of course, waiting for us at the gas station at the edge of the village. Quite a lot of them and, at first glance, far too few of us.  Even the contingent from ‘Isawiyya that marches uphill to welcome us and guide us in is sparse, too sparse. I’m expecting a violent response by the soldiers today in line with recent developments. I wonder: Will I ever get used to this? I have a strong, demoralizing sense of déjà vu. I’ve trained myself not to be afraid of the tear gas and the stun grenades and the clubs and even the rubber bullets, but I don’t like them.  Slight rumbles in the pit of my stomach.

The last weeks in the village have been mostly full of such things. There’s a familiar, periodic quality to such attacks in ‘Isawiyya; we’ve been through many cycles over the years. The soldiers come in to shoot, to terrorize; at night they turn up to make arrests. Quite often I hear and see all of this from my office in the Rabin Building on campus; our windows look out directly on ‘Isawiyya, a stark vision of the Occupation you can’t ignore. So I sit amidst my books, next door to the espresso machine, and watch the soldiers playing their deadly games just a few hundred meters away. Sometimes there are pitched battles in the village streets. Most days this week, along with the usual army jeeps and police vans that prowl up and down the hill there were helicopters hovering above. Continue reading →


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Science is objective: true or false?

After teaching plant agriculture for 32 years at Guelph University, Associate Professor Ann Clark ‘retired’ in 2010 to a farm in eastern Ontario.  It would be her refuge and her lab.

Clark designed the farm to be “post-oil.”  Here she can try out experiments for which research Monsanto Business Incubatorfunding always eluded her.  Since neither of her teaching specialties, grasses and organic agriculture, tends to generate proprietary profits, the corporate funders that increasingly dominate research funding were not interested.

From the late 1990s on, Ann Clark became an eloquent critic of the impacts that GMOs (genetically modified organisms) can have on livestock, farm survival and the environment.  Unsought by her and unpaid, this new public role did not foster Clark’s career.  “Academic suicide, some of my colleagues called it,” she says.  “By their standards I’m not a very good scientist.”

By what standards can they judge as ‘not good’ a scientist who has inspired countless students, farmers and citizens with her knowledge and integrity?  “The problem is,” she replied, “I can’t accept one of the central tenets of their dogma: that science is objective.  When I got my PhD I fully believed that it is.  But then one of my PhD examiners backed me into a corner where I had to acknowledge that personal values will inevitably determine what questions you ask as a scientist, and the questions you ask will inevitably pre-determine the range of answers you’ll get.”

This view is powerfully confirmed by the ongoing battle over a study by French scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini & his co-researchers, on impacts of Monsanto’s genetically modified maize and its associated herbicide Roundup.

Hours after the study was published in 2012, a vicious, well-orchestrated assault erupted against Séralini.  “This is so disturbing,” says Ann Clark.  “Very often industry research doesn’t ask the right questions.  He  asked some of the right questions, and for that he’s under attack.”

In response, Clark joined with eight other scientists to publish an open letter supporting Séralini, and to “raise the profile of fundamental challenges faced by science in a world increasingly dominated by corporate influence.”  Signed by an impressive roster of scientists in many countries, the October 2012 letter cites other researchers who’ve been attacked for studies questioning GMOs and Monsanto.

Read more:

Ann Clark’s vision of post-carbon farming and food production is here:  The future is organic: But it’s more than organic!

Corporate Push for GMO Food Puts Independent Science in Jeopardy.  Vandana Shiva, The Asian Age, December 2012.

Growing Maize Disaster (in Mexico).  ETC Group, December 2012.

FDA [Food and Drug Administration, US] Quietly Pushes Through Genetically Modified Salmon.  Anthony Gucciardi, Natural Society, December 2012.


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Ideas as dangerous as weapons

The Israeli secret police don’t like the Israeli mathematician Dr Kobi Snitz.  Kobi SnitzOr perhaps it would be more accurate to say they fear him.  But how can one of the most powerful military states on the planet be afraid of a mathematician?  Then again, Kobi Snitz is also an activist with two Israeli organizations that oppose the occupation.  Both practice pacifist non-violent tactics and work with Palestinians.  So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the secret police want Kobi Snitz to fear them.  That is, after all, the primary job of secret police everywhere.  More than anything, they and their political masters fear loss of power – the power to continue doing as they wish, with impunity.  In Israel, the authorities call this feared loss “delegitimization.”

Recently Shabak (aka Shin Bet) ‘invited’ Kobi Snitz to their office for interrogation.  A fascinating account of it follows below.  It’s written by American commentator Richard Silverstein, who followed up the story first published by journalist Amira Hass this week in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

First, a little background.  Kobi Snitz shared his story with me a couple of years ago for Our Way to Fight.  He was born Israeli in 1971, to a European-Canadian mother and American father who had emigrated to Israel.  After finishing school there, Kobi went to university in Toronto, Canada, then to Maryland for his PhD in mathematics, returning to Israel for post-doctoral work

“My politics developed while I was away,” he said. “Meeting Palestinians and Arabs at school in Toronto and Maryland heightened my sense of the need to build new kinds of relationships with Palestinians here.  When I came back in 2003, that seemed the most important thing to do.”  And so he has done since then.  This is why the Israeli secret police don’t like Kobi Snitz.

Richard Silverstein writes:

A few days ago, Amira Hass wrote a story in Haaretz about a Shabak interrogation of Israeli peace activist, Kobi Snitz.  Snitz is a mathematician at the Weizmann Institute and a member of a pro-BDS group in Israel called Boycott from Within.  He is also a member of Anarchists Against the Wall.  Snitz and several hundred other Israelis signed the group’s manifesto, which in turn brought many of them to the attention of the secret police (another term I use for Israel’s intelligence/security apparatus).

They “invited” Snitz to come for questioning exactly a year after the last time they’d had him over for a nice cup of tea and cakes.  He didn’t want to come, but they told him one of the alternatives would be sending a police car to campus to arrest him and haul him in for questioning.  Since they told him he was not being summoned as a result of charges being filed against him, he complied. Continue reading →


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Mental health: who can you trust?

Conformity hazardBruce Levine works as a psychologist in Cincinnati, Ohio.  By the time he got his PhD, he told me, he felt so alienated from the profession’s dominant goals and practices that he hesitated to tell strangers how he made his living.  Eventually he encountered other dissidents, both within the profession and among people who have survived its abuses.  As a therapist, activist and writer, Bruce Levine strives to help people, especially adolescents, to find their own way through a society that packages conformity as freedom, and non-conformity as illness.

“Over and over,” he says, “we’re told that mental illness is caused by a biochemical imbalance in the brain, or it’s genetic.  I’ve learned to distrust claims like these, especially when it’s going to make someone a ton of money or be used to manipulate and control people.  The whole area of biochemical cause and cure is a giant money-maker for the drug companies.  And who decides these things?  Committees of psychiatrists basically decree what gets listed in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the diagnostic bible of the American Psychiatric Association.  If you have any common sense, it’s not hard to see how unscientific that is.

“For example, in the 1970s when I was a psychology undergrad, homosexuality was in the DSM as a mental disorder.  Gay activists finally managed to get rid of that, but now we have things in there like ADHD (‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’), and ODD (‘oppositional defiant disorder’).  If you look at the so-called symptoms, what you find are kids – huge numbers of them – who are bored, or who question, or argue, or refuse to cooperate with illegitimate authority.  So what do you do?  You call these kids sick and you drug them.  In the Soviet Union, the psychiatrist’s job was to ‘treat’ political dissidents as sick, to hospitalize and drug them.  Here we don’t even wait until they’re adults speaking out against injustice, instead we get ’em when they’re twelve and speaking out against some pointless school assignment.

“Given how often the mental health authorities have been wrong, and how much harm they’ve done, people like me have a clear responsibility to question their decisions, their power.  In a strange way, the fact that the abuses are so clear actually makes it easier to speak out.”

Bruce Levine speaks out in his blog.   And in his books.  And other places too, eg:

Why are Americans so easy to manipulate and control?  AlterNet, October 2012.

A clear voice for human rights in the mental health system is here: MindFreedom International.

On the other hand: 70% of DSM Psychiatrists Financially Tied to Drug Companies.  Natural Society, March 2012.


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Drones: coming home to roost?

Drone adRemote-controlled drones are used for aerial surveillance and assassination of designated enemies.  Until recently most of the targets have been at a safe remove, over there where other people live.  Now drones operate over the United States, and they will soon be flying over our heads in Canada.

In addition to military duties, drones will also do a range of civilian tasks in Canada.  Profit potential is considered to be quite exciting.

Dazzling leaps in science and technology tend to obscure uncomfortable questions about control and consequence.  David Lyon has built a career on asking such questions.  I met Professor Lyon, an international authority on surveillance and identification systems, at his office in Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.  With quiet intensity he detailed what he sees and thinks, and what questions arise.  For example:

“Several companies are setting up just now to manufacture drones in Canada – clearly they believe they can corner some part of this expanding market.  Primarily they would produce surveillance drones, but even those raise significant questions.  If you look at their marketing materials, they want to provide drones for private security companies to scan public events – sporting events, political demonstrations, picket lines, that sort of thing.  These drones would operate in conjunction with facial recognition technology, generating very precise high-resolution images.  This raises deeply important moral and ethical questions – or at least it ought to – for example about the kinds of things this technology allows us to do from a great distance, remotely, with impunity.*  How do such vital questions go missing so easily?  How have we managed to create a world like this?”

*  Dreams in Infrared: The Woes of an American Drone Operator.  Spiegel Online International, 12/14/2012.

Transport Canada looks at loosening restrictions on unmanned aerial vehicles.  CBC News, August 2012.

The Coming Drone Attack on America.  The Guardian UK, 22 December 2012.

Protect global internet freedom: OpenMedia.ca.

Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation.  Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, 2012.