Rising Up Against Police Violence, From the Black Panthers to #BlackLivesMatter

By Juan Thompson, The Intercept

05 September 15

turned away more than once while watching Stanley Nelson’s documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. I averted my eyes from the screen when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s nefarious mug first appeared. I turned away once more when the charismatic and admirable Fred Hampton was first shown, knowing that eventually he would be murdered by Chicago police and federal agents.

But, of course, I could never turn away for long, because Nelson’s documentary is something all Americans should watch to better understand the country’s current racial climate, including the formation of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first entered public consciousness after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, in July 2013, on charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Three activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, are credited with coining the phrase. Tellingly, it wasn’t until a year later — in August 2014 when a white police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — that the hashtag gained greater prominence and morphed into an enduring movement against police brutality.

I write “tellingly” because many black American riots can be traced back to an act of police violence. For black citizens, particularly those who are economically disadvantaged, the police are the most consistent and cruel representatives of the white supremacist state. It makes sense then that the same origin story would be true for the revolutionary Black Panthers, who organized after police killed a black person 49 years ago.

Nelson’s documentary, which he spent seven years making, opens with the organization’s founding in Oakland, California, in October 1966, after the death of Matthew Johnson. Johnson’s death convinced Panthers co-founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of the need for a different, more proactive black movement. In Newton’s mind it was time for black Americans to defend themselves against police violence.

The Oakland Police Department, like so many today, was notorious for its treatment of black residents. The Panthers, legally armed with guns after Johnson’s death, began following the Oakland police around to monitor their actions. Whenever the police made a stop, armed Panthers were there, ensuring no racist harassment or brutality would take place.

One of the great virtues of Nelson’s film is the opportunity to see rare footage. There’s a clip of John Lennon, dressed in a Boston Red Sox jersey, chatting on a talk show with Black Panthers. And there’s the scene of Bobby Seale, depicted with court sketches and audio, gagged and tied to a chair during a trial because he kept calling the presiding judge a “racist, pig, fascist, liar.”

Given the Panthers’ cultural significance, it’s surprising that The Black Panthers is the first documentary to present a thorough examination of the group. (I omit from consideration the vapid and cartoonish 1995 docudrama Panther.) And the film is replete with information many viewers will find new. Nelson reminds us that one of the first major public displays of black power occurred when the Panthers entered the California legislature in Sacramento, armed with guns. Another surprising detail was that after Hoover declared war on the Panthers in the late ’60s, 233 of 295 domestic covert actions by the FBI aimed at black nationalist groups were directed against the Panthers. Undercover agents infiltrated the group almost from the very beginning. It was also news to me that the first known SWAT raid in American history was against the Black Panthers in Los Angeles, just five days after the notorious assassination of Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

The 116-minute film leaves viewers wanting more, however. Nelson barely touches on the subject of Newton’s alleged shooting of a white Oakland police officer during a traffic stop in October 1967. Likewise, Newton’s struggle with a crack cocaine addiction later in life, and his 1989 killing by a drug dealer, receive little attention in Nelson’s documentary.

The film does, however, focus on Eldridge Cleaver, the eccentric Panther who along with Seale and Newton composed the Panthers’ powerful Troika. Some of the most exciting storytelling occurs when the documentary recounts how Cleaver fled the U.S. for Cuba, and then Africa, after being charged with attempted murder following a botched attack on the police. Nelson also focuses on how Cleaver, before his death, renounced his radical past and converted to Mormonism. In 1958 Cleaver was convicted of assault during an attempted rape, though Nelson doesn’t mention it except in passing. But with so much attention given to Cleaver’s antics, Nelson ignores the radical substance of the Panthers.

Former Panther Elaine Brown, writing in the Daily Beast, accused Nelson of “excising from his film the Party’s ideological foundation and political strategies, despite the wealth of published materials articulating the Party’s goals and ideals, reducing our activities to sensationalist engagements, as snatched from establishment media headlines.”

The colorful characters who made up the Panthers may provide a cautionary example for the young activists leading Black Lives Matter. Big personalities and internal conflict helped to tear the group apart, but so too did interference and disruption from the racist FBI. Like the Panthers, Black Lives Matter has struggled with refashioning and expanding its missions. The Panthers began a successful breakfast program in Oakland that gave free meals to young people, and attempted to start black businesses with the hope of constructing an economic foundation for black Americans. Black Lives Matter doesn’t seem quite sure where it wants to go next, though some St. Louis activists are attempting to organize black people around economic issues such as the Fight for $15 campaign.

Despite the struggles and the growing pains, Black Lives Matters represents, for the first time since the civil rights era, a social movement focused on battling American racism that has energized black Americans all around the country.

Perhaps the most important lesson that Black Lives Matter, and the rest of us, can learn from Nelson’s film can be encapsulated in an insight from Bobby Seale, which comes in the documentary’s closing scenes: “You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.”

A Dangerous Redefinition of 'Terrorism'

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

04 September 15

“Terrorism” is a word of condemnation, referring to the coldblooded killing of civilians to advance a political cause. But U.S. pundits and officials have blurred its meaning to cover attacks on American soldiers in foreign lands, a word game that can contribute to more wars, writes Robert Parry.

he classic definition of terrorism is the intentional killing of civilians to make a political point, as in planting bombs near the finish line of a marathon or crashing commercial jetliners into buildings filled with office workers. Yet, the mainstream U.S. media has broadened the definition to include killing U.S. soldiers or allied troops even those operating in foreign lands.

For instance, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on Wednesday cited as a supposed example of “Iran’s terrorism” the bombing of the Marine base in Beirut in 1983, “believed to be the handiwork of Iran’s cat’s paw, Hezbollah.” And Friedman is hardly alone in citing the Marine bombing in 1983 as “terrorism” along with Iran’s support for Shiite militias who fought the American occupying army in Iraq last decade.

The U.S. media routinely treats such cases as deserving of the unqualified condemnation that the word “terrorism” implies. Similarly, that attitude is extended to Hezbollah attacks on Israeli military forces even in the 1980s when Israel was occupying southern Lebanon.

But attacks aimed at military forces – not civilians – are not “terrorism” in the classic definition. And this is an important distinction because the word carries deservedly negative moral and legal implications that can put those nations accused of “terrorism” in the cross-hairs of economic sanctions and military attacks that can kill hundreds of thousands and even millions of civilians.

In other words, abuse of the word “terrorism” can have similar consequences as terrorism itself, the indiscriminate deaths of innocent people — men, women and children. Much of the case for sanctions and war against Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s was based on dubious and even false claims about Iraq’s alleged support for Al Qaeda and other terrorists.

And, the 1983 case is especially significant because it is a go-to emotional argument in accusing Iran of having “American blood on its hands” and thus unworthy of any normal diplomatic relations. However, when examining the real history behind the Marine barracks bombing, a much more complex and nuanced story unfolds with blame to be apportioned to all sides.

The immediate context for the tragedy was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the multi-sided civil war raging among Lebanese factions. Israeli invaders reached the Lebanese capital of Beirut in a matter of days as part of a campaign to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Then, after more fighting and protracted negotiations, Israel forced the P.L.O. to leave Lebanon, departing for Tunisia. But the P.L.O. left behind women and children in refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, where Israeli officers allowed Israeli-supported Christian militia forces to massacre more than 700 and possibly thousands of Palestinian and Shiite civilians, one of the most shocking atrocities of the war.

Into this chaos, President Ronald Reagan dispatched a force of Marines as peacekeepers, but they gradually were pulled into the fighting on the side of Israel and its militia allies.

National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, who often represented Israel’s interests in the upper echelons of the Reagan administration, convinced the President to authorize the USS New Jersey to fire long-distance shells into Muslim villages, killing civilians and convincing Shiite militants that the United States had joined the conflict.

On Oct. 23, 1983, Shiite militants struck back, sending a suicide truck bomber through U.S. security positions, demolishing the high-rise Marine barracks in Beirut and killing 241 American servicemen. Reagan soon repositioned the surviving U.S. forces offshore.

Though the U.S. news media immediately labeled the Marine barracks bombing an act of “terrorism,” Reagan administration insiders knew better, recognizing that McFarlane’s “mission creep” had made the U.S. troops vulnerable to retaliation.

“When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American ‘referee’ had taken sides,” Gen. Colin Powell wrote in his memoir, My American Journey. In other words, Powell, who was then military adviser to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, recognized that the actions of the U.S. military had altered the status of the Marines in the eyes of the Shiites.

Reagan’s redeployment of the Marines offshore also didn’t end U.S. intervention in Lebanon. The tit-for-tat violence in Beirut continued. CIA Director William Casey ordered secret counterterrorism operations against Islamic radicals and dispatched veteran CIA officer William Buckley. But on March 14, 1984, Buckley was spirited off the streets of Beirut to face torture and death.

In 1985, Casey targeted Hezbollah leader Sheikh Fadlallah in an operation that included hiring operatives who detonated a car bomb outside the Beirut apartment building where Fadlallah lived.

As described by Bob Woodward in Veil, “the car exploded, killing 80 people and wounding 200, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who had happened to be in the immediate neighborhood was killed, hurt or terrorized, but Fadlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge ‘Made in the USA’ banner in front of a building that had been blown out.”

In other words, the U.S. government dove into the bloody swamp of terrorism even as it was condemning other parties of engaging in terrorism. But the moral morass that was Lebanon, circa 1982-85, is not what Friedman and other U.S. propagandists describe when they smear Iran as some particularly evil force. Nor does Friedman operate with an objective definition of terrorism.

As Colin Powell recognized, once the United States joined the Lebanese civil war as a belligerent, U.S. troops became legitimate targets for retaliation. As much as one may lament the deaths of 241 U.S. personnel (or any deaths for that matter), it was not an act of “terrorism.”

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.