(Photo by Mohammad Ismail/Reuters)

Among the speakers was an Israeli doctor whose talk was by Skype. What he would have to say about immigration could only have to do with Zionist settlement on Palestinian land. You can imagine my horror, even though he was a liberal Zionist who advocated the 1967 borders. I was the only one who challenged him in what seemed to be a political event attended by dead people with no connection to immigration & who couldn’t distinguish immigration from colonialism.

Two of us made an enormous stink about his inclusion as a speaker & persuaded a leading figure in the institute that it was a disastrous political mistake. That eventually led to the resignation of the director.

I relate this story not for self-aggrandizement (though I am certainly proud of the role I played) but because there are going to be all sorts of opportunities like this now that Israel is out to destroy BDS. Activists will be called upon to challenge such events & it’s clear that many will be persuaded by our best efforts.

(Please don’t ask which institute was involved since they corrected their course & that is not relevant to the story. Perhaps more important is that Mexico is politically repressive & the institute had to protect itself from government repression–which does not explain their inclusion of the Israeli guy but makes their avoidance of Mexican politics at least understandable.)

He formed his own group in 1996 with the misnomer, Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, specifically so he could go after Palestinians for human rights crimes, but it folded in 2011, ostensibly for lack of funds & probably because he couldn’t get anybody to work for him.

Now Eid has aligned himself with the Gatestone Institute in the US run by Elie Wiesel (a Zionist ideologue & big fat liar), John Bolton (US official under Bush), Nina Rosenwald (a notorious Islamophobe), & James Woolsey (former CIA director). Gatestone publishes writings by Alan Dershowitz to give an idea of its low intellectual caliber.

Eid is now touring campuses in the US & Canada, racking up honorifics all over the place by calling himself a Palestinian human rights activist & campaigning against BDS. He associates with Avi Posnick, the managing director of Stand With Us New York, a rightwing Zionist group that got the New York State Assembly to pass a resolution last year condemning BDS. The strategy is to get the NYS Assembly to follow up with a bill that goes beyond condemnation of BDS to outlawing New York from investing in companies that participate in BDS. The resolution was supported by both Democrats & Republicans. Of course.

Last Tuesday, Posnick brought Eid to the NYS Assembly to lecture lawmakers about the perils of BDS & was then publicly thanked by the assembled politicians. The photo is a dour Posnick & a smug, sorry-assed Eid standing while the assembled politicians give the dog a bone.

Make Bassem Eid’s fame a fleeting one. Build & honor the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS). Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(Photo is screen shot from video of regrettable moment:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_pLDGNrhKs)

“I am seeking a seat on the DNC to spread one message far & wide: to defeat Trump & win back the Supreme Court, we need to build a united front to defeat Republicans in November & elect a bloc of senators in swing states. The most important need is to put together a ticket & platform doing the least damage & divisions in our ranks. Build without bruising? We have suffered losses in close or stolen elections before & with we might have conducted ourselves differently. Trump represents a growing, virulent, violent & hateful resentment of too many groups to event count up. I do what I can everyday to engage both Hillary & Bernie supporters on how to best repair their differences & achieve unity in the short & long run.”

That Hayden is a hack comes as no surprise. That Sanders’ supporters would endorse this proposal exposes the fault line of lesser evil politics: that it lacks the bearings of political principle. It would be good for Sandernistas to explain how the differences between Clinton & Sanders can be brokered. But of course, meaningful differences never existed in the first place, except in the realm of chimera.

A forensic report on Arellano’s brain was done for the courts when he was trying to weasel out of jail time. It was concluded the combination of dementia with multifactorial Alzheimer led to mental derangement, including cognitive & psychotic disorders. He was also diagnosed with metabolic encephalopathies (a syndrome of overall brain dysfunction) & alcoholism. One could claim these were the very qualities which made him so effective as a general of death squads. But it’s also a possibility they were the direct consequence of his murderous, rightwing politics.

The glee is that he croaked; the regret is that he never answered to justice for his monstrous crimes against the people of Chile.

Good riddance to him.

(Photo of Arellano by Santiago Llanquin/AP)

Civilization’s Cradle,
I said, is broken.
I am a witness
I must howl.
In every well in Baghdad
A rafiq is weeping
While long black coats
(With gas masks)
Huddle at the Wailing Wall
As if prayers could halt
Smart bombs.

“Rhetoric, not lyric,”
My peers echoed Yeats
“Argue with yourself not others.”
An adjunct admonished,
“A warhead soaring
From the earth’s womb
Was over the top. Navy Seals
Stockpiling kneepads was sick.
Not ars poetica.”

(Photo is poster Rafiq bought at Sinn Fein shop in Dublin)