NEWS

• December 2010:

Making a Mockery of the Real Crime of Rape

Assange Beseiged

By ISRAEL SHAMIR and PAUL BENNETT

The plot thickens as our favorite hero of the Matrix; our own “Captain Neo” Julian Assange, faces danger yet again. When we last parted company with the legendary founder of WikiLeaks, he was breathing a sigh of relief after dodging spurious double-rape charges. The complaints were dropped, and our hero was free to roam the globe once again. But soap opera plots are repetitive; the story was quickly recycled and now our brave captain is again under threat of being castrated on Stockholm’s Stora Torget, or whatever the latest craven penalty is for molesting sacred Nordic virgins in a land where Vikings once ruled.

In other words, the farcical rape charges have once again been leveled against the Pentagon’s Public Enemy Number One. Julian Assange now stands accused of: (1) not calling a young woman the day after he had enjoyed a night with her, (2) asking her to pay for his bus ticket, (3) having unsafe sex, and (4) participating in two brief affairs in the course of one week. These four minor charges, worthy of Leopold Bloom’s mock trial in the Nightown chapter in Ulysses, have been shaken and fermented until they were able to cook up a half-baked rape case! Step down Iran; Sweden takes the cake! While Iran is notorious for unyielding conservative sentences against adulterers, Sweden shows us what the liberal side of the coin looks like as she invents criminal charges for failing to telephone and for careless use of preservatives in consensual acts of affection. Worse, they are purposely conflating consensual sex with rape for political purposes. In this, Sweden makes a mockery of the very real crime of violent rape.

The Swedes have a practical reason behind their deceptively slapstick police-work. The WikiLeaks founder, pursued by malevolent forces around the world, sought momentary relief beneath Sweden’s reputation as a bastion of free speech. But the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service. That got the present right-wing government out of its chair, as it does everything it can to bury the Prime Minister Olof Palme’s legacy of careful neutrality. The suspicion of whether the rape farce is an orchestrated campaign, might be illuminated by these facts: (1) Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan, (2) Assange’s WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary which exposed this cruel and needless neo-colonial campaign. Furthermore, the expected release of new secret materials by WikiLeaks might just influence the general elections on September 19. Perhaps that explains the sudden police raid on a WikiLeaks server.

An American Tea Party website the RightwingNews.com suggested that “a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around [Assange’s] skull the next time he appears in public as a warning”. Rest assured that the CIA is wiser than the Tea Party. They at least have learned the lesson of Che Guevara. Nowadays they ruin a rebel’s reputation instead of wasting a bullet. They won’t raise Assange up to become a martyr, they simply use his own erstwhile allies to reduce him to a laughing stock. They stain him with opprobrium. It is much more certain and final than the marksman’s shot. History is witness to their growing efficiency in using this tactic. In the 70’s, they could only bring themselves to say that Philip Agee was a womanizer and a drunkard. Nowadays they do not stint at charges of pedophilia, for example to humiliate Scott Ritter for failing to go along with George W Bush’s charade of Iraqi WMD. As you might expect, the rape campaign against Assange might be just an initial volley. Perhaps they will decide he is a pedophile too. The unspoken threat is enough to send some faint-hearted supporters of WikiLeaks scurrying for cover.

The bullet can always come later, once the victim has been successfully isolated by the smear campaign. The Gospels tell us that hardly anyone followed Jesus to Golgotha, though just a week earlier the people of Jerusalem hailed Him with hosannas. A Jewish anti-Gospel explains that this was the result of a successful smear campaign managed by Judas, a surprisingly modernist reading for an early medieval story.

For a smear that really sticks, you need to get it from an ex-apostle. An accusation by a Caiaphas does not impress. If you are targeting a leftist, hire leftists. For example, Trotskyites were willing and useful tools against the Communists. Pseudo Anti-Zionists are currently being used to hamstring a genuine Pro-Palestinian movement. Who are the Judases of this campaign against our Julian?

• An anonymous group claiming to be “Wikileaks insiders” uploaded a new site full of “revelations” about Assange’s past and present, claiming he lives in luxury in South Africa on donated funds – though he appears almost daily in Swedish media and police reports.

• Another ex-apostle is the Icelander politician Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is misrepresented as a “Wikileaks spokesperson”. She called on Assange “to step down” and leave Wikileaks to drift without his guidance – as if WikiLeaks is somehow separate from Assange.

• The pseudo-progressive organization Reporters Sans Frontières attacked Assange for endangering the lives of innocent American secret agents in Afghanistan. Despite its ‘leftist’ terminology, RSF is a private organization drawing funds from US government sources aiming to destabilize Cuba. It is connected to Cuban émigrés in Miami.

• Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes  in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter.  Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”

However we do not have to accept the single-bullet theory. Life is more complicated than that. In addition to her anti-Castro, pro-CIA streak, Anna Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of male-bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an expert on sexual harassment and the male “master suppression techniques”. Once, as she was lecturing, a male student in the audience looked at his notes instead of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual harassment because he discriminated against her for being a woman and because she claimed he made use of the male “master suppression technique” in trying to make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once again report him for sexual harassment, again because he was using the “master suppression technique”, this time to belittle her feelings.

Ardin is apparently involved with a “Christian” Social-Democrat group. The Swedish church has a precious few male priests: what was once the struggle for female equality has ended up with men being effectively removed from service. Nowadays very few Swedish male-female couples marry in the church, or get married at all; most Swedish gay couples, however, are proud to become “man and wife” in the church. This is all good news for wealthy Swedes: deserted churches sell their properties (once enjoyed by the community) to be fenced off by the nouveau riche created by the latest privatization wave. So much for Swedish social democracy!

The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna’ friend. There is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together. Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-like behavior.  Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism. Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?

The brilliant Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon describes, in his funny novel My One and Only Love, how the secret services employ young ladies for honey-traps. Is this the case here? Perhaps it is nothing more than a case of gold digging. New legislation, in Sweden and all over Europe, has made men extremely vulnerable to extortion scams of this sort. A young Swedish woman, 26 (her name withheld) succeeded in winning over a million dollars during the course of one vacation in Greece, as reported by the Daily Telegraph. She complained of being raped. Four men were arrested, their names disclosed, and their jobs jeopardized. She went back home a millionaire, her sacred identity safely preserved. Her success begs imitation: according to an EU report, Sweden has twenty times more rape complaints than were generated by the hot-blooded Italians. Most are dismissed right away, and justly so.

Rape is a horrible crime, and it should not be stretched to encompass minor misdemeanors and moral failings (like the failure to give an encouraging phone call the next day). Tellingly, when the complainant’s advocate was asked why the young women were unsure whether they were raped, he replied: “They are not lawyers”. Rape (like murder) is a crime that one needs no lawyers to understand. Rape is a capital crime: if the rape charges are proved false, then certainly the complainant should be charged with criminal defamation.

As for Julian Assange, we need him. We need our captain Neo, whether chaste or womanizer, in order to uncover the secret doings of our governments behind the Matrix. For our own sakes, we must all do our part to protect him from castrating feminists and secret services alike.

Israel Shamir can be reached at:

 adam@israelshamir.net

October 2010:

 

We got the terrible news (with a 2 months delay) that Rod Coronado is back in Federal Prison for Four Months for Friending Another Person on Facebook!!! 

Guy Debord was right! This society is gonna become more and more ridiculous until the moment of its dissolution...

Update on Rod Coronado

by Johnny Boy Jovem

August 21, 2010

On August 3, 2010, Rod Coronado was sentenced to four months in federal prison for allegedly violating the terms of his probation, i.e., for “associating” with Earth First! cofounder and former Greenpeace U.S.A. Director Mike Roselle, by accepting his “friendship” on Facebook, and for accessing an unauthorized computer outside his home. (There is no current evidence that the FBI surreptitiously surveiled Mr. Coronado’s Facebook account. Mike Roselle is a prominent environmental organizer and author, active most recently in the campaign to ban mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.)

The probation terms Mr. Coronado is said to have violated were not related to his most recent case, which resulted in a hung jury and a plea deal in 2008. In that case, a San Diego jury declined to convict Coronado for answering a question after a talk in which an audience member asked him how incendiary devices were made. (Coronado answered generally while holding up a jug of apple juice from the concession table; the government’s own presentation at trial contained far more detailed and accurate information.)

One probation term Mr. Coronado was accused of violating (the association term) was left over from his federal conviction in Arizona in 2005 for trying to disrupt a mountain lion hunt through peaceful means. The other (the computer monitoring term) was added by a federal judge in Michigan after Coronado moved there to help raise is son. The San Diego judge did not impose any computer conditions on Coronado, and had also told him he was free to associate with Earth First!ers, in part to spread the message that his views on activism had changed.

In August 2006, Mr. Coronado wrote a Statement from Prison renouncing property damage as a tactic and advocating social change through other means. He wrote, in part: “What our world needs now is a whole lot more love and a lot less violence. Nothing in this world will change overnight. But if we live peace and teach our children well, they might still inherit a world better than ours.”

Mr. Coronado has not veered from this message. He is not accused of any crime. He has been allowed to self-surrender to begin serving the four month sentence locked away from his children, his partner, and his community. His three year term of probation will begin anew upon his release.

Ben Rosenfeld is a San Francisco Civil Rights Attorney and Board Member of the Civil Liberties Defense Center based in Eugene, OR (www.cldc.org).

• September 2010:

German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote almost two centuries ago: 

"Those who begin by burning books will end up burning people."

"Those who begin by burning books will end up burning people."

• August 2010:

We are  very sad  to report the death of Marilyn Buck a  beautiful women who gave up her freedom so that others could be free. A true bodhisattva in this ocean of suffering. Please acquaint yourself with her story and pray for her!

This is one of her poems recorded from prison:

Marilyn Jean Buck (December 13, 1947 – August 3, 2010) was an American communist revolutionary, convict, and poet who was imprisoned for her participation in the 1979 prison break of Assata Shakur, the 1981 Brinks robbery and the 1983 U.S. Senate bombing. Buck received an 80-year sentence, which she served in Federal prison, from where she published numerous articles and other texts. She was released on July 15, 2010, less than a month before her death at age 62 from cancer.

ONWARD TOWARDS THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY!!!

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. 

 "The Mission," Chapter 8 in Torture Garden Octave Mirbeau