The Islamization of The Green Party

The Palestinianization of reality has become overwhelming. The recent World Economic Forum at Davos was engulfed by it. Human rights and academic organizations, campus life, websites, conferences, media coverage, and daily life at the United Nations all focus obsessively on a country--Palestine--that does not even exist and on only one group of refugees in the world--the Palestinians. The rest be damned.

Both illiterate and educated civilians remain transfixed by Arafat's Gangsta Soap Opera. Israel is the Nazi, apartheid, "settler" state and America is the world's most dangerous terrorist regime. And Muslims are peaceful and not the world's largest practioners of gender and religious apartheid and jihad.

Increasing numbers of people are addicted to the reduction of complex matters into something simplistic, ugly, repetitive--and yet strangely arousing. Such purposeful non-thinking has infected tens of millions of people in the Islamic world and in the West who, in a protest against reason, continue to call for a boycott against Israel.

Arafat's virus has now infected the Tree People.

On November 21, 2005, The Green Party of the United States resolved to "divest from Israel." Resolution 190 calls for a "boycott of Israel" and urges all governments, Green Parties around the world, and campus Greens to help implement an international boycott. The resolution describes Israel as "comparable" to the South African apartheid state and calls for the "serious consideration of a single, secular, democratic state as the national home of both Israelis and Palestinians."

The Green Party is thus on record as calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

How this particular demand helps endangered species or addresses global warming remains to be seen. But, within weeks, the Trondheim region of Norway and the Basque country, Arbizu, also resolved to participate in a "comprehensive boycott" of Israel.

Resolution 190 does not condemn the Palestinian serial suicide murders of Israeli and other civilians. It also calls for East Jerusalem to become an open city for all faiths. Apparently its signatories are unaware that Muslim terrorists groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah, and Muslim governments in general have an abominable record towards the practioners of non-Muslim religions. They tax, confiscate their property, jail, torture, murder or exile them; in our time, Muslims burn churches, murder Christians, and be-head Christian teenage girls.

In 1982, the late Petra Kelly founded the first-ever Green Party in Germany. Although American progressives have had serious environmental concerns, The Association of state Green Parties in the United States was not founded until 1996. It was a latter day attempt to politicize Woodstock Nation. Anarchists, "freaks," tree-huggers, eco-feminists, anti-corporate activists, and the occasional Marxist were all welcome; they agreed on nothing, seemed harmless, and made no difference.

In 2000, this all changed when Ralph Nader ran for the American Presidency on the Green Party ticket. As of November of 2005, Green Party candidates won at least 19 electoral races and 34 Green Party candidates were elected in the United States. Membership has been variously estimated as between 250,000-300,000 people.

New York State Green Party member, environmentalist and pianist Lorna Salzman was once a potential Green Party candidate for the U.S. Presidency. She has recently been "purged" by the Women's Caucus of the New York state Green Party for having committed various Thought Crimes, e.g. she opposed Green Party support for Georgian Cynthia McKinney, who believed that the American government was behind 9/11. According to Salzman, McKinney also refused to distance herself from anti-Jewish statements made by McKinney's father. Although Salzman is no Zionist, she is alarmed by the rising tide of Jew-hatred in the world and fears the imposition of Islamic religious law and its "inevitable subversion of secularism, secular democracy, basic civil liberties, and open discourse."

According to Salzman, "the US Green Party has given aid and comfort to both anti-Semites and terrorist organizations" and has now "been taken over by leftists and radical Islamists whom they have allowed to dictate the party's national policies." Salzman also notes that Resolution 190 violates one of the USGP's ten Key Values, namely that of "Grassroots Democracy".

The vote, which took place in Wisconsin, was almost a secret vote. No discussion or debate took place among party members or within state parties. According to Salzman, 72 delegates actually voted. Fifty-five were in favor, 7 were opposed, 10 abstained. Mohammed K. Abed, of the Wisconsin Green Party, who is also a member of al-Awda (The Palestinian Right of Return), initiated the Resolution but he was joined by non-Muslim and non-Palestinian international and national GP members such as Justine McCabe, Scott McLarty, Ben Manski, and Ruth Weill. The Green Party has also reached a mysterious "Memo of Understanding" with the American Muslim Association.

In fact, it was just announced February 2nd that Mohammed Abed, the Wisconsin Green Party member who sponsored Resolution 190 to boycott Israel, will be speaking at the Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference which will take place at Georgetown University from February 17-19 2006. Other speakers include Sue Blackwell, the British academic who led the Association of Teachers (AUT) boycott of Israeli academic institutions in 2005. In the past, the PSM conference has promoted divestment and a one-state solution, and has refused to renounce terrorism.

I visited the al-Awda website (Mazin Qumsiyeh, who penned the Davos Divest-in-Israel piece, was formerly a propagandist for and member of al-Awda), which describes Israel as a "colonial settler" and "terrorist state" and refers to its government as the "U.S. backed Zionist junta." It demands that charges against Professor Sami al-Arian be dropped, and appeals for funding for Palestinian causes. Al-Awda condemns Israeli "assassinations," but not Palestinian and Islamist serial suicide-murders. It also focuses on Palestinian suffering as a function of Zionist Occupation, but fails to mention the corruption and murderousness of the Palestinian Authority as a contributing cause to Palestinian misery. Al-Awda's website does not mention any ecological concerns nor does it discuss the Palestinian trashing of the Gazan greenhouses -- which American Jewish philanthropists specifically funded so that Palestinians might take them over. Al-Awda has just opened a national office in Washington DC and is planning state branches throughout the United States.

Indeed, Resolution 190 is a serious distraction from pressing green issues, including health care, ocean fisheries, endangered rainforests, tax cuts for the rich, etc. Thus, the presumably non-violent and democratic Greens have forged an alliance with "outside special interest groups" which seriously and routinely violate human rights, and which use violence to terrorize and subjugate people. Ironically, the Green Left is courting Islamist terrorists who are notoriously anti-Left and anti-secular.

The Greens are notoriously "anti-war." This really means that they are anti-President Bush's Iraq war but do not necessarily oppose the war against the Jews or the war against black African Christians and animists who are being genocidally slaughtered in Sudan by ethnic Arab Muslims.

Some Green Party members and sympathizers are worried about this latest turn of events. They fear that GP candidates will lose in the coming elections because of this misguided stand. They may or may not be right. Oregonian businessman, Gary Acheatel, voted Green in the elections of 2000. He has always "admired the Green agenda." He now says that "it is time for people to stop complaining about Israel's poor image and start making the case for Israel. He has founded the new Advocates for Israel, which will offer speakers and which will post all educational material and resources at its website: www.advocatesforisrael.org. He is also circulating a petition to the Green Party leadership and membership to rescind Resolution 190. Acheatel has joined the Green Party for one reason: "To create a groundswell of member activism to reverse the party's anti-Israel resolution."

In late January of 05, Professor Stanley Aronowitz of the CUNY Graduate Center, who ran for the New York State governship as a Green Party candidate, and Marakay Rogers who is the Green Party gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, sent a letter to the National Green Party leadership. They wrote that, "the credibility of the US Green Party has been badly damaged; resignations from the party are occurring....one of our main concerns is the fact that Green Party candidates will be running for public office next fall and will be put in a difficult position because of Resolution 190."

Aronowitz and Rogers believe that the National Committee must "revisit and review this resolution," and at least consult with Israel's Green Party. In their view, the resolution violates the Ten Key Values of the Green Party, "by failing to condemn violence on both sides and by failing to observe the principles of Grassroots Democracy when it approved the resolution without a broad discussion within the state parties and without soliciting dissenting views."

They stop short of condemning the concept of divestment in Israel.

Lorna Salzman and Gary Acheatel do not stop short. Salzman came to see me and described how the Green Party had always been ripe for a takeover and that one had happened before. "Today it's Islamists and Marxists. Yesterday, it was the Democratic Party who viewed Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader as a spoiler and a threat who needed to be punished. Nader siphoned votes away from Al Gore." According to Salzman, the Green Party "kicked Nader in the teeth." Secret meetings were held about how to best squash Nader. The behind-scenes GP nastiness, which included the hands-on activism of Soros-funded Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, became so bad that Nader ultimately chose to run as an independent in the 2004 Presidential election. Salzman also refers to various funding "payoffs" that Green Party members received for their anti-Nader activism and for their decision not to "make trouble for John Kerry in 2004."

When Salzman told people that she had been secretly expelled from the Green Party's Women's Caucus and removed from their listserv group, no one responded. Both she and Acheatel have found a level of complacency and fear among progressives that is deeply disturbing. Salzman describes herself as a "super rationalist and a devout atheist." She strongly believes that "all the anti-Israel stuff is a deflection away from the way Muslims treat women," and that "there is a much bigger story here that has to do with the radical left embracing traditional enemies: radical Islamists who hate the Left."

I wish her and fellow activist Gary Acheatel, and Aronowitz and Rogers too, Godspeed in their campaign to take back the Green Party from the Marxists and Islamists who have hijacked it.