Today Jill Stein announced her VP pick: Ajamu Baraka.
I’ll admit the name didnt ring a bell, but according to his own website he is a human rights activist and a funding director of the US Human Rights Network
www.ajamubaraka.com/...
If you want to read some of his opinions, here is his website.
www.ajamubaraka.com
Apart from writing about human rights, he stands out for his rather radical views. Among others he blamed France for the terrorist attacks there this year:
“And in that sense, while the victims of the violence in Paris may have been innocent, France was not. French crimes against Arabs, Muslims and Africans are ever- present in the historical memory and discourse of many members of those populations living in France. Those memories, the systemic discrimination experienced by many Muslims and the collaboration of French authorities with the U.S. and others that gave aid and logistical support to extremist elements in Syria and turned their backs while their citizens traveled to Syria to topple President Assad, became the toxic mix that resulted in the blowback on November 13.”
www.ajamubaraka.com/...
But, and that’s where it gets interesting: he is also known as a critic of…..Bernie Sanders.
At a time when Jill Stein has spent months pandering to the bernieorbust crowd, is more known for her vicious attacks on Hillary than for her own political ideas, she picks a Sanders’ critic of the far left to pander to Sanders supporters..
In an article in which he speaks about the war in Yemen (and Saudi Arabia attacks on that country) he writes among others:
www.ajamubaraka.com/…
Do Non-European Lives really Matter to White Leftists?
The political reaction to the killing spree in Yemen that now eclipses the murderous assault on Gaza by Israel, has not only been met with indifference but many leftists and radicals in the U.S. have given their support to Bernie Sanders who said very clearly that under his administration the Saudi’s would be given even more latitude to carry out military operations in the Middle-East. The Sanders’ position is that the Saudi’s needed to get their “hands a little dirty.” For Bernie and his supporters, the mischief that the Saudi government and private individuals have been engaged in across the region financing groups like ISIS wasn’t dirty enough.”
“After pounding the country into rubble with six months of terror from the sky, the Saudi’s are now involved in ground operations in Yemen that will only increase the death toll and the humanitarian disaster.
This is the world that a President Sanders promises—continued war crimes from the sky with drone strikes and Saudi led terror in support of the Western imperial project.
This is not to suggest that everyone who might find a way to support Sanders is a closet racist and supporter of imperialism. I know plenty of folks of all backgrounds who “feel the Bern.” There is, however, an objective logic to their uncritical support that they cannot escape and which I believe represents the ongoing crisis of radicalism in the U.S. and Europe.”
“The Sanders’ campaign, like the Obama phenomenon before it, does not offer a program or strategic direction for addressing the current crisis and contradictions of Western capitalist societies. Instead, it is an expression of the moral and political crisis of the Western radicalism.”
“In their desperate attempt to defend Sanders and paint his critics as dogmatists and purists, the Sanders supporters have not only fallen into the ideological trap of a form of narrow “left” nativism, but also the white supremacist ethical contradiction that reinforces racist cynicism in which some lives are disposable for the greater good of the West.
And as much as the ‘Sandernistas ’ attempt to disarticulate Sanders “progressive” domestic policies from his documented support for empire (even the Obamaite aphorism “The perfect is the enemy of the good” is unashamedly deployed), it should be obvious that his campaign is an ideological prop – albeit from a center/left position – of the logic and interests of the capitalist-imperialist settler state.”
The bright side I guess, is that not everyone who supported Bernie is a closet racist and supporter of imperialism.
But then: Bernie apparently is.
I think its fair to say that nothing in this election should surprise us anymore after seeing the Donald combust the last couple of days, but if this was an attempt to get the bernieorbust vote, saying they fell for white supremacists’ thinking, and flat out accusing Bernie of racism ..makes Harambe looking better and better as third party candidate.