The White House policy is explicitly endless, perpetual war.
“I’ve often wondered what that bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oval Office must be whispering to President Obama late at night as he’s making these kinds of plans,” says Tavis Smiley, author of the new book, “Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year.”
“Everybody quotes Martin. It’s almost become pablum and platitude to quote him every time we have a public gathering. But to really wrestle with the subversiveness of his truth about that triple threat that he talked about: racism, poverty and militarism?”
As debate continues over U.S. plans to launch airstrikes in Syria, Democracy Now! looks at the final year of King’s life when he became a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War, calling his government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Click here to watch the 15-minute interview with Tavis Smiley.
On Democracy Now! today, look at the increasingly dangerous political climate inside Israel where several peace protests have recently come under attack. On Saturday, right-wing activists burned a Palestinian flag, chanted racial slurs and threw stones at an antiwar protest in Haifa of Arabs and Israelis opposed to the bombardment of Gaza.
“There has been much incitement from the political class that has allowed even so-called moderate right-wingers to join cries saying, ‘Death to Arabs! Death to leftists!’ and attacking activists and Arabs in the street,” says Rann Bar-On, an Israeli peace activist who took part in the antiwar protest in Haifa.
“The police allowed them to attack us, to throw stones at us.” Click here to watch Bar-On, and journalist Max Blumenthal, discuss this political context in Israel on Democracy Now! today.
Image Credit: Khulud Khamis
“We felt that war criminals shouldn’t be honored by our university — and receive $35,000,” says Rutgers University senior Carmelo Cintrón Vivas about why students and faculty organized against Condoleezza Rice giving the commencement address this year. Watch his interview on Democracy Now! today, along with Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“The job of the military, as they see it, is to seek out the enemy and destroy them. When the enemy is nonviolent dissenters, the First Amendment becomes the enemy.”
Watch this Democracy Now! exclusive report.
“We knew the FBI was systematically trying to squash dissent. And dissent is the lifeblood of democracy,” says John Raines, who spoke on Democracy Now! today alongside his wife, Bonnie Raines.
They were two of the activists in the group that called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI who broke into an FBI office in 1971, exposing the existence of COINTELPRO.