NY Times Runs Interference For Anti-Abortion Terrorists

In Wake of Tiller Assassination, NY Times Runs Interference For Anti-Abortion Terrorists

Monday, June 8, 2009, on page A10, the NY Times is at it again, running political interference for the anti-abortion movement. Almost the entire page is taken up by a puff piece on the anti-abortionists and their alleged dilemmas and uncertainty in the wake of their smashing victory resulting from the execution of Dr. George Tiller. The Times repeats over and over the phony disclaimers of responsibility and alleged regret over the murder by the anti-abortionists, and reinforces the sham contention that there is no terrorist wing to the anti-abortion movement. (This contention is belied by the support given to terrorists like Slepian assassin James Charles Kopp and clinic and Olympics bomber and cop-killer Eric Robert Rudolph, who were able to avoid capture for long periods because of support from the anti-abortion community. The Catholic press even editorialized on behalf of Kopp while he was on the lam.) The article reeks sympathy for these terrorist supporters, who are no doubt secretly gleeful over their success in permanently ending Tiller's medical practice after decades of attacking him, his workers, his family, and his clinic.

This most recent Times article on behalf of the anti-abortionists falsely distances the assassin of Tiller, Scott P. Roeder from the movement he is a part of, repeating absurd lies that no one knew him, he wasn't connected to them, etc.

And of course the times continues to hide FBI complicity in the latest murder, namely their refusal to enforce Federal law and arrest Roeder when he was caught redhanded by clinic personnel glueing their locks the day before carrying out the assassination, and previous Federal crimes he was seen committing. (The bogus Federal Clinic Protection Act is one of these window-dressing laws designed to dupe people and keep them passively waiting for the Government to protect them. It neutralizes people by keeping them corraled within the system, while with the other hand the Government allows terrorists to operate freely.)

The Times also ignores the vicious hostility of Kansas "authorities" (the legitimizing term for people in power) towards abortion providers, including Tiller, who they repeatedly harassed, investigated, and prosecuted, while ignoring criminal violations by the anti-abortion terrorists. (Screaming in people's faces to change their behavior certainly constitutes terrorism in its low-grade form. And as with mob pressure, the implied threat of violence backs up what the anti-abortionists do.)

The Times of course has long been anti-abortion, in a smarmy, underhanded, dishonest way, trying to undermine the beliefs of their "liberal" readers. It does this most obviously by using anti-abortion terminology in its "news" articles (which is pretends are "objective"). It never calls intact dilation and extraction just that, but uses the inflammatory anti-abortionist propaganda term "partial birth abortion." It calls the anti-abortionists "pro-life," another propaganda term. (These fanatics who allegedly find life so sacred, never made a peep about Reagan's massive state terrorism in Central America in the 1980s, for example.)

The Times also consistently slants its abortion coverage negatively towards women's right to control their own bodies. They paint pro-choice people are unreasonable and uncompromising.

This is a line the whole ruling class of the U.S. pushes. The right to abortion was one of the concessions the rulers of the U.S. were forced to make in the 1960s and '70s under pressure from militant movements from below. Ever since, they have been trying to reverse these concessions, including the right to abortion, which they constantly chip away at and demonize. Laws and court decisions keep adding more and more restrictions to the "right," (some right!). Abortion, when it is discussed in the media, is treated as something awful or tragic, or at best something undesirable to be eliminated. Pro-choice people are constantly invited to "the debate" in terms of how to eliminate abortion. Abortion providers have been effectively isolated from the medical establishment, forced to practice in standalone clinics which is like painting a bullseye on them.

The massive terrorism starting under Reagan, which included countless thousands of acts of intimidation, threats, vandalism, firebombings, bombings, maimings and now 8 known assassinations, is blacked out by the Times and the rest of the U.S. media. Only an out and out assassination is "newsworthy" to these propagandists. Environmentalists who commit property damage are reviled as "ecoterrorists" by the media, Times, FBI, and the full weight of secret police methods is brought to bear against them- infiltration, agents provocateurs, every kind of spying method, draconian "conspiracy" and "terrorism" laws, Grand Jury dragnets; the whole panoply of repressive methods the U.S. has in its arsenal. Same thing they did to the totally legal Central American solidarity movements. The FBI even tried to have one of its infiltrators, Frank Varelli, plant guns on one such group, according to Varelli's Congressional testimony. More recently, Muslim men were subjected to a massive roundup and brutal internment in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. Government covered up the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy, even though they had moles inside the terrorists' nest in that case. No raids or roundups resulted. Muslim charities have also been shut down and persecuted, with draconian sentences for people sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

But repression by U.S. secret police agencies doesn't stop there. They also use rightwing terrorist organizations to carry out bombings and assassinations. A few of many examples include the San Diego “Secret Army Organization.” An FBI agent (i.e. badge-carrying member of the FBI, an alleged “law enforcement officer,” participated in a shooting attack on an academic perceived as leftwing by the FBI. He was in the car with the gunman who fired into the professor's home, hitting a woman in the elbow, permanently maiming her.

When the KKK assassinated civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, FBI “informer” instigator Gary Rowe was in the assassins' car. The FBI was in the business of persecuting civil rights activists. Headed for years by notorious racist J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. into committing suicide before accepting his Nobel Peace Prize by making him aware of their tapes of his sexual trysts in motel rooms. (The “respectable” “commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an avowed admirer of fascists like Franco and McCarthy and known anti-Semite, was the FBI's media conduit for “leaking” this sexual blackmail dirt into the public domain. It speaks volumes about the political economy of the U.S. that Buchanan is a ubiquitous presence in the U.S. media.)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (part of the U.S. Treasury, which contains a number of repressive “police” agencies, has been involved in various acts of terrorism through surrogate organizations. The BATF had an infiltrator in the base camp (“Elohim City”) from which the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing emanated, and was forewarned by their mole.

BATF also had one of two Government agents inside the Klan-Nazi combine that murdered five leaders of the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. In fact they organized the assassinations which specifically targeted the CWP leaders at a public demonstration. The NY Times went so far as to label a photo of the assassins taking guns from the trunk of their car as “CWP” members. (Stalinist propagandists had nothing on the NY Times.) Not only is this not secret, but the PBS show Frontline even had a program about it discussing the instigation by these Government agents provocateurs. (The assassins were acquitted at trial, this being the reactionary South. The CWP was effectively destroyed. The Government targeted the CWP because the CWP was effectively standing up to the Klan-Nazis and encouraging armed opposition to these Government-sponsored terror groups.

As in the Weimar Republic, where Nazis could murder leftists with impunity, but leftists who fought back were vigorously prosecuted for self-defense, the heavy hand of state power puts progressives, and indeed any decent human beings who want to be politically engaged, at a huge and physically perilous disadvantage. Since people who engage in what is supposed to be legal political activities are also targeted for “neutralization,” -anything from constant harassment, firing from jobs, evictions, false arrests, oppressive surveillance through electronic and other means, on through to long prison sentences on trumped up charges with perjured and fabricated “evidence” and even assasination, this makes it virtually impossible to effectively organize for change in America. (And then the impulse for change gets channeled and neutralized by gulling people into following Pied Pipers like Barack Obama.)

Meanwhile the anti-abortion terrorists have scored another victory. Abortion is unavailable in at least 83% of all U.S. counties. Tiller's clinic is closed permanently. More people are intimidated. The official U.S. definition of terrorism is violence used for the purpose of achieving a political goal. If the U.S. media and Government weren't totally cynical in their use of law and language, they would have long ago used the words "terrorists" and "terrorism" for the violent arm of the anti-abortion movement and their crimes. But of course they won't even report their thousands of crimes with exceedingly rare exceptions.

The "law" is not neutral, and "justice" is not blind. Laws are instruments of power for rulers, which only fitfully are related to morality, and their application and enforcement are rarely evenhanded and in the interest of justice, understood in terms of normal human morality. This is true in most countries, and most certainly in the U.S. Meanwhile the pernicious false consciousness promoted and reinforced daily by the system's propaganda organs, aka "the media," needs to be chipped away at with facts and truth.
June 10, 2009

NY Times Phony "Reform" Editorials

Every week or two the New York Times runs an editorial bemoaning the dysfunction of the State Government in Albany and calling for "reform."  But when there was an actual chance for reform to occur, the Times went all-out to sabotage it.

I refer to the aborted Governorship of Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer, unlike all the phonies who preceded him in the office, actually was determined to reform the horribly corrupt, inept, dysfunctional and ossified political setup perpetuated by the horrible hack politicians who rule New York State. Spitzer was a driven and hard-driving, moralistic man who genuinely tried to shake up the venal political system. 

Immediately the Times and the other NYC daily rags (NY Post and NY Daily News, owned respectively by plutocrats Rupert Murdoch, a global purveyor of crude fascistic agitprop, and real estate baron Mortimer Zuckerman) set out to check Spitzer. Instead of supporting Spitzer, the Times ran character assassination pieces about what a rotten personality Spitzer had, this being the putative reason he was running into opposition to reform! (That the entrenched vested interests could care less about his personality, and resisted change because of their self-interest, is obvious, and was ignored in these Times' hatchet jobs.) 

Next, Joseph Bruno, a lifelong corrupt hack who was the Republican boss of the State Senate, was discovered to be misusing State Police copters to ferry himself around the state on partisan political errands. When Spitzer's people leaked this to the press, the press turned it into a scandal against Spitzer! That is, Spitzer broke some unwritten rule by investigating Bruno and by leaking the results. This was labeled "Troopergate" by the media lynch mob. Even to this day, "Troopergate" means a Spitzer scandal, not a Bruno scandal. Amazing.

Finally, the media found a sword with which to slay Spitzer. The FBI, one of the U.S.' secret police agencies, snooped into a prostitution ring. (Or were tapping Spitzer.) Of all the upper classs clients of the ring, ONLY SPITZER was named. Yes, he broke the law. Of course, it is oppressive and unjust that prostitution is illegal in the first place. And Spitzer was hypocritical (show me a person who isn't hypocritical about something!) because of his past public crusading against prostitution and johns. But Spitzer was in the bullseye of the finance capitalists and their Federal hatchetmen who held a grudge from when, as State Attorney General, he went after Wall Street and made them pay fines for their various crimes and misdemeanor. (The financiers and their organs like the Wall Street Journal were positively gloating when they got Spitzer.)

As recently as Saturday, June 6, 2009, the Times was at it again, with another hand-wringing, sanctimonious "reform" editorial. They're full of it. The Sulzbergers and their fellow plutocrats like the political system just the way it is, because the corrupt hacks in Albany (and in New York City for that matter) give them everything they want. For instance, when the Times needed to run roughshod over property owners in Times Square to seize a site for its new temple, the Government used its power to do the Times' bidding,

It's easier to control unethical, amoral hustlers who have no principles and are dependent on and beholden to the media. The reason these rags run fake calls for "reform" is pure posturing, and to fool the rubes who credulously believe the propaganda they're reading. Apparently you can fool most of the people most of the time quite easily.

Since this was originally posted,  the Times has run a couple of more editorials (through June 14, '09) bemoaning the political circus in Albany. Two putative Democrats, a girlfriend-face-slashing bully named Hiram Monserrate, and a sleazy crook named Pedro Espada Jr., were paid by a billionaire named Thomas Golisano to vote with the Republicans to seize control of the State Senate from the Democrats. Golisano had the brass to run a full page ad in the NY Daily News braying about how wonderful it all is. (Both Monserrate and Espada are under investigation for scams whereby they set up "nonprofits," fund them with taxpayer money, and siphon off the proceeds. Espada also lies about where he lives- he doesn't live in the district he "represents," as required by law, but lives outside NYC in an "upscale" area. They are classic examples of amoral, ethics- and scruples-free political animals who dominate politics, especially in New York.) 

So the times just deeps its cynical hypocrisy with each new handwringing editorial bemoaning the tawdry state of NY politics, which it helped perpetuate by sabotaging would-be reformer Spitzer.