"I am Dedon Kamathi. I am representing the cadre of African Programmers, Local Advisory Board Members, and Volunteers who were categorically purged en masse, and in all of the history of the contradictions not once are the struggles from 1984-1994 mentioned. Interesting. Is it because it was primarily Black? Or is it because those today who are singing the blues were part of the forces that purged the African volunteers and violated our 1st amendment rights?…"

Dedon Kamathi, Former KPFK Board Chair & programmer

The Purge of Black Pacifica

The History of a Decade of Struggle and its Implications for Today

© 2004 by Rafael Rentería

__________________________

"Remove ‘hate mongers’ – who viciously label other staff members and listeners ‘racist’ if they’re not black – or if they happen to be white or Jewish or Latino or middle class."

Steve Brown, WBAI Local Station Board, 2003

___________________________

Maurice Bishop

Don Rojas, general manager of Pacifica station WBAI in New York City, understands living under siege. He was the Editor in Chief of Grenada’s national newspaper The Free West Indian before he became Press Secretary for Maurice Bishop, the fiery leftist prime minister of the Black island nation in 1981, and remained in that post until 1983.

Then came a coup d'état, followed swiftly by a US invasion on October 25, 1983. Rojas told Democracy Now! "I was underground, so to speak, this coming a few days after the coup d'état that had assassinated Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, and several of his close colleagues. I was in hiding at the time. The invasion, of course, brought tremendous fury, death and destruction in the first 24 hours, and continuing for another week or so, active fighting throughout the country, resulting in the deaths of many Grenadians, and international workers, including Cubans who were there to help us construct the civilian international airport…I can say for certain that the US was very much involved inside of Grenada in terms of the ongoing campaign to destabilize the country from 1979 all the way up to 1983." In the end, Rojas was deported by US forces to Barbados, where the US press had been safely quarantined from the action during the invasion.

Twenty one years later, under immense pressure, and after only a year and a half on the job, Rojas became the second Black station manager to tender his resignation from Pacifica radio within a six month period following the imposition - by court order - of new, and hotly contested bylaws for the network.

Don Rojas

There is a virtual war at WBAI, with Black management, staff and their supporters on the local board pitted against white board members charging that the station’s programming is "anti-white," "anti-Semitic," and "hate radio." Opponents of the Black management and staff at that station are calling for a purge. Leading members of the current station board ran on a platform calling for a purge, and some called for a boycott of WBAI, as well. Their campaigns were a declaration of war, and the execution of their strategy for war has precipitated a crisis at the station. The notion of a war at WBAI is something more than metaphorical. It has broken into incidents of violence. WBAI is a station under siege.

The current crisis at WBAI, which reached its boiling point when Rojas’ submitted his pending resignation in June, has its roots in a deep, concerted and sustained attack on Pacifica radio by right wing forces in this country, as well as in internal divisions that have been intensified by the defeat of affirmative action measures in the elections of Pacifica’s local station boards. Divisions have also been exacerbated by the network’s negligence in carrying out its policy on Race and Nationality, designed to address intense and festering wounds that lay just beneath the social surface of events. Events and issues in the network today mirror with precision what unfolded in earlier periods. At Pacifica, race war is nothing new.

"PBS programs regularly attack whites." David Horowitz, cited by David Barsamian in Z Magazine

__________________________

The most dramatic episodes of Pacifica’s race war began with the purge in the 1990’s of virtually every program for the Black community at KPFK, Pacifica’s Los Angeles station. The purge was the result of a nationwide firestorm of Republican pressure unleashed by right wing social critic David Horowitz, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and their allies in Congress. What happened was this: Horowitz had listened to a KPFK special, "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend." Eric Roth records Horowitz’ reaction:

David Horowitz

"‘I was riding on the 405 and tuned in to KPFK, [where] Louis Farrakhan [was] giving a mesmerizing speech with the constant refrain 'Death is a horse with a pale rider,’ remembers Horowitz. ‘The whole weekend was incredibly racist.’ In response, Horowitz and Jerry Shapiro, Associate Director of the Los Angeles Anti-Defamation League, filed complaints with the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB]… KPFK officials believe that the charges of anti-Semitism are a cover for conservatives who are opposed to the station’s programming and [who] want to limit the public debate on social conditions. Horowitz acknowledges that his opposition to the station goes beyond the canceled programs…‘I'm opposed to taxpayers supporting KPFK and their liberal-left agenda.’"

Horowitz, a former leftist, former editor of Ramparts magazine (which had been a "high priority" target of the CIA’s operation MHCHAOS, a COINTELPRO-style effort that targeted the Left press for suppression, disruption and recruitment in the 1960’s) and former ally of the Black Panther Party, had done a radical flip – going to work for the CIA affiliated United States Information Agency in Central America. According to the Nation, "In the fall of 1987, Horowitz received a phone call from the office of Elliot Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State… A few weeks later, Horowitz found himself in Managua, Nicaragua, where, at the expense of US taxpayers, he offered tactical advice to anti-Sandinista labor unions, politicians, and journalists ..."

When Horowitz returned to the United States in 1988, he was hired as a speech writer by conservative Republican Sen. Bob Dole.

As David Barsamian points out in his article "Media Power & the Right-Wing Assault on Public Broadcasting," Horowitz was the intellectual author of much of the right wing assault on Pacifica and public broadcasting in the 1990’s. He is also known as a prominent, vociferous critic of the Reparations movement.

Horowitz’s Uncivil Wars, published in 2001, chronicles his "crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism." He is known for having criticized PBS, saying its programming "regularly attacks whites." Horowitz seems still haunted by Farrakhan’s horse and its pale rider – even now he is mounting a new public relations battle against Pacifica. He counts Marc Cooper, a leading figure associated with the purges and mainstreaming of KPFK in the 90’s, as "an honest man and a friend."

During that same period, the early 90’s, the ADL spy-scandal broke into the headlines, creating new woes for the League, whose reputation had long been tainted by their cooperation in targeting leftists for Senator Joe McCarthy. The Village Voice cited one source who thought it was "99 per cent certain that the ADL will be indicted." Much of the information in ADL files had allegedly been stolen from FBI and police data bases, including what the Voice said was "probably the theft of a classified FBI report on the Nation of Islam from the FBI's San Francisco office." There were allegations that the ADL had worked with the CIA, domestic police, the FBI, the Israeli Mossad, and South Africa’s apartheid-era Bureau for State Security (BOSS).

Joseph McCarthy

"In the late 1940s, the ADL spied on leftists and Communists, and shared investigative files with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the FBI. The ADL swung sharply to the right during the Reagan administration, becoming a bastion of neoconservatism. To Irwin Suall, a repentant Trotskyite who heads the ADL's powerful Fact Finding Department, the real danger to Jews is posed not by the right--but by a coalition of leftists, blacks, and Arabs, who in his view threaten the fabric of democracy in America, as well as the state of Israel."

For thirty years the ADL had run covert spy operations on a vast array of leftist and progressive groups – 9,876 individuals and more than 950 groups -- from the pro-Palestinian and anti-Apartheid movements (information on the anti-Apartheid movement was shared with the South African regime) to the NAACP, the Gay and Lesbian Labor Alliance and CISPES, and, according to the Middle East Labor Bulletin, the ADL spent some $34 million a year to do it. Pacifica Radio and its New York station, WBAI, both of which air views sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, were among the list of targets - presumably because of the network’s role in airing programming for leftists, Blacks and Arabs – the very forces the ADL’s Suall declared most threatening.

As recently as December 2002, former WBAI employee and current station board member Paul DeRienzo, in support of his contention that WBAI is anti-Semitic, claimed that the ADL was once again threatening action against the station. An ADL press release dated November 16th, 2001, said the League was "extremely distressed" "about one-sided anti-Israel programming" on WBAI. The release conflated programming critical of Israel with anti-Semitism, adding, "WBAI has engaged in this type of on-air intolerance concerning Jews and the State of Israel for many years." DeRienzo has openly called for a boycott of WBAI.

Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan

In "The Pacification of Public Radio," David Barsamian wrote, "Horowitz has been ballistic when it comes to KPFK, Pacifica’s Los Angeles station. As a former Dole speechwriter he pushed the former Senator’s vituperative tirade against public radio and TV at the 1993 Public Radio Conference in Washington. Dole railed against the ‘unrelenting liberal cheerleading on the public airwaves.’ He called Pacifica ‘hate radio’ and ‘anti-Semitic’… I was sitting in the audience during Dole’s speech. The effect on station managers and program directors, the gatekeepers of public radio, was palpable."

Then, Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), chair of the Commerce Committee, demanded of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a list of National Public Radio staff who had previously worked for Pacifica stations, saying, according to the Washington Post, "There's a feeling that if a large number of Pacifica reporters were being hired [by NPR] that this might affect balance and objectivity." It was a witch hunt, McCarthy-style.

Memos were issued at KPFK directing all programmers to refrain from any discussion of Black – Jewish relations, on penalty of removal from the air. One member of the Coalition Against Political Censorship and Racism at KPFK said, "This memo is obviously directed at African programmers because Jewish programmers, such as Atheists United and Suzi Weissman openly discussed these issues with impunity." Another added, "This is a Black - Jewish question and we have been censored from addressing this… Our exclusion from this dialog is patently unfair… the mainstream media is always addressing this from one side."

In 1993 members of the Coalition Against Political Censorship and Racism at KPFK and the African United Front presented a list of 15 demands to the Pacifica National Board, calling for an "end to the marginalization and subordination of people of color" and the democratization of decision making processes around programming.

Their protests were to no avail.

Recently, feminist writer (turned Bush supporter) Phyllis Chesler stated the matter plainly on Horowitz’ Frontpagemag.com website:

"…unbelievably, refreshingly, in June of 1994, a coalition of Jewish leaders and disenchanted listeners formed a successful campaign that led to the passage of the Hefley Amendment in Congress, which reduced federal funding by one million dollars for such Pacifica ‘hate speech.’ In response, Pacifica cancelled two of its anti-White and anti-Semitic programs."

Another perspective was offered by Barsamian in Z Magazine: "The ensuing brouhaha resulted in a bill passed in Congress, ostensibly to punish Pacifica, that took away one million dollars from stations. The right-wing had its first taste of blood."

___________________________________

Pat Scott

The right wing campaign created the atmosphere in which the Blueprint project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio International and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (later dubbed the Healthy Stations Project) and Pacifica's Strategic Five Year Plan to mainstream its programming and "professionalize" its sound took effect.

In concert with changes in CPB funding standards, which required stations to raise more revenues to qualify for CPB matching grants, the impact of these various plans forced many stations to cut programming for communities of color, and to zero in on creating an audience and funding base more like that of PBS or NPR – an "upwardly mobile" white audience with a more disposable income. To achieve this mandate, to appeal to a more upwardly mobile audience, purges (most notably of programming by radicals of color) and a massive reorganization would be required.

Kathy Reuve wrote that, "In October 1994, Pacifica shifted to more centralized control and implemented the Five Year Plan... Soon after, Executive Director Pat Scott told local station boards they served at the will and direction of the National Board [and] to carry out the directives of the board. Later, Pacifica dissolved the station boards, creating the less authoritative Local Advisory Boards (LABs).

"…Any LAB members not accepting the reconfiguration required by the Five Year Plan were threatened with removal. Then a gag rule was imposed prohibiting on-air discussion of Pacifica’s internal policies. The five station Folios were eliminated, removing that link between subscribers and stations," Reuve wrote.

The Los Angeles Times laid the matter out concretely.

"At KPFK, Ruben Lizardo, a former chair of the station advisory board, said at first he sympathized with those who argued Pacifica had to ‘get rid of all the people who don't know what they're doing and are stuck in the '60s.’ KPFK was in a funk, and its audience was not only getting older, it was beginning to shrink.

"But Lizardo split with station management when it refused to reinstate several African American programmers, as

recommended by KPFK's community advisory board. (The programmers had been removed for making offensive on-air comments, a charge they disputed.) Then Lizardo and other members of the advisory board were forced to resign.

"Management claimed radicals had taken over the board and were using it to try to usurp the Pacifica Foundation's authority."

KPFK’s station board had been the most diverse board in the network.

The right wing assault on Pacifica began with the mass firing of African American programmers at KPFK. As The Jewish Journal of May 20, 1995 noted; "That the firings had come on the eve of the new Republican Congress seemed hardly coincidental. [Former Pacifica Executive Director Pat] Scott warned that the funding will likely be nixed to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting next year, so that Pacifica may lose up to 25 percent of its budget. She pointed out that KPFK has only a paltry audience or 150,000 to 170,000 listeners. ‘If we keep this up, with expenses escalating and our audiences declining, we'll be out of business by the turn of the century,’ she said."

Eric Roth suggested that "the future of KPFK…looked bleak. Members of Congress were condemning Pacifica Radio, KPFK's parent organization, prompting the House of Representatives to reduce the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's funding. Print commentators were attacking KPFK's programming, and conservative activist David Horowitz was heightening his campaign against the station. Listenership was declining, and the station was under intense financial, legal, and political pressure." According to The Washington Post, "The station publicly apologized and offered members of the Anti-Defamation League rebuttal time." The Jewish Week reports that the ADL declined the offer.

The Pacifica Deception, a 1993 video produced by KPFK’s banned and fired African producers, asked, "Has Pacifica in general and KPFK in particular fallen prey to the right-wing pressure groups such as the ADL…? Is corporate funding influencing programming decisions at Pacifica radio stations? Is Pacifica afraid to face the truth?"

"’Black Nationalist Hate Groups’: FBI newspeak designating black rights organizations in the U.S. including Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference."

Ward Churchill and Jim Vader Wall, from

Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement

 

Black programmers and their allies of color at KPFK stood up to the assault from the beginning, setting an example their white counterparts in the Free Pacifica movement would later follow in style, though not in substance. Hector Tobar of The Los Angeles Times painted a vivid picture of the struggle in 1996:

"The war for control of the national Pacifica Radio network reached a crescendo the night the dissidents sneaked into a San Fernando Valley studio and took control of KPFK's 112,000-watt FM transmitter. It was a bold coup de radio, staged by leftist programmers who'd been axed by the station management.

Ron Wilkens

"Nzinga Heru, an African American programmer whose show, ‘Hotep,’ was pulled off the air, added: ‘I am a firm believer that we in fact are at war. I'm not surprised what the enemy would do in order to attack us and to suppress truth.’ ‘Black people and white people do not think alike," Heru continued. ‘We do not think alike and we have the right to have our own critical thoughts.’

"Finally, [former KPFK GM Mark] Schubb appeared, separated from the dissidents in the studio by a thick pane of soundproof glass. ‘I see the manager in master control,’ Wilkins said calmly. ‘Maybe he may want to join us. I'm sure he can hear our signal.’ Seconds later, Schubb cut the dissidents off (without explanation to the listening audience), shifting to a cheerful promo tape for a women's radio program: ‘Feminist Magazine brings you education, information and controversy--on the air!’"

According to The Portland Free Press, Wilkins, a Pacifica National Board member for five years, was illegally banned from the station for violating the "dirty laundry rule," an action similar to one the paper said was declared unconstitutional in another case (presumably a Providence RI case.) Similarly, while it appears that there may have been a handful of anti-Semitic comments at KPFK, no programmer received due process or a fair hearing on such charges, nor was a pattern of such comments established on the part of any programmer, nor in KPFK’s programming as a whole - in fact, for all the electronic ink it’s spilled on the matter, Horowitz’ website has noted only four instances of arguably anti-Semitic on-air comments by Pacifica broadcasters among all five Pacifica stations over a twelve-year period. But under immense pressure from Congress, the CPB, the ADL, and the press, a fair hearing was the last thing on the minds of Pacifica’s leadership.

Robert Coonrod

Mumia Abu Jamal

Pacifica’s leadership had not only capitulated to the right wing onslaught but actively embraced it. In the end, they were virtually taking orders from Robert Coonrod of the CPB.

Dedon Kamathi

Kwaku Person-Lynn

Among the initial group of fired and banned programmers were Wilkins, whose Continent to Continent was taken off the air; Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn, whose Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend program was first targeted by Horowitz and the ADL; Karole Selmon, an arts programmer and Pacifica Archives employee who read a statement of protest at a Pacifica National board meeting; Steve Conley, former production director at KPFK, who was the creator and producer of Beneath the Surface, KPFK’s afternoon drive time program and who sat next to Selmon at the national board meeting; Astenu, a frequent program host who covered the ADL spy story; Kamal Hassan of the Family Tree; Dedon Kamathi of Freedom Now; Nzinga Heru of Hotep, who was banned

Michael Taylor

for participating in Ron Wilkins’ on-air rebellion; Marcus Lopez of American Indian Airwaves; and Loraine Mirza, whose program Islamic Perspectives was cancelled, and who suffered severe injuries when forced to move her belongings from the station without notice. Fernando Velazquez was also banned. Michael Taylor, a Black journalist who had been the first at KPFK to cover the Mumia Abu Jamal story, was also driven from the station, and was later killed in a local dispute over rights to the equipment he had procured from Radio Free Berkeley to set up a micro-radio station in South Central Los Angeles.

Noted Los Angeles artist and activist Mark Vallens said plainly, "Had the local Pacifica listeners rallied around Ron at the time it might have saved us all years of assaults and destruction by the corporatist forces that took over. That we didn't is a manifestation of continuing racism within progressive forces, a potentially fatal weakness."

Things were much the same with respect to programming for the Chicana/o and Spanish speaking community in LA, the world’s second largest Spanish-speaking city. The Pacifica Campaign reported that Pacifica removed the only Spanish-speaking drive time talk show host in Los Angeles and replaced him with an Anglo; that news personnel were forbidden to use Spanish pronunciations of Spanish words, and that programming for the community was seriously reduced. Enfoque Latino, the last non-commercial Spanish language program in the city, had a third of its time cut.

In 1997 Mario Murillo's nationally syndicated program on the politics and history of the continent, Our America, was taken off the national satellite system of distribution by Pacifica's National Program Director. Murillo would later be targeted in the purges that would come to WBAI. In response, Alexander Cockburn, in The Nation, spoke up about "the inexorable extermination of dissent" at Pacifica.

John Martinez, host of KPFK’s program Radio Chicana (and whose guest list read like a Who’s Who of Chicana/o culture) was cancelled after he broke the Pacifica hijacker’s gag rule in 1999.

Fernando Velasquez

Bari Scott

According to the PBS documentary "KPFA On The Air," in 1974 the KPFA staff staged a walk out, which forced the station off the air. Striking workers demanded the creation of the Third World Department to ensure that peoples of color were equitably represented in programming and among paid staff. Third World programmers had also filed a challenge on the grounds of discrimination in hiring practices. They won. In 1997, their victory was reversed.

The attacks on Black and Third World programming concentrated in the Horowitz / ADL agenda and the CPB-inspired Healthy Stations Project served a right wing and, frankly, anti-Black agenda for community radio, eradicating virtually all voices for oppressed communities of every description at Pacifica stations KPFK and KPFT, and further assaults on such programming at KPFA, including the removal of programs like Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Labor and the Global Economy, and Living on Indian Time, according to The Los Angeles Times.

KPFT in Houston went from being the most diverse of Pacifica’s stations – broadcasting in eleven languages - to an English Only format of quasi-country music with only one program for the Black community, and none at all for the Chicana/o and immigrant communities. (I’ve outlined the history of the struggle at KPFT elsewhere in some detail -see http://www.radio4all.org/fp/renteria.htm.)

Labor activist and former KPFA programmer Steve Seltzer (who, along with Take Back KPFA activist Jeffery Blankfort and Anne Poirier had won a suit against the ADL arising from the ADL spy scandal) said in the Los Angeles publication Change-Links that "over 300 programmers ended up losing their radio shows" in the purges at all five stations.

The hijacking had many of the hallmarks of a COINTELPRO – style operation, including in having as its primary focus the elimination of the voices of Black radicals and other radicals of color – if, by chance, they had ever been granted significant airtime that might be cut.

J. Edgar Hoover

Importantly, by the time the purges were done, the Pacifica National Board was comprised primarily of African Americans, a number of whom were closely allied with the Democratic Party center, such as former PNB chair Mary Frances Berry, a Clinton appointee to the US Civil Rights Commission who would later use her connections to call in the Justice Department against Free Pacifica protestors. There was a profound class division between the latter day PNB and those it purged. Likewise, in the early 90’s, Pacifica had hired a Black manager to carry out the purges of Black programmers at KPFK, then gave him the axe.

As Ron Wilkins noted in 1993, "Now we have people who look like us but who do the same [oppressive things] on the KPFK board… Pacifica must repudiate, I repeat, repudiate and abandon the practice of hiring men and women of color who lack sensitivity and commitment to the struggles of racial groups with which they are identified. There’s always this attempt to divide the community against itself – we’re not going for that." Wilkins then cited slain African American activist Melvin X of Los Angeles, who, according to Churchill and Vader Wall, had been murdered in the fall of 1970 in an execution – style killing with COINTELPRO implications, and who said, "‘A change in the color of the slave master’s skin does not change the essence of the State.’" "It’s true," Wilkins added, "and it applies to this foundation – we’re not about simple changes in paint jobs."

The attitude Black programmers at KPFK held toward such figures was summed up vividly in the voiceover that introduced The Pacifica Deception:

Voice 1. "What’s wrong with having it good for a change?"

Voice 2. "Now they’re gonna let us have it good if we just help ‘em. They’re gonna leave us alone. Let us make some money. You can have a taste of that good life too, now. I know you want it. Hell, everybody does."

Voice 3. "You’d do it to your own kind…"

Voice 1. "What’s the threat? We all sell out every day. Might as well be on the winning team.

When the purges at KPFK and KPFT were complete, Robert Coonrod of the CPB tightened a noose the PNB hijackers had placed around Pacifica’s neck, gave the national board the excuse it needed to eliminate what little power was left to local boards, and a "reason" to make the national body secluded, unaccountable and self selecting.

Counterpunch wrote, "the decision to change by-laws in part resulted from a letter from CPB president and CEO Robert Coonrod to outgoing Scott in response to her request for clarification about Pacifica's compliance with CPB regulations. Specifically, Scott inquired whether the present structure of Pacifica, in which each Pacifica station advisory board nominates two of their number to serve on the Pacifica Governing Board, violates CPB rules indicating a separation of governance and advisory board functions. Before he joined CPB in 1992, Coonrod was deputy director of Voice of America, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (both Radio and TV Marti), and Worldnet Television and Film Service. Coonrod responded that it was his opinion that Pacifica's structure did indeed violate CPB rules. However, the rules he spoke of have not substantively changed since at least 1978. Still the apparent threat of losing CPB grant money… seems to have convinced the Pacifica governing board that it now must change how it elects itself. Some have the suspicion that the canvassing of CPB opinion by Scott and Coonrod's response were a collusive operation."

According to Reuve, "In September, 1998, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting declared LAB members concurrently serving as national board members might violate the Federal Communications Act of 1934… In February, 1999, CPB threatened to withhold their March, 1999, payment. Executive Director Chadwick presented station reports to the board indicating elimination of CPB funding would cause lay-offs of three quarters of the staff, influencing board members to vote at the February, 1999, board meeting to alter Pacifica’s structure and by-laws to comply with the CPB. Documents provided indicate that Pacifica may have withheld or misrepresented proposed changes to its members, staff, volunteers and subscribers."

The national board became self-selecting at Coonrod’s urging – an illegal act for which the board was later sued - and almost immediately began to carry the purges even further, firing the popular Arab–American manager at KPFA in Berkeley, Nicole Sawaya, a woman of Lebanese descent.

ISPA Guards at KPFA

Pacifica also hired a firm called Decision Strategies to spy on Free Pacifica activists online. The Pacifica Campaign called Decision Strategies "a high-end corporate security and ‘intelligence’ firm, which touts its use of  ‘multijurisdictional online and onsite searches with the involvement of overt and covert field operatives.’"
"According to a USA Today article, the firm hires ‘ex-FBI, CIA, IRS, DEA, and Secret Service agents; former police, prosecutors, customs agents, federal marshals and military intelligence experts; veterans of Britain's MI6, Europe's Interpol or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and lawyers, forensic accountants, database specialists and journalists,’" the Campaign said.

Unable, nonetheless, to subdue the rebellion, the hijackers locked out the KPFA staff, running taped programming from the national archives 24 hours a day. Former national board chair Mary Francis Berry – a Clinton appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, leaned on the U.S. Dept of Justice to have Berkeley police crack down on the protestors.

But there was no surrender. As banned KPFA programmer Bill Mandel described it, Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific Islander youth "established and maintained Camp KPFA on the avenue in front of the station, round the clock with sleeping bags and tents on the sidewalk, during that occupation," shutting down Martin Luther King Jr. Way near University Avenue. Some 12 thousand protesters marched, demanding an end to the lockout.

In an article in Black Journalism Review Online, Askia Muhammad cited one of a number of Black employees at the Pacifica national office in Berkeley who complained of receiving racist threats and messages; "I’m having a lot of difficulty with this because I’ve been made a walking target by the situation at KPFA," she said, her voice cracking with emotion. "I hear a lot of talk about ‘accountability,’ and ‘no confidence,’ and I’m physically sickened by it. There’s been a campaign of hate targeted at my office and the staff that works with me."

She continued, "I’ve been called a ‘nigger bitch,’ daily, and my life has been threatened several times, with words like: ‘I hope you die a slow, painful death.’ I won’t run from accountability, but a campaign of hate, no matter whether it was meant or not has been directed at my office with words like ‘tyranny,’ and ‘oppression.’ Those go outside the parameters of broadcast responsibility and you’ve made me a walking target because of it."

"But", Muhammad wrote, "Black on-air staff members at KPFA are participating in the protest, and condemn [ the staff member] as a ‘house Negro.’ Blacks attending the national board meeting spoke out against the violence and verbal abuse, but stood by a May 21 statement they issued: ‘We, the African American programmers at KPFA radio have been active participants in the ongoing staff protest against Pacifica's recent management decisions.’

"Former KPFA Manager Sawaya agreed, questioning the allegations that her supporters would hurl racial epithets at anyone. She suggested that ‘agent provocateurs’ may be responsible for some of the untoward behavior by anti-Pacifica demonstrators. ‘They are much too 'P.C.' for anything like that’ … they are more P.C. than I am.’"

The extent and source of the threats has never been formally investigated by the Pacifica network, and whether the threats came from the ranks of listener-activists or COINTELPRO - style operatives remains an open question.

Kevin Close

"And I thought, wow, that's interesting, you're having lunch with Kevin Close. Kevin Close is the boss of National Public Radio. And he comes from Voice of America, from Radio Free Europe in fact. He was responsible for...he was a journalist with the Washington Post, went over to Radio Free Europe, was responsible for the shift of Radio Free Europe from Munich to Prague, part of the eastward expansion of NATO and the eastward expansion really, of US imperialism. And he, from Radio Free Europe, became head of NPR. And they were meeting with him to discuss the KPFA crisis.

"A little while later, Lynn then said to me, ‘Well, we met with ‘Uncle Bob,’’ as she used to call Bob Coonrod, the head of CPB. And Bob Coonrod also comes from VOA, and he was in charge of things like Radio Marti. And she said to me, "Dan, you know it was really interesting...we had this meeting with Uncle Bob, and you know what? He promised to give us some money to see us through the KPFA thing" [to defeat the KPFA struggle]. And she said, ‘You know, all these years we've been asking CPB for money and they say they never have any. And here you are, now, they're ready to give us money!’

"And whether this is true or not, whether CPB in fact ended up giving money to Pacifica, fact is that Bob Coonrod, according to Lynn, told her that and she interpreted that obviously as political support."

In the end, despite the assistance of the former intelligence operatives at the CPB, NPR, and the intervention of the Justice Department, and the hired guards and online spies with links to the CIA and FBI, the national board relented – allowing KPFA staff to return to a building that had suffered $20,000 damage, apparently at the hands of the "guards" - only to lock out the WBAI staff in New York City a year and a half later in the infamous "Christmas Coup" of December, 2000.

Errol Maitland

Sharan Harper

With the popularization of the Internet, with superior financial resources and much greater numbers (in comparison to Pacifica activists like the Coalition Against Political Censorship and Racism at KPFK) and of course, lawyers – all the trappings of relative privilege - the leadership of the largely white middle-class Free Pacifica movement moved in to take power. Most effective and important, however, was the national boycott of Pacifica initiated by Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez, a veteran journalist and activist with roots in Puerto Rican New York’s Young Lord’s Party, a group that had been allied with the Black Panthers.

At last, the Pacifica board was forced to the table to settle various lawsuits that had been filed against it, and a power sharing arrangement was established that seated a majority comprised of Free Pacifica activists on the board, and that mandated new bylaws for the network, which were to include elections fro Pacifica’s local station boards.

There was some basis to assume that when activists across the country defeated the Pacifica board "hijackers" after a long, bitter, and some times brilliant struggle by activists across the country, that the rightist agenda for Pacifica had been dispensed with. Certainly many of the thousands who joined in the email campaigns, boycott, and protests, and who contributed time or money to the lawsuits against the old PNB majority, imagine that the right wing purge of Pacifica is over.

But the tale is more complex than that.

The rightist agenda for Pacifica is being fiercely re-articulated in virtually the same form today by a faction of the WBAI station board in NY, by members of the collective that produces the Feminist Magazine program at KPFK, and in attacks from Horowitz’ website, each laying claims that programming at KPFK and WBAI is, as local board member Steve Brown would have it with respect to WBAI, "anti-white" and "anti-Semitic." With the pending resignation of general manager Don Rojas, submitted in June, WBAI is teetering under its impact, and the station’s fate, and the direction of the network, depend on whether WBAI topples, or whether its balance is kept.

The most recent targets of Horowitz and those of like mind within Pacifica itself have been the expected ones -  Black leftists like WBAI GM Don Rojas, WBAI program director Bernard White,  and KPFK GM Eva Georgia, a South African Black and a supporter of the African National Congress. On the wall of Georgia’s office is a poster of assassinated ANC leader Chris Hani, and although there is no reason to imagine Georgia is aware of it, according to Counterpunch, Roy Bullock of the ADL spy operation admitted to the FBI that he was also paid by a South African intelligence agent to spy on anti-apartheid activists. Bullock had reported on a visit to California by the ANC's Hani, "ten days before the man expected by many to succeed Nelson Mandela, returned home to be brutally murdered." An article on Horowitz’ website bashing KPFK pointedly cited remarks by Georgia antagonist Sonali Kolhatkar of KPFK’s morning program and from Myla Reson’s KPFK Listeners Forum.

Alexander Odeh

The Horowitz site fails to mention these facts, and while it mentions that Shehade is part of the LA 8, a group of Middle Eastern and African activists that has been fighting deportation from the US for years on charges that they distributed political tracts for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, it fails to mention that it was the ADL that first spied on the circle and turned their "findings" over to the FBI, or that the FBI referred the matter to the INS, which still seeks the group’s expulsion from the country.

At KPFT, programmer Robert Buzzanco, who is associate professor of history at the University of Houston and author of Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life, was targeted by local board members Greg Geiselman and Stan Merriman, who had accused KPFT of being "pro-Palestinian." They also attacked the Middle East coverage of Flashpoints host Dennis Bernstein and called for equal credence to be given on KPFT for the Zionist position on Palestine.

In 2002, Geiselman and Merriman accused Buzzanco of making an anti-Semitic statement following the broadcast of a special program, Jewish Voices, which was produced by Merriman and included as guests an official from the local Israeli consulate, and the executive director of the local chapter of the American Jewish Committee. The program ran immediately prior to Buzzanco’s regularly scheduled spot on Open Journal.

Notable leftist scholars Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ed Herman sent a letter supporting Buzzanco to Pacifica, to no avail. The only result was that Chomsky, Zinn and Herman came under attack by the same activists who were accusing Buzzanco of anti-Semitism. Buzzanco left the network, denouncing a lack of support from Pacifica leadership, despite a local investigation that cleared him of the charges. He wrote, " With the smears thus continuing, Pacifica caving in, and a hostile environment at KPFT, I saw no reason to stay on the air, and at that point resigned as a programmer. As I saw it, this was more of a strike or boycott against a network that rhetorically claimed to speak for the dispossessed and stand up to the power structure, but had in fact been terribly complicit in the ongoing Zionist slanders against me."

Today’s targets at Pacifica fit the old profile… Blacks, Leftists and Arabs.

Carol Spooner

In order to do so she had to first overturn a vote of the national board – which she managed by challenging in court the vote of several African American directors on procedural grounds. When the vote was taken among national board members, draft bylaws without affirmative action measures failed in a vote of eight to five.  The court overseeing the settlement of the lawsuits ruled, however, that three Black members of the national board had disqualified themselves by not voting in favor of any of the plans on the table, and ruled their votes null and void, in an incident has been referred to as "Pacifica’s Florida Vote."

Thus the plan without affirmative action measures was declared to have "passed" at the national board level.

Afterward, despite the impact of the court’s ruling, when the bylaws returned to the local boards for ratification, the plan to structure the network without guarantees of participation for oppressed and excluded communities was defeated by a single vote on the KPFK station board, which long had vacillated between supporting affirmative action and demands to have elections "now," at any cost. The network entered negotiations on a new affirmative action plan, but before the process could be completed, Spooner managed to have the court overturn the KPFK vote on grounds of "equity," which is to say the court’s opinion about what best served the interests of the network, without regard to issues of law and procedure.

Spooner had created and fed fears among white listener-activists that a catastrophic lawsuit would result if Pacifica utilized affirmative action measures for its board elections, claims which ignored the reality that most suits are settled out of court, that damages are not customarily awarded in affirmative action cases and that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Michigan University cases substantially changed the legal terrain with respect to affirmative action. Those who opposed her, especially those of the oppressed nationalities, were labeled "self-aggrandizing race-baiters" who, it was claimed, "opposed elections."

Thus "victorious," Spooner narrowly evaded the need for the Pacifica National Board to consult qualified civil rights attorneys in the wake of the Michigan case, which had set new standards for how affirmative action measures might be legally implemented.

The result has been that whole communities whose programming was purged at the various Pacifica stations in the 1990’s now have no equitable voice in setting Pacifica’s new direction - in effect a continuation in a new form of the policies that led to the purges of programming for communities of color in the 90’s. For practical purposes it sealed the results of those purges, and institutionalized them.

In Houston, at KPFT, the new board, for example, is 4/5 European. In Los Angeles, the board is 2/3 European in a city that is 2/3 peoples of color. The Chicana/o and Spanish speaking community in LA makes up roughly half of the population, but it has only 3 seats of the 24 on the KPFK board. Even today, after significant changes, the Chicana/o and Spanish speaking community of LA has less than one tenth of programming time, and people of color as a whole are represented in only one seventh of the programming time at KPFK.

The results weren’t unexpected. Current WBAI station board member Patty Heffley, for instance, reportedly stated at a public meeting that she would not see any problem if the entire local station board were white.

The matter was clear from the outset. Communities whose programming had been purged (like LA’s South Central) no longer listened to Pacifica. Those who don’t listen, don’t, of course, donate money to become members. Those who aren’t members can’t vote. Those who vote control who, from among the oppressed nationalities, will serve on Pacifica’s boards. The boards oversee programming. It’s an endless loop, a permanent enshrinement of colonial liberalism and noblesse oblige. A permanent Catch 22 – a permanent, institutionalized, exclusion and subjugation.

In the wake of such elections, it was only a matter of time before Black power at WBAI in New York would come under direct assault. Within six months following the station board elections, general manager Don Rojas tendered his resignation, effective at the end of this year, 2004.

The racial dynamic that had remained repressed and unaddressed recapitulated, or repeated itself. Those who tried to point to it were demonized.

Pacifica’s latest coup d'état was underway.

The purge of Black "hate mongers" began again.

Repeating the Pattern:

WBAI, KPFK and "The New Anti-Semitism"

"With the return of the former managers there has been a widely noticed steep decline in the quality of WBAIs programming and growing incidents of anti-Semitism leading to public warnings by respected organizations such as the ADL."

Paul DeRienzo, Dec. 2002

"…anti-Zionism is the new anti–Semitism."

Phyllis Chesler

"’Anti-Semite’ is a cop-out – it’s a way to avoid a dialogue. When a dialogue is open, when both sides speak… we don’t use code words, code phrases, to cut off dialogue. So for all of those people who would use the phrase anti-Semite to cut off any dialogue in the future, whether it be here at KPFK or wherever, define anti-Semite…"

The Pacifica Deception, 1993

________________________

In an article entitled "Radio Intifada," which ran on David Horowitz’ Frontpagemag.com in the summer of 2003, Greg Yardley described the backdrop of events and Pacifica’s hijacking, this way: "The 1990s were a difficult time for the network.  The national board, all liberal-to-leftist individuals, were concerned about Pacifica's limited growth… They wanted their message to reach more people, and therefore decided to introduce national programming, to be carried by all five stations, in an effort to build a nation-wide identity.  They also wanted to get the anti-Semites who were giving Pacifica a bad name off the air."

It may come as no surprise, then, that as far back as 1993 WBAI host Paul DeRienzo reportedly attacked fellow programmer Mimi Rosenberg for stating that "Israel is committing genocide" in order to support his hypothesis that the station is anti-Semitic.

Mike Feder

(The magazine also noted that in an earlier incident Feder had been "suspended for a month after denouncing a black producer at the station as an Israel-basher." Feder admitted to The Jewish Week that his attack on WBAI’s Robert Knight had included "a racist comment.")

As a result of his accusations in 1994, Feder met with station manager Valerie van Isler, Program Director Samori Marksman, Amy Goodman, Bernard White, and others. He reports that "After the meeting broke up, Amy sat opposite me and said, with tears in her eyes, ‘I can't believe you are saying these things about WBAI. My mother reads these newspapers and listens to WBAI and hears what you say.’ I looked at her amazed and told her that she shouldn't be worrying about her mother. She should be worrying about the vile company she keeps… i.e., Bernard - and that she should have some regard for her own background and people and more self-respect." Goodman is frequently targeted as a "self-hating Jew" due to her support for Palestinian causes. She has a prominent mention, for example, on the so-called "Self Hating or Israel Threatening List" on the web. Today some of the same forces that are seeking to purge Blacks in power at WBAI are also attacking Goodman.

Amy Goodman

Feder’s effort in 90’s seemed to have yielded little in the way of complaints from listeners – only four rather weak allegations covering a 14 year period were reported by The Jewish Week - but his efforts did result in a new program for the Jewish community.

"…if things continue the way they are, WBAI will have an infintesimal audience for their hate based radio. It is time to bring in every government agency as well as to file lawsuits."

WBAI board member Luanne Pennesi

But today, the same litany is being chanted again. On July 16th of 2004, Gary Null, host of WBAI’s Natural Living program, read Phyllis Chesler’s article, "Listener Sponsored Hate," which can be found on the Horowitz website, and supported her contention that WBAI has become a voice of "hate," and that "anti-Zionism is the new anti – Semitism," a theme Chesler also strikes in her book The New Anti-Semitism. The following excerpts from the article Null shared with his listeners are revealing:

Phyllis Chesler

Chesler says she longs for the good old days at WBAI, when "Afrika was a still, small drumbeat, not a steady Madame Defarge-like drum roll. Everything has changed, and things are worse, not better.

She wrote, "On October 12, 2003, [former WBAI programmer] Mike Feder interviewed me on WBAI about my book, The New Anti-Semitism. He described an increasingly surreal level of hostility towards Israel, Jews, and whites at the station. He confirmed that the only Jewish-specific programs that were still on-air were hosted by Jews who were always the first to demonize the Jewish state and Judaism. Such Jews did not view Jew-hatred as racism nor did they comprehend that anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism."  She notes that Feder has "criticized the station as anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-Israel."

The main thrust of Chelser’s article, however, relies on a citation from WBAI programmer Bill Weinberg, who, during the lockout of WBAI staff under the old regime, had criticized the repeated airing of interviews with Jim Marrs, author of Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids, which frequently cites the infamous forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document the Nazi Party once folded into its twisted ideology.

In an open letter to Null, Weinberg wrote, "My work was invoked in support of Chesler's (and, presumably, Null's) contention that WBAI has become a voice of "hate," and that "anti-Zionism is the new anti- Semitism." The invocation of my work in support of these claims is either grossly ill-informed or blatantly manipulative… using the idiocies of the "coup" period as propaganda against the current WBAI is disingenuous and cynical in the extreme."

"A final irony," he wrote, "is that immediately after reading Chesler's letter, Null turned the show over to Marjorie Moore, who apparently hosts a sort of on-air advice column segment. As my reportage had made clear, it was Moore who first brought Marrs to WBAI's airwaves as the latest political guru back in 2001."

Weinberg was mistaken on one point, however: Null himself had interviewed Marrs on WBAI as far back as 1992.

In "The Chesler Wars," also on the Horowitz site, Chesler attacks KPFK and cites the need to "combat the unchallenged, unbalanced, and omnipresent hate speech against Jews and the Jewish state that seemed to have a life of its own at the station." She also offers her opinion that programming at KPFK is "anti-white."

In the same spirit, Null recently claimed on his late night program on KPFK, that there is no place at Pacifica for programming for a variety of nationalities.

The board operator, making a routine announcement of the upcoming show, said, " Stay tuned for KPFK’s English and Spanish news which is coming up next - and they work hard on that program...

Gary Null

Null was an opponent of the Free Pacifica movement and has openly allied himself with the forces that mainstreamed the network and purged its programmers of color, going so far as to provide his attorney, David Slater, to represent former board members Bob Farrell and Ken Ford as they sought to put Pacifica into receivership in an apparent move to take back control of the network after the movement to free Pacifica had emerged victorious. The Horowitz website, of course, has nothing but kind words for those who tried to mainstream the network, and nothing but criticism of the movement, just like Null and his closest associates.

Null and his allies on the WBAI station board, Luanne Pennesi and Paul DeRienzo, have called for a boycott of the new Pacifica, outlining a list of "Ten Reasons to Boycott WBAI / Pacifica."

Luanne Pennesi

Pennesi also insisted that WBAI and Pacifica should "Examine the background of virtually all the newly hired. Blacks, and friends of the management," and when criticized for her comment wrote, "You can stuff your platitudes of peace and justice, harmony and unity in your...ear. There is no peace, democracy, justice, unity, and free speech WBAI. It's time that the public acted. This IS about race. But not about blacks being attacked by anyone, least of all ME."

In the same letter she continued, "I find it unfortunate that no Jew has stood up and challenged the anti-Semitism at the station. This is not a time to cower from open racism. It's a time to fight it… It's time for civil rights litigation. I know a team of lawyers who have been quietly working in just this area. And only when these perpe-traitors are brought to justice can the station be saved."

There can be little doubt that the outlook and tactics of the Null camp mirror the attacks of Horowitz, Dole, the ADL and the hijackers. The threat of government intervention, charges of anti-Semitic and anti-white programming, and the attacks on programming for Blacks and Chicana/os should be all too familiar to the reader by now. This is the precise formula and terminology of the 1990’s hijackers Null has aligned himself with.

It comes as little surprise, then, that Null read Chesler’s attack against WBAI on his program, given the similarity of their agenda. For that matter, Null and Chesler have been associated since at least 2000, when Null edited a new edition of one of Chesler’s books for Seven Stories Press, and there is at least an outline of a loose, ideologically aligned network among several of these figures. Horowitz and Chesler obviously work together – her attacks on Pacifica are published on his website. Feder and Chesler have interviewed one another, according to her comments in "Listener Sponsored Hate." DeRienzo is Null’s former producer. Brown and Null are widely known in New York to have been long acquainted and they are obviously allied in the effort to paint WBAI as anti-white and anti-Semitic. But when Null, Horowitz, Chesler, Feder, DeRienzo, and figures like WBAI LSB member Steve Brown lay claims of "anti-Semitism" and "anti-White" programming, what does the claim mean – what underlies it?

Steve Brown

Is there a difference, then, between anti-Semitic comments and remarks critical of Israel or Israeli policies?

Not according to Chesler.

And is there a difference between comments attacking racism and anti-white comments?

Not if you read Brown.

But the question of a "New Anti-Semitism" as posed by Chesler, by ADL chief Abraham Foxman in his book Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, and by others, is an urgent one. It is as important in its own right as its opposite - the question posed at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001: whether Zionism is a form of Euro-colonialism, and thus of racism.

Jewish people have every reason to be deeply disturbed by the sharp and widespread rise in anti-Jewish violence in the wake of 9-1-1 and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the new Intifada in occupied Palestine. Jews in many areas have been attacked, ostensibly in retaliation for US and Israeli policies.

But, in 1988, a Los Angeles Times poll indicated that some 50 percent of Jews interviewed said that "a commitment to social equality" was the characteristic most important to their cultural identity as Jewish people. Only 17 percent cited a commitment to Israel as central to their identity. Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun said that it is "No wonder, then, that social-justice-oriented American Jews today feel betrayed by Israeli policies that seem transparently immoral and self-destructive." For this group, in particular, then, to be targeted for Israeli politics is as demoralizing as it is dishonest for those who perpetuate such actions and attitudes. Such actions are anti-Semitic – not anti Zionist.

Progressive Jews, especially their leaders, are also often targeted by hard line supporters of Israel (see, for example, the "Self Hating or Israel Threatening List" on the web, which targets several prominent Pacifica personalities.) Lerner wrote, "…an Israeli website called ‘self-hate’ has identified me as one of the five enemies of the Jewish people, and printed my home address and driving instructions on how to get to my home. We reported this to the police, the Israeli Consulate, and to the Anti Defamation League. The ADL said this was not a 'hate crime.'"

Is it, then, "hate speech" to criticize Israel?

Chesler, Horowitz and company say "Yes."

Pacifica can only say "No."

In "The Silencing of Dissent" Paul Eisen wrote, "The anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism argument amounts to this: If you do not agree with the right of Jews to go to Palestine, settle there en masse against the wishes of the indigenous population, expel this population from 75% of their land and then, for the next fifty years and more, continue this assault on the remaining land and population, then you are an anti-Semite. Similarly, if you do not support the existence of an ethnically based state which defines itself as being for Jews only and discriminates officially both inside and outside its borders against non-Jews, then, again, you are an anti-Semite."

Contrary to Null’s claims, it is just these kinds of questions that the Pacifica mission was designed to explore – the network’s mission statement specifically demands the exploration of the root causes of racial and religious conflict.

But there is another broad dimension to the question of hate speech. If Sen. Bob Dole’s attack on Pacifica as "hate radio" in the 1990’s was a clarion call to the hard right, today the same rhetoric is being applied by the Right much more broadly.

In "Political hate speech: A case study in the use of language as a political weapon," Brendan Nyhan writes, "Since Sept. 2003, the Republican Party has been attacking Democratic presidential candidates for "political hate speech," the latest in a long line of catchphrases such as "political correctness," "media bias" and "class warfare" popularized in recent years by pundits and political operatives. As these terms - which draw on a set of associated stereotypes - gain wider use, they are often used in an increasingly vague and logically nonsensical manner. In this way, "political hate speech" and other bits of political jargon are used to trigger an emotional reaction without making an argument as to why the term applies to a specific case."

Nyhan points out that "political hate speech" is "part of a recent trend in which conservatives strategically reverse civil rights jargon... accusations of liberal ‘hate speech’ can be observed at least as far back as episodes of Rush Limbaugh's TV show in 1995."

Stanford linguist Geoffrey Nunberg argued in the New York Times, "What's notable is the way the Republicans have appropriated ‘hate speech’ to describe the Democrats' attacks on Bush. That's another example of the way political language has tended to drift from left to right over recent decades."

"Conservatives," he wrote, "use ‘hate speech’ the way they use words like ‘diversity’ and ‘bias,’ in the hope that the moral valence that the terms acquired in the context of civil rights will persist when the words are applied to partisan divisions, even if their meanings are altered in the process."

To heal the rifts among its friends and to defend itself from its enemies, Pacifica will have to take its mission seriously, and deal with these matters as outlined in its long-ignored Race and Nationality policy, and create concrete programming policies defining, most importantly, what "hate speech" is not. The network needs desperately to get honest with itself. In a culture based on psychological, social, and moral evasion of such matters, the going can only be tough.

(For a more in-depth look at these questions, see Brian Klug’s "The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism" in The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040202&s=klug )

Pacifica’s New Right and the Struggle for Justice

"Some white people resent this.  Some white people feel that because they do not pick up racism on their sensors therefore it does not exist.  Or, that they themselves are the Victims of Reverse Racism or as the  neo-racists on some Pacifica lists put it, the Black Nats... (the new N word)."

Sheila Hamanaka, WBAI’s Justice and Unity Campaign

"It's time for emergency reorganization of programming..."

A WBAI programmer on the WBAI "Blue Board"

The debate that occurs in the press, in the parlors, and in the conferences is different, of course, than how that debate translates on the street. Matters there are never so abstract, or "refined." The Pacifica "street" is no different – but those who ignore it run the risk of missing the heartbeat of the people, the heartbeat of a movement. It’s the same in any struggle. It’s there where one can taste the tears spilled, the raw power unleashed by the words and ideologies of the rigid men who rule us.

Bernard White

At WBAI today, the Pacifica street looks and smells and tastes like this, from a post by European man who writes daily and anonymously on an Internet bulletin board devoted to WBAI matters. He writes:

"No, stupid. The ‘war’ is between the LSB majority (and the majority of listener-members they represent) and the dumb, ignorant, racist management that BAI has long been saddled with.

"You will lose. And so will Bernard & his hateful blacknat mafia. The station is now a beacon of afrocentric blacknat bullshit artists, ignoring all other ethicities at best, pissing on them at worst. This is obvious to anyone who has listened for more than a few months. And this WILL be changed. Latinos WILL get a voice. Asians -- real asians, not moral abortions like you -- WILL get a voice. Black Americans who do not think that race war and feelgood, bullshit history are the path to happiness WILL have a voice. And decent whites who want to make the world better WITHOUT having to ritually abase themselves on account of their race WILL get a voice.

"This radio station is going to be returned to the great masses of decent people, out of the hands of the few zealous ‘vanguard ideologues’. You don't like that fact; and that's tough shit for you. Go find some more Holocaust Denial websites to bother yourself with."

The tone of the publicly posted email above is not far removed from the volumes of hate mail and numerous death threats aimed at KPFK management – including threats slipped under the GM’s office door late at night - when Spanish language programming was re-introduced there. Is it any wonder, then, that WBAI is being rocked by violence? No, for this is what is meant by hate speech – speech that is one step removed from inciting violence against an oppressed group.

What’s important to realize is this – the email by this anonymous correspondent demonstrates how WBAI station board member Steve Brown’s election platform plank (below) plays in the street. Let’s look again at Brown’s call to action, thinly veiled as it is:

Legendary WBAI Program Director, the late Samori Marksman

"Remove ‘hate mongers’ – who viciously label other staff members and listeners ‘racist’ if they’re not black – or

if they happen to be white or Jewish or Latino or middle class."

This is nothing, of course, but a call for a purge – the same kind of purge on the same grounds as the purge of African programmers at KPFK in the 90’s… and a purge toward the same ends, with as little justification. As The Pacifica Deception noted, "When black programmers address the issues facing oppressed peoples here in the U.S. such as racism and make critical analysis of the sources of racism by ethnicity, religion and class analysis, then those programmers are accused of preaching hate."

Brown’s comments, of course, are a reflection and a distillation of the rhetoric and ideology of figures like David Horowitz, the ADL’s Irwin Suall, Phyllis Chesler, Rep. Joel Hefley, and former Sen. Bob Dole. The ideas are not "extreme" by accepted social standards. What’s being said in the passages above is similar to what George W. Bush means when he says he opposes "racial quotas." One kind of statement is theory, the other is the theory applied in practice and with only the barest pretense of a non-oppressive intent.

The actual agenda is clear enough. One WBAI staffer wrote on August 3^rd, "It's time for emergency reorganization of programming. Shows, programs currently on the air that express extreme ideological views, that is programs that routinely praise, or in some way support overseas "revolutionary"/nationalist/racial wars, or dictatorships of one variety or other Must be removed" (emphasis added).

An hour or so later, he admitted, as he put it, that one person’s extremist was another’s "revelation," and added the following clarification in calling for a purge… "Even as I was writing it I knew it violated perhaps our supreme belief at Pacifica. "Free Speech" Even for, perhaps especially for speech you despise. I certainly despised, and despise communists, and totalitarians generally. As for the Palestinian murderers, and their morally blind camp followers, contempt doesn't begin to describe my feelings.

"Yeah, at this point I want the murderers, and their apologists the f#ck out of here. I turn on WBAI and I hear my co-workers praising Mugabe, a murderer. But it's okay because he’s african?! I hear Palestinian cut throats praised as ‘freedom fighters’, and Jews, and Israel routinely condemned as the villains of history, heard it again just the other morning at about this time, and that's okay?! BTW before you start, I'm on the record as being for the 2 state solution…"

This is akin to what David Horowitz, Bob Dole, and the Pacifica hijackers said. It's how the hijacking started, and illustrates something about why the right wing offensive of the 90’s was able to gain ground among Pacifica’s leadership.

But by this standard, one would have to say that there could be no programming supporting Palestine, that Pacifica - specifically WBAI - would not have sent the first US reporter to Hanoi during the Viet Nam war, the Central American struggle of the eighties would have been left out in the cold, there could be no advocacy on behalf of the Zapatistas, communists or former communists like Bill Mandel could not have had a program, no programming advocating the overthrow of Apartheid could have been aired, anti-Apartheid martyrs like Steven Biko would have been silenced on Pacifica, and Malcolm’s speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" would be taboo. Mumia Abu Jamal’s commentaries, broadcast on many Pacifica stations, would join the list of "All Things Censored" at Pacifica, as they have at National Public Radio. Is that what Pacifica is about? No, that is what US imperialism is about.

Consciously or not what this staffer is suggesting is that all the purges in the 90's at KPFK, KPFT and KPFA were just the thing to do - these kinds of programs were exactly what the hijackers targeted first. Consciously or not, the staffer is saying the purge at WBAI in the 2000 Christmas Coup just didn’t go far enough. (Much the same dynamic is occurring at KPFK, where one correspondent, attacking a Black women’s program there, wrote on August 4^th about the KPFK GM and PD, "Georgia and Guardino [sic] are about nothing if not reverse racism / Identity politics."

In the era of the Patriot Act, labeling positions one opposes as left-"extremist," in order to carry out a purge is not only dangerous (after all, who, then, is tomorrow’s left-"extremist"?) - but it also plays directly into the hands of the most reactionary elements of the US ruling class, as Pacifica’s history demonstrates.

Summing Up:

"I see the manager in master control,’ Wilkins said calmly. ‘Maybe he may want to join us. I'm sure he can hear our signal."

" …No one excluded from and deprived of power wants to talk of compromise and consensus if that means re-absorption and erasure, if the consensus process is co-opted and becomes a cancellation of difference. It is this co-optation by the white Left which progressive peoples of color regard with profound suspicion. Control of the airwaves is really the only power-based means to avoid that co-optation."

David Moore, son of Pacifica Founder Lew Hill

The lesson should, by now, be clear.

One of the most important lessons I hope the reader will draw from this analysis is that racism and all forms of oppression are structural and systematic, identifiable, and that they are above all political, and not merely psychological or related to mere "prejudice." In this sense racism is not a "moral" problem for those who oppose it. It is a problem of the overdetermination of a system – which is to say that where we fail to correctly identify and contradict racism as a system with mutually reinforcing political, economic, cultural, rhetorical, and psychological aspects in its functioning, it will continue to dominate social dynamics and our daily interactions over time.

The coup targeted radicals of color, and exploited contradictions among Pacifica’s various communities to advance a right wing agenda and to eliminate from the airwaves those the system deems most threatening.

If Pacifica fails to reckon with its history of ethnic and political purges - and fails to correct its course, it will remain vulnerable to right wing takeovers, to new hijackings from within and without by those whose politics, consciously or not, serve the interests of the oppressor. The Pacifica network, founded by radical pacifists, must learn at last that without Justice there can be no peace. That’s not radical rhetoric, it’s a natural law.

Although Blacks at WBAI are under siege, if they are to remain functional as a group, they will have to break, at whatever cost, the siege mentality. They will have to reach out and forge substantive alliances with the Puerto Rican, Dominican and Asian communities. They will then have to move to resolve as amicably as possible the very real contradictions between themselves and the white and Jewish communities. This will prove impossible without the concrete and dedicated support of the Pacifica National Board and the Executive Director, who must intervene to buy the time needed for healing and transformation to occur.

At KPFK and KPFT peoples of color must unite to rekindle the struggle for affirmative action remedies in Pacifica’s elections. In those cities there is simply no hope whatsoever that the majority will be justly represented under current conditions. We will remain relegated to the programming basement, pacified with promises, held back by threats of funding losses from displeased white listeners, and otherwise excluded until the cycle of abuse called "democracy" at Pacifica is rectified so that it allows our communities to elect our own representatives in numbers commensurate with our percentages in the overall population. The absence of self-determination means determination by others, at Pacifica, no less than in the world at large.

Under current conditions at Pacifica, for us, "democracy" means "rule by other people." Pacifica’s standards for democracy and inclusion are to the right of those of the US government, which at least allows oppressed groups to elect their own representatives.

If there is any hope at all for a principled and equitable alliance between colonized and oppressed peoples and the colonizer, it lies in an alliance between those groups and the white left. But if Pacifica is an indicator of the potentials for such an alliance, W.E.B. DuBois’ Color Line may have become a gaping fissure. Attacks against the rights of programmers and communities of color have been an unceasing and unrelenting reality, as this analysis demonstrates, for over a decade in the Pacifica network.

With its Race and Nationality Policy, with its focus on anti-oppression training and dialog on issues pertaining to ethnicity, class and oppression, Pacifica has the necessary tools to transform itself. A gathering of oppressed peoples in San Francisco in 2002 gave the network those tools, but they have remained unused, like an unwanted and unwelcome gift, like a Trojan Horse to be approached with only the greatest suspicion. In fact, the gift was rejected, and in return we were stripped of even the barest essentials of justice. With the overthrow of the network’s effort to establish affirmative action in its elections, the network shamelessly stripped us of our dignity, and spat on the gift of healing it had been offered.

If the national and local boards, and the executive director, pick up these tools, even now, Pacifica can help set a tone for a new Left movement that can create the basis for a real justice and real unity – or, Pacifica can continue to attempt to crush the interests of oppressed groups whenever they seem contradictory to the interests and outlooks of dominant groups. If it chooses the latter course, Pacifica will remain a site of ceaseless, antagonistic struggle – not of peace. If it chooses the latter course oppressed peoples will have little choice – only whether to surrender our rights and our voice, or to join in the spirit exhibited by banned programmer Nzinga Heru, the African American programmer who said in KPFK’s on-air rebellion, "I am a firm believer that we in fact are at war."

If that is the case, if such a war becomes a permanently compelling necessity, then the Pacifica mission, which demands the exploration of the causes of racial conflict, will, perhaps once and for all, have been betrayed.

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