Fight the Empire on 10/15/09

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KBOO
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Air date: 
Thu, 10/15/2009 - 9:30am to 10:00am

Host Per Fagereng speaks with Lenni Brenner about his book "51 Documents:.Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis." Lenni Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He became an atheist at 10, and a Marxist at 15, in 1952. His involvement with the Black civil rights movement began on his first day in the organized left, when he met James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, later the organizer of the "freedom rides" of the early 60s. He was active in the mid 50s with Bayard Rustin, later the organizer of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I had a dream" March on Washington. He was arrested 3 times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent 39 months in prison when a court revoked his probation for marijuana possession, for his activities during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964. Immediately on imprisonment, he spent 4 days in intense discussion with Huey Newton, later founder of the Black Panther Party, who he encountered in the holding tank. Subsequently he worked with Kathy Cleaver. More recently, in the 90s, he and Panther do-founder Bobby Seale defended their activities during the 60s on Morton Downey's TV show. He was an anti-war activist from the 1st days of the Vietnam war, speaking frequently at rallies in the Bay Area. In 1963 he organized the Committee for Narcotic Reform in Berkeley. In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In the 90s he and Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael), the legendary "Black Power" leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, co-founded the Committee against Zionism and Racism. They also published The Anti-War Activist. He is presently organizing the Coalition for Narcotic Law Reform. Mr. Brenner is the author of 4 books, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Jews in America Today, and The Lesser Evil, a study of the Democratic Party. His books have been favorably reviewed in 10 languages by prominent publications, including the London Times, The London Review of Books, Moscow's Izvestia and the Jerusalem Post. He has written over 100 articles for many publications, including the Amsterdam News, the Anderson Valley Advertizer, the Atlanta Constitution, CounterPunch, the Jewish Guardian, the Nation, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Middle East International, the Journal of Palestine Studies, the New Statesman of London, Al-Fajr in Jerusalem and Dublin's United Irishman. In 2002 he edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. It contains complete translations of many of the documents quoted in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and The Iron Wall.

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