Willie Colón 1950 - 2026

 

Jesse Jackson 1941 - 2026

 

at 51:20..

James Petras 1937 - 2026

"Chomsky's long history of denying the power and role of the pro-Israel lobby in decisively shaping US Middle East policy culminated in his recent conjoining with the US Zionist propaganda machine in attacking.. "The Israel Lobby" by.. Mearsheimer and.. Walt..  (The Power of Israel in the United States, 2006, 168-9)

".. Noam Chomsky is an icon of what stands for the US anti-war movements and intellectual dissent.  That he has chosen to absolve the pro-Israel lobby and its affiliated groups and media auxiliaries is an important political event, especially when questions of war and peace hang in the balance, and when the majority of Americans oppose the war.  Giving a 'free ride' to the principal authors, architects, and lobbyists in favor of the war is a positive obstacle to achieving clarity about whom we are fighting and why.  To ignore the pro-Israel Lobby is to allow it a free hand in pushing for the invasion of Iran and Syria.  Worse, to distract from its responsibility by pointing to bogus enemies is to weaken our understanding not only of the war, but also the enemies of freedom in this county.  Most of all it allows a foreign government a privileged position in dictating our Middle East policy, while proposing police state methods and legislation to inhibit debate and dissent.  Let me conclude by saying that the peace and justice movements, at home and abroad, are bigger than any individual or intellectual - no matter what their past credentials.

"Yesterday the major Zionist organizations told us whom we may or may not criticize in the Middle East, today they tell us whom we may criticize in the the United States, tomorrow they will tell us to bend our heads and submit to their lies and deceptions in order to engage in new wars of conquest at the service of a morally repugnant colonial regime." (180-181)

Michael Parenti 1933 - 2026

Most of his primary works can be downloaded here and here, with some omissions such has his 1962 Yale dissertation Ethnic and Political Attitudes: A Depth Study of Italian Americans, published in 1975 for Arno Press' 38-volume The Italian American Experience series, but of course Piri' Miri Muli' has you covered:

"Even the Italian's religion suffered from alien adulteration.  In architecture and ambience, the church facade and interior bore little resemblance to the old village chiesa.  Near the altar, where the immigrant may expect to be comforted by statues of Santa Lucia, Sant' Antonio or other dearly loved celestial patrons, he would be startled by the presence of Saint Patrick stepping on snakes.  The lay ceremonies, festas, and semi-pagan rituals and superstitions that were either doctrinally forbidden or peripheral to Catholicism but central to the peasant's way of religion were nowhere to be found."  (27-28)

 

  

The building that responds most forcefully to this phenomenon is Watts Towers, which has a chapel and a baptistry.  The shape of the towers has been linked to costumes worn in a "semi-Pagan" festival in the Southern Italian town where Rodia's family was from.  He attempted at first to build it in Thousand Oaks but the neighbors would have none of it, so he moved to Watts where the local kids brought him their broken ceramic ware.