Occupy Wall Street Calls For 20,000 Protesters In Lower Manhattan
The Occupy Wall Street movement is calling for protesters to flood lower Manhattan in September, where they are to set up tents and barricades while resisting any police or National Guard attempt to dispel the crowd, KleinOnline has learned.
“If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us,” reads a call to arms posted on the website of Adbusters Magazine, which has been behind Occupy since the movement’s inception.
“Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations,” added the announcement.
After largely breaking for the winter, Occupy is calling for the encampment to begin Sept. 17. “On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” reads the Adbusters announcement.
“Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices…We demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”
In January, this column first reported that a coalition of U.S. radical groups, including the Occupy Movement, is preparing protests to start in September, including the targeting of the Democratic National Convention that takes place that month in Charlotte, N.C.
The Occupy movement, however, is likely to escalate months before the Sept. 3-6 event. A slew of extremist organizations, some tied to Obama, are preparing protests to coincide with major NATO and G-8 summits slated for Chicago in May.
Is The U.S. Arming Al Qaeda To Fight Syria’s Bashar Assad?
Turkey has been arming Al Qaeda organizations as part of its aid to the opposition targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to Egyptian security officials speaking to this column.
Turkey is a member of NATO. It has been coordinating its arming of many Syrian opposition groups with the U.S. and several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the security officials said. The officials did not have specific information that the U.S. was aware of, or involved in, the direct arming of the Al Qaeda groups.
Several knowledgeable Egyptian and Arab security officials claimed the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region. The security officials also claimed Saudi Arabia was sending weapons to the rebels via surrogates.
Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, released a video last month calling on Muslims to support Syrian rebels to oust Assad’s “pernicious, cancerous regime.”
Media Matters For America Official Tells Detractors To ‘Go To Hell’
In response to the controversy surrounding Media Matters for America, a top official from the organization told one of his group’s main detractors to “go to hell.” “Best way to tell Dershowitz to go to hell (1) picket his classroom or (2) tell your friends to follow me on twitter,” tweeted Media Matters Action Network senior fellow M.J. Rosenberg, referring to liberal Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.
While Rosenberg’s tweet may not have been an official response from Media Matters, it’s the first public recognition of the ensuing controversy by anyone inside the embattled organization.
Rosenberg makes clear in his Twitter profile that “statements here are my own and do not represent the views or policies” of Media Matters.
Last week, Dershowitz was in the news after he announced on this reporter’s WABC Radio show that he will personally make the Media Matters for America controversy a re-election issue for President Obama.
A series of reports has exposed the embattled Media Matters’s purported illicit tactics, including compiling a de facto enemies list; announcing an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel; and reportedly seeking to investigate the personal lives of reporters and news personalities.
The information came amid reports that White House staffers held regular meetings and even a weekly conference call with Media Matters.
Dershowitz takes particular issue with Media Matters coverage of Israel, including rhetoric from Rosenberg, who is known for his extreme anti-Israel views. Rosenberg has been pushing the phrase “Israel Firster,” implying that those who support the Jewish state put Israel’s needs before those of the U.S.
Rosenberg has called Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu a “terrorist” and Israel’s President Shimon Peres an “uberhawk on Iran” who has “undermined” Obama. He has denied that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ever threatened to wipe Israel off the map, suggesting it was a mistranslation despite similar rhetoric being regularly repeated by top Iranian officials. He has compared the violence of terrorist-supporting anti-Israel activists on recent Gaza flotillas with “civil rights demonstrators who sat down at segregated lunch counters through the south.” And recently, he defended reporter Helen Thomas against charges of anti-Semitism for saying the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine.” He criticized Obama for “diss[ing]” Thomas calling instead for her to be “salute[d].”