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If you saw the movie Argo, well it appears very little of it was either true or purposely was designed to include Germany’s hidden relationship with Iran. Sheesh…things are for sure coming into play and full understanding given the recent Iran nuclear deal.
The day after the last day of his presidency, Jimmy Carter flew to Frankfurt to greet 52 American diplomats who had been held as hostages for about a year by radical students in United States Embassy in Tehran. Now they were being attended to in a US Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, and Carter wanted to express his sympathy.
On Jan. 21, 1981, the ex-president had warm, but mysterious, words for his German hosts. At the time, Helmut Schmidt, a member of the center-left Social Democrats, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, of the liberal FDP, were leading West Germany in the former capital city of Bonn. The Germans, Carter said, “helped us in a way I can never reveal publicly to the world.”
The race to apportion credit began only moments after the words about Germany’s mysterious role had been uttered. Chancellor Schmidt allowed himself to be celebrated by the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which wrote that “Bonn appears to have played a decisive role.” Foreign Minister Genscher was lauded by the tabloid Bild, which claimed the “release had been negotiated at night at Genscher’s.” And Middle East negotiator Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski was praised in the daily Die Welt.
The occupation of the US Embassy and the 444-day hostage situation remains one of the most dramatic events of the post-World War II era. It represented the Western world’s first encounter with the radical Shiite movement of Ayatollah Khomeini, which was violating the rules of international law. A mob could be seen burning American flags on the embassy property, and for a time Iran and the US appeared to be on the verge of war. In the end, however, everyone claimed to have helped them to reach a peaceful solution.
The details of the German contribution, however, remained unclear. Now historian Frank Bösch, the director of the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam and SPIEGEL have conducted research in German archives and spoken with period witnesses. This has revealed that the West German government at the time had a “smooth intermediary role,” as Bösch puts it. And one of the key figures, it turns out, is barely known: Gerhard Ritzel, the German ambassador in Tehran.
Witnesses from the time describe the small, portly native of the Odenwald region in central Germany, who died in 2000, as a very sly man. He’s also one whose career is rich in anecdotes. As a young diplomat in the 1950s, he pretended to trip at a reception in Bombay (now Mumbai) so that he could fall on top of a banquet table covered with colored rice kernels in the shape of a swastika. In India, the swastika is a symbol of luck and the thoughtless host had served it up in honor of his German guests. Before a meeting with Soviet diplomats, Ritzel ate sardines and drank his colleagues under the table.
Contact with the Opposition
When Ritzel took his post in Tehran in 1977, the shah, who had a good relationship with Bonn, was still in power. Iran was Germany’s largest source of oil and, in exchange, was pressing Schmidt and Genscher for the planned export of submarines, frigates and nuclear power plants.
At the time, Ritzel was also trying to establish contact with the fundamentalist Iranian opposition. They were adventurous meetings, which he told everyone about afterwards. Before the meetings, a car would pick him up in front of a hotel, and the driver would drop him off somewhere in Tehran with a note pressed into his hand. On it stood: “Wait here, a blue pick-up will come by.” He would then changed cars one more time and ultimately had to cross various courtyards and climb into an upper floor whose wall had been punctured by a mortar. There he met his interlocutors, a group that would soon be taking over power in Iran.
In January 1979, after millions of people demonstrated against him, the shah left Iran. A few weeks later, Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile and announced the beginning of an Islamic Republic.
Ritzel quickly came to terms with the regime change. The West feared that Iran could slip into the Soviet sphere of influence. Khomeini seemed to be the lesser evil — and the new regime didn’t appear to have much of a future. “The ayatollahs can’t govern the country in the long run,” Chancellor Schmidt prophesized in March 1979. He conveyed to Khomeini that Iran would remain an “important external trading partner, regardless of its form of government.”
Ritzel, however, seems to have truly liked Khomeini. The Shiite leader, he later claimed, was a “humanitarian.” He also argued that the West should be “thankful if he is around for many more years.”
Ritzel as Intermediary
The ambassador purposefully established contact with people in the “Imam’s” milieu. He profited from the fact that Khomeini was partly surrounded by men who had lived in the West Germany, including Sadeq Tabatabaei, who had completed his doctorate at the Ruhr University in Bochum. His sister had married one of the ayatollah’s sons.
Tabatabaei became a senior government official in Tehran and Ritzel’s main interlocutor. After the beginning of the hostage-taking on Nov. 4, 1979, he also became the Germany’s main source of hope in the quickly escalating crisis. Khomeini put his support behind the students, describing the United States as “the great Satan,” while President Carter imposed strict sanctions, demanding that his allies do the same and ordering the preparations for a military attack.
Ritzel was one of the few Western diplomats officials in Tehran would still listen to. In order to safeguard German export interests, the government in Bonn wanted a quick end to the crisis. Ritzel obtained permission for a delegation from the International Red Cross to visit the hostages. He had newspapers brought to the imprisoned Americans, including a January 1979 issue of DER SPIEGEL featuring Khomeini on the cover at the top of the stack. When the revolutionary leader wanted to convince the shah to face the “complaints of the Iranian people,” the relevant letter was given to Ritzel. The shah, however, refused to accept it.
The situation in Tehran was confusing for the Americans, because self-described middlemen were constantly popping up. The Americans first approached Ritzel in May 1980. Together with Genscher, he flew to Vienna to meet with then US Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. There, Muskie and Ritzel had a one-on-one conversation, and when Tabatabaei found out about it, the Iranian declared that he could be of service to the German ambassador.
At the request of the Americans, the German Foreign Ministry passed Ritzel’s situation reports on to the US. The Iranians were worried that a retaliatory military attack would take place if the hostages were released. They also wanted back the deposits of $12 million that Carter had had frozen in US banks and access to the shah’s fortune, which they believed to be in the US. On May 27, the US Embassy in Bonn communicated that Ritzel should tell the Iranians that Carter would “seriously consider” a declaration to this effect.
Ritzel’s Savvy Ploy
In order to get the ayatollahs to compromise, the resourceful Ritzel undertook a journey to the spiritual leader of the holy city of Mashhad. He politely asked for the terms “truth,” “justice” and “hospitality” to be interpreted for him from an Islamic perspective.
After three days of religious-spiritual debate, the ayatollah asked the visitor why he had really come to visit. Ritzel’s honest answer: He was looking for arguments for the release of the hostages. “I will think about this,” answered the cleric. Soon after, a messenger arrived at Ritzel’s, with a document from the cleric for Khomeini that indirectly frowned upon the hostage-taking. Years later, Genscher raved about how the diplomat had created a “basis for the trust” on the part of the Iranians in the German government.
On Sept. 9, Tabatabaei offered to meet with a US delegation in West Germany. Under Khomeini’s instruction, he asked that Germany keep the minutes for the meeting, and that Genscher “be involved” in the discussions for as long as possible.
One week later, the secret negotiations between Tabatabaei and Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher began in the guest house of the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn under Genscher’s leadership. Christopher was surprised when he met Tabatabaei: A good-looking man in his mid-thirties wearing flannel pants and a sporty tweed blazer. He hadn’t thought that a representative of the Khomeini regime could look like that.
His demands, however, posed problems for the US emissaries. Ultimately, Washington couldn’t take control over the now-dead shah’s funds. American creditors were also demanding compensation for confiscated Iranian assets.
But Christopher did offer a guarantee that the US would not attack and held out the prospect that approximately $6 billion in gold and other assets would be released. The gold was to be handed over with the help of the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank. Christopher also agreed to “help overcome banking secrecy” to access the shah’s fortune. Genscher added that this seemed “exceptionally far-reaching and very substantial,” and that his government could not offer anything on that scale. Even years later, Christopher still seemed convinced that without the help of the foreign minister, the discussions would have fallen apart at this point.
Carter noted in his diary that, for the first time, he was certain that he was “in direct contact” with Khomeini.
An agreement seemed to be close. Over the following weeks, Ritzel met with Tabatabaei almost every day. For reasons of secrecy, the latter was now referred to as “the traveler” in German documents.
SuddenTwist
In early October, the Americans deposited drafts for legislative decrees — with which Carter wanted to resolve the disputed points — in the US Embassy in Bonn. Genscher helped where he could. He offered to Tabatabaei that Germany would take on the “role of guarantor when it comes to Americans’ adherence of their obligations.” He agreed to “positively influence public opinion about Iran” and suggested meetings in Berchtesgaden, Germany, or Saudi Arabia.
Then, suddenly, the Iranian side froze up again, for reasons that have been widely speculated. The American election was set to take place on Nov. 4 — did Khomeini want to prevent Carter from getting a boost in the election if the hostage drama came to an end? Or had another group gotten the upper hand in the power struggle in Tehran?
In any case, Tabatabaei delivered alarming news on Nov. 9. He said he was in danger of being arrested and that Ritzel needed to make sure that all documents testifying to Tabatabaei’s role were destroyed.
That fear ended up being exaggerated: Tabatabaei, who died earlier this year, was later named special envoy. But when the Iranians took up negotiations with the United States again in November, they bypassed him and his German connection. Algeria ended up helping release the Iranian billions and on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages were flown out of the country. US President Carter’s praise for the Germans, however, endured. Without their prior mediation, Historian Bösch says, the agreement wouldn’t have worked out. Even the suggestion to include Algeria came from Bonn. According to the records, it came from Helmut Schmidt.
Speaking recently before a D.C. green group, Resources for the Future, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy emphasized her belief that Congressional Republicans would find it difficult to roll back the newly-finalized rules for the Clean Power Plan which will, in effect, largely put an end to the use of coal as a fuel source for electricity generation in the name of doing something meaningful about global warming.
McCarthy projected victory despite the almost certain reality of extensive and lengthy litigation over the rules. To her “the extensive comment record and completed litigation over EPA’s underlying authority to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act are sticking points for a future Administration intent on reversing the rules,” said an analysis of her remarks by Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington firm producing public policy research for institutional investors.
“The Administration is resolute with respect to climate change, and we think McCarthy’s remarks speak to the survival of the rules as a legacy priority for the President, on par with healthcare reform and Iran diplomacy,” the firm said in a recent update.
Legacy or no legacy, the Clean Power Plan will prove very expensive to implement. It will intrude on the governing authority of the different states, will push electricity rates through the roof (as Obama promised he would do in his 2008 campaign for president), kill countless jobs in coal and related industries, and make a severe dent in U.S. electricity generating capacity. Even without full implementation, because the handwriting is already on the wall Wyoming and West Virginia look like they are slipping into a recession with most of the other big coal states likely to follow within a few quarters.
What we get for that is a scintilla of reduction in the generation of so-called greenhouse gases that is almost certainly not worth the enormous expense and the promise of more, not just where coal is concerned, but across the entire energy sector.
Politico: The oil and gas industry is in the crosshairs of the administration’s eco-agenda, even if Shell gets its Arctic drilling permit.
President Barack Obama’s enemies have long accused him of waging a “war on coal.” But a very different war on oil and gas is coming next.
The newest phase of Obama’s environmental agenda has the oil and natural gas industry in its crosshairs, with plans to curb greenhouse gas pollution from rigs and refineries, tighten oversight of drilling on public lands and impose a strict ozone limit that industry lobbyists slam as “the most expensive regulation ever.”
The administration still might hand some modest victories to the industry along the way — as early as Friday, for example, the Interior Department may give Shell Oil a final green light for expanded drilling off Alaska’s Arctic coast. And unlike the massive climate rule that the EPA issued for power plants last week, the administration’s actions on oil and gas will be quieter, more piecemeal and harder to track.
Still, the oil industry’s top lobbying group says it’s facing a “regulatory avalanche or a tidal wave” — one that some of Obama’s critics have been bracing for.
The administration has “ridden this horse as far as it wants to ride it,” GOP energy lobbyist and strategist Mike McKenna said in an interview, tying the oil and gas crackdown to Obama’s efforts to make wind and solar power more competitive. He said Obama and his team “have always been very clear-eyed about their strategy: they want to make affordable, dependable, traditional fuels like oil, gas and coal more expensive. … This is just the natural rush at the finish line.”
But greens say it’s past time for Obama to start reining in oil and gas as the next step in the climate legacy that he’s made such a priority for his second term. For these activists, the EPA’s power plant rules represented only a down payment.
“We’ve seen the administration willing to take on King Coal,” Jamie Henn, co-founder of the climate activist group 350.org, said in a recent interview. “They’ve got to go after bigger bad guys, like Big Oil and the Koch brothers.”
Environmentalists say the upcoming actions still won’t hit drillers and refiners as hard as EPA is hitting coal-burning power plants.
For example, the administration promised this year to slash oil- and gas-related emissions of methane — an especially potent greenhouse gas — by as much as 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. But that level of reduction is “not hard, nor is it particular costly” to achieve, Environmental Defense Fund Vice President Mark Brownstein said.
Unlike the tectonic realignment away from coal underway in the power sector, thanks in part to the EPA’s rules, “nothing would be required of the oil and gas industry that would cause it to have to fundamentally rethink how it does business,” he added.
Republicans in Congress may yet succeed in stopping or slowing down some of the multiple regulations that oil and gas hate the most during final negotiations on funding the government beyond next month. But GOP leaders have little to no appetite for risking a government shutdown to bury the regulations. And the refinery and ozone regulations are both tied to court-ordered deadlines this fall, making it harder for lawmakers to stop the train.
The limits on toxic air emissions from refineries that EPA proposed last year could cost more than $20 billion to implement, according to industry estimates, though the American Petroleum Institute said on Thursday that it hopes to see the final version significantly scaled back. EPA’s projected price tag was much smaller, at $239 million in total costs for the new emissions standards. Much more here.
Philadelphia: The School District of Philadelphia’s special registration for immigrant students who speak a language other than English closes on Aug. 28, giving families of such students roughly two weeks to register their child for the upcoming school year.
The school year begins Sept. 8 for grades 1 through 12, and on Sept. 12 for kindergarten students; interested families should contact the Multilingual Assessment Center at (215) 400–4240 and selecting option 1. The office is open for registration Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.
Last year, the center registered more than 800 students from more than 70 countries. Collectively, those students spoke more than 40 different native languages.
The district also noted families shouldn’t be concerned about registering their child based on their immigration status. The district referred to Plyler v. DOE, a U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that it is unconstitutional to deny free public education to children who are not legally admitted into the United States.
City immigrant populations have been on the rise since Mayor Michael Nutter’s signage of a pair of executive orders, starting in 2009.
“All city services, including but not limited to the following listed services, shall be made available to all city of Philadelphia residents, consistent with applicable law, regardless of the person’s citizenship or legal immigration status,” read a portion of one order. “[Those services include] police and fire services; medical services, such as emergency medical services, general medical care at community health centers and immunization; testing and treatment with respect to communicable diseases; mental health services; children protective services and access to city facilities, such as libraries and recreation centers.”
That order also stipulated that law enforcement officials alone are allowed to question an individual’s immigration status, or those who work for a municipally–governed service or program. Nutter’s second immigrant executive oder, signed in 2014, ended the procedure of detaining individuals without a warrant on behalf of Immunization and Customs Enforcement.
“No person in the custody of the city who otherwise would be released from custody shall be detained pursuant an ICE civil immigration detainer request,” read a portion of the most recent executive order, “nor shall notice of his or her pending release be provided, unless such person is being released after conviction for a first or second degree felony involving violence and the detainer is supported by a judicial warrant.
“The police commissioner, the superintendent of prisons and all other relevant officials to the city are nearby required to take appropriate action to implement this order.”
And earlier this summer, Jim Kenney, winner of May’s democratic mayoral primary, joined with pro–immigrant groups Juntos and Philadelphia Stands United to support Nutter’s stance on immigration and to roundly reject Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comments on immigrants.
“I also would wish that the United States congress would be as animated and as energetic about gun violence and education as they are about holding immigrants without a warrant,” Kenney said. “Our neighborhoods are not safer if people are afraid of the police. They’re not safer if they’re afraid to come forward and be a witness. They’re not safer if the relationship between the police and the community is a negative one.”
Mayor’s Office of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Executive Director Jennifer Rodriguez said Nutter has “repeatedly stated that a piecemeal approach to immigration is not effective and has called onto congress and the federal government to address our broken system by enacting reform that reflects the welcoming values that our nation and our city were founded on.”
Syrians?
In part from Refugee Resettlement: Yikes! Look at this opinion piece posted at a “progressive” website of all places. This worldly Syrian woman, born in America and apparently now living in Syria, says many Syrian so-called ‘refugees’ arriving in Europe are not from unsafe parts of Syria, but are just looking for “El Dorado” (a mythical city of gold)—for Europe to give them free everything!
Here is some of what Deena Stryker says of her fellow Syrians (emphasis is mine):
“My husband is one of 10 children. Of that large extended family, many have taken the boats to Europe now. Some are in Sweden, Denmark, Italy and Germany. Several are in Turkey. None of these people needed to leave Syria. They were all living in safe, violence free zones (Latakia on the coast). None of them had been attacked or threatened or were in any danger from Syrian government, or police, etc.
Why did they leave? They left homes and cars and possessions here in order to take up the offer of FREE money and housing in Europe. They had been sure that once in Europe they will be given free medical, education, housing, food and provided for in every way forever. They think of Europe as “El Dorado”.There is also a large dose of jealousy involved, as they saw their neighbors going and they didn’t want to be left behind. Syrian hate to see someone else get a good deal, and not get a piece of the pie themselves. More here.
WTH??? Anyone who believes the reasons for these decisions needs to think again.
I personally will throw in my reason, it is part of the Iran Deal where under the P5+1, John Kerry and Wendy Sherman along with The White House gave up yet another major item….missile defense. Iran and the IRGC must be delighted.
Berlin: Germany on Saturday said it would withdraw its two Patriot missile batteries from Turkey early next year, ending its role in a three-year NATO mission to help bolster the country’s air defences against threats from Syria’s civil war.
The German army, known as the Bundeswehr, said on its website that the mandate for the mission would run out on January 31, 2016, and would not be renewed.
Germany will also call back around 250 soldiers who are currently deployed in southeastern Turkey as part of the mission, the statement said.
“Along with our NATO partners, we have protected the Turkish people from missile attacks from Syria,” Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen was quoted as saying in the statement.
“We are ending this deployment in January 2016,” she said, adding that the main threat in the crisis-wracked region now came from the Islamic State group.
Turkey turned to its NATO allies for help over its troubled frontier after a mortar bomb fired from Syrian territory killed five Turkish civilians in the border town of Akcakale in 2012.
The United States, the Netherlands and Germany each sent Patriot missile batteries in response. Germany’s Patriot missile system is based in the Turkish town of Kahramanmaras, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the Syrian border.
Originally used as an anti-aircraft missile, Patriots today are used to defend airspace by detecting and destroying incoming missiles. NATO deployed Patriot missiles in Turkey during the 1991 Gulf war and in 2003 during the Iraqi conflict.
FNC: The U.S. military is pulling its Patriot missiles from Turkey this fall, the U.S. Embassy in Ankara announced Sunday.
It is unclear if the decision to pull the missiles is in response to Turkey’s unannounced massive airstrike against a Kurdish separatist group in northern Iraq on July 24. The strike endangered U.S. Special Forces on the ground training Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, angering U.S. military officials.
The U.S. military was taken completely by surprise by the Turkish airstrike, which involved 26 jets, military sources told Fox News.
Patriot missiles have been upgraded in recent years to shoot down ballistic missiles, in addition to boasting an ability to bring down enemy aircraft. The U.S. military has deployed these missiles along Turkey’s border with Syria.
When a Kurdish journalist asked the Army’s outgoing top officer, Gen. Raymond Odierno, about the incident over northern Iraq at his final press conference Wednesday, Odierno replied: “We’ve had conversations about this to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. It is influenced by Marxist ideology and has been responsible for recent attacks in Turkey, killing Turkish police and military personnel. A separate left-wing radical group was responsible for attacking the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul last week.
State Department and Pentagon officials have said in recent days that Turkey has a right to defend itself against the PKK.
A senior military source told Fox News that Turkey is worried about recent gains by Syrian Kurds, some affiliated with the PKK. But the group is seen as an effective ground force against ISIS, helping pinpoint ISIS targets for U.S. warplanes.
The Turks, however, worry Syrian Kurds will take over most of the 560-mile border it shares with Syria.
Currently, ISIS controls a 68-mile strip along the Turkey-Syria border, but Turkey does not want Kurdish fighters involved in the fight to push out ISIS from this portion of the border because it would enable the Kurds to control a large swath of land stretching from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean. Right now Syrian Kurds occupy both sides of the contested 68-mile border controlled by ISIS.
Of the 30 million Kurds living in the Middle East, 14 million reside in Turkey. They are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without its own country.
Despite Turkey being listed among the 62-nation anti-ISIS coalition, it has yet to be named as a country striking ISIS in the coalition’s daily airstrike report.
A week ago, after months of negotiations, the U.S. Air Force moved six F-16 fighter jets to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey from their base in Italy and several KC-135 refueling planes. Airstrikes against ISIS in Syria soon followed.
The decision to allow manned U.S. military aircraft inside Turkey came days after an ISIS suicide bomber killed dozens of Turkish citizens.
Part of Turkey’s reluctance to do more against ISIS is because Turkey wants the U.S. military to take on the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. But that is not U.S. policy.
“We are not at war with the Assad regime,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said recently.
The animosity between Turkey and Syria goes back decades. In 1939, Turkey annexed its southern most province, Hatay, from Assad family land. Syria has never recognized the move and the two countries have been at odds ever since.
There was no immediate reply from the Pentagon or State Dept. when contacted by Fox News asking what prompted the decision to pull the U.S. missiles from Turkey.
Daily Beast: The answer might define the future of the American left, which has split over race, party politics, and the power of protest since BLM activists targeted Bernie Sanders.
Last Saturday, for the second time in a month, protesters who identified themselves as members of the Black Lives Matter movement leapt onstage to interrupt a speech by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.“I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, even with all of these progressives, but you’ve already done that for me,” said Marissa Johnson, who was roundly booed before demanding and receiving a four-minute moment of silence for the death of Michael Brown, as Sanders stood behind her and fellow protester Mara Willaford.
The Seattle protest sparked a particularly strong counter-reaction, especially among the white liberals who form the core of Bernie Sanders’ base. Sanders is not the frontrunner to win his party’s nomination. Many on both the left and right are asking: Why him?
Sanders currently trails Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, whose events have not yet been successfully interrupted, by 38 points in Quinnipiac’s most recent national poll. He has made criminal justice reform a tentpole issue early in his campaign. Jeb Bush, who trails Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by 10 points, allegedly reached out to local Black Lives Matter leaders a night before, then was shouted down at a campaign event less than 24 hours later.
Why protest Bernie and not Hillary? Why Jeb and not Trump?
Interviews with 10 members of both local and national branches of Black Lives Matter—as well as with the political campaigns they’ve tested—reveals no single, easy answer. It’s one part logistical—from the less stringent security of a second-tier candidate to the simple timing of a speech.
And it is another part—a larger part—purely organizational.
In response to the death of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer, activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi rallied together on Twitter to create visibility with a unified phrase: Black Lives Matter. As more black Americans — like Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray — were killed by police, the phrase gained prominence and resonance — both on Twitter, and in the protests that would follow, nationwide.
In the process of trying to grow its message from a hashtag spawned by three activists into a national political movement, Black Lives Matter—a decentralized organization with official and unofficial Facebook pages, meet-ups, and blogs throughout America and the world—is splintering internally on how to express that message, and even defining what that message truly is.
After all, when an article says Black Lives Matter interrupted a campaign event, who is a part of Black Lives Matter, anyway? The answer to that question is even harder to answer.
The answer to that question might be a small group of people who self-identify as a “radical organization.” The answer to that question might also be anyone.
And the answer to that question might define the future of the American left, which has split over race, party politics, and the limits and powers of protesting since two activists took over a podium in Seattle seven days ago.
Nikki Stephens, 16, was hit with a barrage of Facebook messages and texts on Saturday night.
“My phone was blowing up,” Stephens says. “Everyone automatically assumed I was one of the two women”—the protesters who took over the Sanders event in Seattle.
Stephens, a high schooler and track athlete, had the keys to the “Black Lives Matter: Seattle” Facebook page. She had “watched the video from all angles” of Johnson and Willaford, and now—as the de facto voice of Black Lives Matter: Seattle, she believed—it was her turn to speak.
She had been drawn into the movement months ago by an activist who came to her school and compelled her to take action on the recentspate of young black menkilled by police.
“I wanted to raise awareness—that this is not a joke. That people are actually dying,” she says. “That’s why I made the page.”
With the help and guidance of her friend, she started sharing stories of injustice and dispatches from the national chapter. Quickly, her page grew to be the largest Black Lives Matter page in Seattle.
Elaine Thompson/AP
Then Johnson and Willaford, whom Stephens had never met, took over the podium at the Bernie Sanders’ campaign event last weekend.
“I felt like I had to come up with a response,” she says.
There was, however, a problem: Stephens is a Bernie Sanders supporter. Panicked, she called her friend who had gotten her into the movement to plan her next move.
“I was like, ‘What should I do? I don’t really know what to do,’” she says.
As the night progressed, she started receiving messages filled with hate, threats, and racial slurs—especially, she says, from Bernie Sanders fans. They all wanted an apology—one for something she didn’t do.
So she crafted one.
“To the people of Seattle and #BernieSanders I am so sorry for what happened today in Seattle. I am a volunteer who just runs this page and I am only just starting to get into the movement,” she wrote. “I was unaware of what happened and now that I’ve seen the video [of the event] I would like to say again that I am sorry. That is not what Black Lives Matter stands for and that is not what we’re about. Do not let your faith in the movement be shaken by voices of two people. Please do not question our legitimacy as a movement. Again I would like to apologize to the people of Seattle and I will be trying to reach out to Mr. Sanders.”
That’s when Stephens received messages from both Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford.
“Of course, you can’t tell tone by text. But when they approached me, through texting, it felt sort of aggressive,” says Stephens. “But it wasn’t like they were mad. They were like, ‘Who are you? Why’d you start your page?’”
They told Stephens to change the name of her page—that she had no claim to Black Lives Matter: Seattle.
However, Willaford, 25, and Johnson, 23, had not been public leaders of any Black Lives Matter: Seattle pages up until the day of the event.
At 5:45 a.m. on Saturday morning, Johnson and Willaford created a separate Facebook page, also, confusingly enough, called “Black Lives Matter Seattle.” At 6:35 p.m., they issued a press release—the page’s first post—called “Black Lives Matter #BowDownBernie Action” that listed Johnson as a press contact and was signed by both Johnson and Willaford.
At the bottom of the note, they are listed as “Black Lives Matter Seattle co-founders.”
Johnson and Willaford were previously leaders of the group Outside Agitators 206, an activist coalition based in Seattle. According to OA206’s website, the fourth of the organization’s four points of unity is this:
Jason Kempin/BET via Getty
“Fuck the police: As an institution fundamentally rooted in white supremacy and anti-Blackness we reject the police presence in our communities, absolutely. It is our responsibility to hold each other accountable and keep each other safe.”
The organization appeared largely dormant over the last several months. According to its website, the group’s sole activity in July was the reposting of a Movement for Black Lives event invitation and an article from TheRoot.com.
After the event, Stephens—thinking she had accidentally claimed a page that wasn’t her own and facing mounting pressure—ceded the name of the page. She changed the name to “Black in Seattle.” Willaford and Johnson’s page was now the primary Black Lives Matter Seattle group on Facebook.
“They said, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing. We appreciate you trying to be involved,’” she says of the texts. “‘But it’s not an official message. We’ve gotten calls from the national people at Black Lives Matter.’”
Then, later on, another Facebook group claiming to be a part of Black Lives Matter instead demanded Bernie Sanders and his Seattle-based organizers apologize to the movement. Some national media reported that as a Black Lives Matter response, as well.
The national Black Lives Matter Facebook page then posted a statement at 2:15 a.m. Sunday morning.
“The #BlackLivesMatter organization did not create any petitions demanding apology from Seattle based organizers. We have not issued a public apology, neither have we made any public statements demanding an apology.”
So who is Black Lives Matter in this situation? Did the movement send protesters to disrupt Bernie Sanders?
“The point of disruption is to challenge business as usual, to really challenge the community of Seattle—largely white liberals—and their inability to see anti-black racism.”
“I didn’t. My chapter did,” says Patrisse Cullors—one of three people credited with starting and spreading the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that was used to help grow a national movement. She’s also the founder of Dignity and Power Now, a Los Angeles-based organization that works for the rights of incarcerated people and their families. “What we do is we support the chapters. We support their local demands and goals. They tell us what they need us to build support around.”
Cullors, 32, says she met up with Willaford at a Black Lives Matter national retreat and that they “talk all of the time,” but she never gave direct instructions to interrupt Sanders’ rally. She calls Willaford and Johnson’s branch “a very new chapter.”
“That chapter did all the work. And we supported it by ensuring they were a part of the chapter,” says Cullors. “It’s very rare there’s a national directive for people to do things. We amplify and support.”
But what about the leader of the larger Black Lives Matter Facebook group in Seattle—one that existed publicly well before Johnson and Willaford got in front of a podium in Seattle?
“I’m not sure where she was coming from,” says Cullors. “I think what’s important is that folks understand the point of disruption: to challenge business as usual, to really challenge the community of Seattle—largely white liberals—and challenging their inability to see anti-black racism, as a part of a larger pushback against the state.”
Does she understand why there might be confusion over who has true ownership of the message in Seattle? If Stephens had publicly acted first and not Willaford and Johnson, would she not be in charge?
“I don’t know how to answer that question,” says Cullors. “There is a network called Black Lives Matter, with chapters and local affiliates. It could be very confusing for some to think it’s all the same. There could be some that use our name, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in alignment with our message.”
Cullors says there are now “registered chapters” of the national Black Lives Matter movement, and cites Boston, Los Angeles, the Bay Area and now Seattle as those who have filled out the necessary paperwork.
But a list of official chapters does not appear on the official Black Lives Matter website and is not publicly available, according to Cullors. There is no registration form on the official website and no statement noting that local Black Lives Matters groups must sign up with the national branch.
Willaford and Johnson did not respond to repeated requests for comment by phone, email, and social media channels. And Cullors wanted to note that she has no problem with Stephens, herself—in fact, she’d like her to meet with Johnson and Willaford to see how she can help the movement—but she believed the apology to be off-message.
“I don’t think it’s necessary to issue an apology trying to censor black folks,” she says.
“Anyone can be a Black Lives Matter activist,” she adds. “That [statement] wasn’t official.”
***
The Seattle disruption exacerbated a nascent divide on the activist left between black and white progressives.
Some white writers, like Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, wrote after the event that the Black Lives Matter movement was alienating the candidate that best served the movement’s interests—or, as he titled his post, “Don’t Piss On Your Best Friend.”
“Many on the left find it hard to come out and say ‘this was stupid,’ because they support both Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter movement,” he wrote. “That is a misperception of the political landscape. Believing that a small group of angry young protesters did something that was not well thought out need not make you feel guilty or racist; rash and counterproductive things are what young people do.”
“But maybe there is a more important question here than mere tactics,” he wrote. “Perhaps shutting down a political speech is, normatively, wrong.”
In The New Republic, Jamil Smith took issue with some of the responses by white progressive media after the speech.
“These are supposed to be the white people who want Black Lives Matter to succeed. These people were willing to throw black people under the bus for the white dude they want to win. That’s the same anti-blackness energy that we’re fighting against.”
“Since when are protest tactics designed to make the people whom they are targeting feel more comfortable and less annoyed?” he asked. “And since when is Sanders, or (Republican presidential candidate Ben) Carson, or any candidate exempt from being pushed?”
“What was most shocking to me about the reactions to the Bernie Sanders shutdown was the amount of rage from progressive white people for two African-American women who were standing up for what they believe in. The reaction was gross,” Julius Jones, founder of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Worcester, Mass., tells The Daily Beast.
“These are supposed to be the white people who want Black Lives Matter to succeed. These people were willing to throw black people under the bus for the white dude they want to win. That’s the same anti-blackness energy that we’re fighting against.”
By late Saturday night, Nikki Stephens, a rising high school junior in Washington state, may have accidentally received the worst and most vocal of that hate—and some of it from fans of the candidate she had already supported.
“I heard from so many people and, although you are liberal and you do support Bernie Sanders—and you do say you support Black Lives Matter—I saw a lot of them come out and say some very nasty things about the movement. There were so many people posting claiming to be liberals, then going back and using slurs, and perpetuating stereotypes. And the sexism I saw from men,” she says, trailing off.
***
Protesters in Massachusetts’ Black Lives Matters chapters say there’s a simple logistical reason Bernie Sanders’ speeches have been interrupted twice—once in Seattle, and once before in Phoenix last month—but Hillary Clinton hasn’t yet been disrupted.
Neither Bernie Sanders nor Jeb Bush have those protective details. Hillary Clinton most certainly does.
“They’re not to be pressed in any way. The Secret Service are very dangerous people, and their operation is protect their asset at all costs,” said Jones, who was part of a group of activists who spoke to—instead of protesting against—Hillary Clinton last weekend in New Hampshire. “To be confronting an issue such as police brutality—and then to tell that same group of people that they should go charge at the [former] first lady—is a little short-sighted.”
Yancey, 22, views Black Lives Matter as a “radical” group. But she says that rushing the stage with the intention of taking over the microphone at a Hillary Clinton campaign event is not viable.
“We’re a radical organization, with radical politics, and we have radical tactics. There’s no way of softening that. But we are strategic, and we’re interested in remaining safe and alive. Something like storming the stage was not a possibility with the Secret Service [present],” Yancey says.
According to New England-area Black Lives Matter activists like Yancey and Jones, they came to demonstrate at Clinton’s New Hampshire event last weekend—only to be offered a private meeting with the Democratic frontrunner herself.
But the Clinton campaign has a slightly different story to tell about the night the former Secretary of State met with local Black Lives Matter reps. The campaign contends that the Black Lives Matter activists arrived late to the event and were unable to enter because the room was at capacity.
“There were another 15 people who also came late and couldn’t get in, so they all were taken to an overflow room. Our team on the ground offered to essentially swap some people out so that they could go into the town hall with Hillary but they declined and asked to meet with her after the event. She met with them for about 15 minutes after the event,” a Clinton spokesperson tells The Daily Beast.
Some activists for criminal justice reform, like Families Against Mandatory Minimums strategic initiatives director Kevin Ring, believe that Clinton is the candidate who deserves the most scrutiny for her previous stances on mass incarceration.
“It’s incumbent on her, more than others, to explain what precisely she got wrong, and what the country got wrong—and what she would do to reverse that,” Ring says.
In 1994, as the House and Senate were considering whether to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, Clinton said (PDF), “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. The ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets.”
As a senator running for the presidency, she opposed making shorter sentences for crack cocaine-related offenses retroactive for previously-convicted inmates, even though many advocates had called the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences unjust.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have backed away from the tough-on-crime reforms they championed in the mid-’90s. But, advocates say, since Hillary Clinton was involved in creating a climate of mass incarceration that disproportionately targets black Americans, she has a greater responsibility to address why and how her stances about the criminal justice system have changed.
In their private meeting with Hillary Clinton, members of the Black Lives Matter movement challenged her to reflect on “her personal involvement in the war on drugs and the anti-black policies that were enacted by her family and throughout her career,” Yancey says.
“That’s not what we heard. We didn’t hear the reaction that we wanted,” Yancey adds.
What they heard was talk about policy and legislation. Clinton told them that her previous positions on sentencing were due to a “different climate and a different set of problems” in the ’90s.
With the criminal justice reform that was passed in the ’90s, Jones argues, the “undercurrent of it is anti-blackness. What in her heart has changed… that will actually change the tide? And how can she use her change to be an example for the United States?”
“She has acknowledged the failure of some of her work. It’s just the next step: the acknowledgement of what’s behind that,” Yancey adds. “Hillary Clinton’s feelings about anti-blackness in our government are very important. She wasn’t willing to go there with us, but it’s a crucial conversation. If you’re looking for solutions to the problem… [and] there’s a form of white supremacy in your solutions, that’s going to continue.”
The Clinton campaign contends that their candidate has been reaching out to the Black Lives Matter movement and was paying attention to criminal justice reform and social inequality.
“[O]n an ongoing basis our team has also been reaching out and talking to different parts of the BLM movement as well as a wide range of organizations, activists, stakeholders, etc. so that policy proposals are informed by many voices and experiences,” a Clinton spokesperson tells The Daily Beast. “Hillary has been speaking out about Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform for some time… it was the subject of her first policy speech of the campaign in April… in which she laid out specific policy proposals. In addition to criminal justice reform she has also broadened to talk about the opportunity gap and systemic inequities.”
Tyrone Brown, a Seattle-based activist who says he “speaks with Black Lives Matter, but not for Black Lives Matter,” says Bernie Sanders was disrupted at his event on Saturday in part “because it was on the eve of the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.”
“Whether it had been Clinton, Perry, or whoever—if anybody had come to Seattle, something would have happened that day,” he says. “Something would’ve had to have happened to highlight it—that tragedy. In this case, it was Bernie Sanders.”
Brown runs an initiative at Seattle University, where he’s an administrator, called Moral Mondays at SU, which organizes events like talks, discussions, and movie nights as part of a “#BlackLivesMatter initiative.”
Brown met Mara Willaford on the way back to Seattle after the Movement for Black Lives event in Cleveland. He says he now recognizes Willaford and Johnson as the leaders of Black Lives Matter Seattle.
“There’s the slight issue with some semantics around timing: How can they take an action before they become an official chapter for the movement? It doesn’t matter,” he says. “If no one had taken advantage of the fact that the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination was speaking in Seattle on that day, somebody was going to take some type of action. They just happened to be the ones that did it.”
***
Although she had to hand over the name to her Facebook group, Stephens says she now believes that the protest was ultimately good for the visibility of Bernie Sanders—and that, days after the event, she sees where Willaford and Johnson were coming from.
“Watching social media after it happened, I came to realize what they were doing. A lot of people wrote in saying that it made them want to learn about Bernie Sanders,” she says. “They inadvertently had done their job—even if that wasn’t their aim.”
Stephens hasn’t heard from Johnson or Willaford since she relinquished the name of the page. She said she’d like to continue her activism, but was discouraged by her experience on Saturday night.
“This really brought out the worst in people,” she says.
“We have waited and waited and waited. Two more people dead in Ferguson. We can’t take a back seat anymore. I want people to clear their minds of what happened, to stop making it about the women [who interrupted Sanders’ speech]. What did you do? You went looking for more information.”
