We spoke with Laura Whitehorn, former political prisoner & tireless revolutionary activist and organizer, about her decades of participation in movements for justice. We spoke about organizing against white supremacists during the 1970s, how her work has changed over time, how she relates to the newly radicalized Jewish left, and what solidarity ought to look like in our current context.
Show Notes
-‘Out: The Making of a Revolutionary,’ documentary about Laura Whitehorn by Sonja DeVries
-‘The Weather Underground,’ documentary by Sam Green and Bill Siegel
-Background on the Resistance Conspiracy Case:
- Arm the Spirit’s interview with the defendants
- ‘Release Laura Whitehorn,’ flyer by the Washington Area Committee for Political Prisoners Rights
–The Northeast Political Prisoner Coalition
–Release Aging People in Prison
-‘The Battle of Boston: An Investigation of ROAR,’ from Osawatomie #1
-‘The Yemeni Bodega Strike,’ Adam Chandler, the Atlantic
- Urgent fundraiser to support Robert’s health
- A review of his book, ‘Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond.’
–International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
–Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
–John Brown Anti-Klan Committee
- Papers published by the committee, compiled by Freedom Archives
-‘The New Jim Crow,’ by Michelle Alexander
–Adameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Organization
Transcript
David Z: So first of all we should start with an explanation to this one.
Sam B: Yup. We should express our apologies.
David Z: I don’t know if I go that far enough we need to apologize.
Sam B: Well I’m going apologize. We broke the two week cycle. This is now three weeks since our last TREYF episode.
David Z: Yeah for our diehard listeners you might have noticed that the end of the last episode we said that a new one would come up in two weeks and two weeks came and went.
Sam B: And we lied.
David Z: That’s part of the opaque mysterious behind the scenes planning that is TREYF podcast, a bunch of interviews fell through. We’ve got an archive digitized that the sound was not usable unfortunately. Many factors.
Sam B: Also having liebs and being busy.
David Z: Yeah but a lot has happened in the last three weeks.
Sam B: A whole lot. I don’t even remember what our last episode was about. It’s been a while…
David Z: But a lot of the things that I feel like I want to talk about we can’t talk about because we have episodes coming out about it. You know what’s going on in Puerto Rico. Hopefully we’ll have an episode coming out soon on that one.
Sam B: There’s the entirety of far right organizing in Quebec that we are working diligently [on] as we speak.
David Z: So we can’t talk about.. But what we can talk about is that we’re going to Boston in two days.
Sam B: Beantown.
David Z: Folks at Tufts and Smith College where kind enough to work to get us out there to conduct two different workshops.
Sam B: Thank you so much in advance. I mean the other aside is that this is one of the rare occasions where we’re recording pretty much 24 hours before putting up this episode. So it’s almost real time…
David Z: Yeah, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to that.
Sam B: And so we’re giving a workshop. We’ve been working on this on this workshop for a while. It had an earlier manifestation but now we’re we’re focusing on the failures of the dominant understanding or framework of anti-Semitism. And I think it’s pretty good.
David Z: Yeah well we’ll see what people think in Boston but we are interested in getting the workshop to other places and having more conversations about it’s not just about the failures it’s also about how to foster new leftist understandings of what anti-Semitism is and how it operates.
Sam B: If you’re interested in bringing TREYF podcast to your school to your synagogue to your town let us know TREYF podcast at gmail dot com.
David Z: So we have an excellent interview lined up today. Before we get to it I know it has been a while Sam was there anything that we should be talking about in this headers section.
Sam B: I think there are a few things but I just want to tease in this moment that I’m really excited about the interview and I’m still not going to say who it is.
David Z: I’m also I’m also really excited about it. Let’s let’s postpone that further for no reason.
David Z: perfect.
Sam B: The first thing that stands out as a Jewish Internet has been a blaze in the last 48 hours.
David Z: I mean it always is. It’s a perpetual motion machine.
Sam B: Well OK so there was the publication Who Shall Not Be Named who published an absurd article. If you’re interested in reading a takedown, I think 150 people wrote articles. But I’ve been thinking about this. You know when people get mad at an article online. Wouldn’t be great if there was a giant Google doc and anyone who wanted to like write a letter or an article condemning it could just collaborate.
David Z: I think I think that’s great.
Sam B: It would save so much time.
David Z: I think it also assumes that everyone’s coming from the same political orientation.
Sam B: Don’t worry I’ve thought about this already so you have a general article where everyone agrees on like 8 points and then people can add paragraphs rather than a whole new article where they basically say the same thing and add a new paragraph. You just have paragraphs at the bottom where people are debating back and forth.
David Z: I mean I think this is great for us but I think for the for the economics of the content industry I don’t think it would be that great.
Sam B: But I think it would save a lot of people time. No?
David Z: A lot of people write these hot takes because they get paid for that.
Sam B: Yeah, I mean the Forward has been disastrous with this recently. They had the ‘why the Republican anti choice legislation is good for Jews’ and then someone wrote an article like 4 minutes later, like why it’s bad. It just seems like pretty ridiculous.
David Z: Sam Bick yells at the Internet. So instead of continuing to push the interview further and further away. Who do we have on the show today?
Sam B: We have an interview that was recorded several months ago and we’ve sat on for a bunch of reasons. It is a discussion in fact it’s a two part discussion that we had with Laura Whitehorn who’s a former political prisoner active in social movements for decades and who is just a generally fantastic human being.
David Z: Part of the reason that we are waiting and putting this interview out is because our discussions are actually staggered through several short discussions and we edited altogether to resemble one conversation. So if our back and forth doesn’t seem to be as natural as usual it’s just because of the way the editing happened.
Sam B: But the content is superb.
David Z: So without further ado here’s our interview with Laura Whitehorn.
Laura Whitehorn: Hello. My name is Laura Whitehorn. I’m a formerly incarcerated person in the United States. I was a political prisoner in a case called the ‘Resistance Conspiracy’ case, where a bunch of us enacted armed actions against government targets, government buildings, in solidarity with the struggles for liberation in the United States and around the world. And one of the actions was an attack on the Israeli aircraft industry office in New York City, which a lot of people didn’t know existed until that happened. And I got out of prison in 1999, and since then I’ve lived in New York with my beloved partner Susie Day, and I do work to try to win the release and awareness of US held political prisoners. And I am an Anti-Zionist Jew.
David Z: Laura it is very exciting to be talking with you, I know we’ve been trying to make this happen for a while, and I have a lot of questions but I know that we have a limited time frame here. So I just wanted to actually start during the Boston busing crisis. I thought this might be a good place to start because today there’s a big upsurge in white supremacist organizing in the United States.
Laura Whitehorn: Yes.
David Z: I know back in the 70s and 80s there was work that you did guarding the homes of Black families, sometimes with baseball bats, from white supremacists and I wondering if you can just talk a bit about that work?
Laura Whitehorn: What happened was that a federal court ordered that school children in Boston be bused to different schools because there was what’s called in the North de facto segregation in the schools. So what happened was that there were these white supremacist groups, the main one was called ROAR – Restore our alienated rights, and they had politicians who were open members, the school committee was dominated by members of ROAR. And so when the kids would get on the buses and go to the schools there would be adults, white adults throwing things at these small Black schoolchildren, it was really horrible. And some Left groups did demonstrations and marches and stuff but we thought, well we better try to check with Black people in Boston about what would help them. Because I’ve always believed that solidarity needs to start, not with what makes the person who’s in solidarity feel good or feel like they’ve done something, but with what is needed and asked for by the struggle itself. So we met with a bunch of different people, everyone we could find who represented an organization in the Black community, and the main thing that we were told was that there were families around the city who had moved by mistake into neighborhoods that were not friendly let’s say to black people and they were being targeted by members of ROAR and other probably Ku Klux Klan groups who would come in the middle of the night, they would ride around and shoot into their houses or mostly throw Molotov cocktails through the windows. And the Black families were finding that they were having to stay up all night guarding their homes and then go to work in the morning. So we organized, a few of us organized, a network of white progressives and people who called ourselves revolutionaries and people who were anti-racists in New York, a quite extensive network. And every Friday and Saturday night we had people who stayed in the house with the family and guarded the house so that the families could get sleep. Actually I think we did it on weekdays too during the summer. But just to give you an idea of what was effective about it, there was this one family that we became very close to and we guarded their house for few years. One night my friend and I were in the house and we heard a car coming and we looked at and we saw these kids were rolling down the windows. I mean when I say kids are in the 20, and I ran out with a baseball bat and we had at that point a CB radio, you know what truckers used, and so we could hear what was going on outside. We could get warnings from other people, and we heard them loudly saying: oh my God there’s some crazy white girl there, let’s get out of here. So it was it was a strategic move to say OK if you’re going to attack Black people you’re going to have to go through some people who look much more like you. And we did it for, I don’t remember, two or three years. It was exhausting, and so a lot of people fell by the wayside. But some of us continued until finally there were fewer attacks on people and people sort of went about their business. The hardest part of it, I have to say, besides staying up all night almost night, was we tried to organize some of the white neighbors to support the Black families. And that was really hard because going up and ringing someone’s bell and saying: you know you’re doing the wrong thing, would you please join and support the family, was very challenging. We were not greeted with great open arms, although we did find some people.
Sam B: Given what has happened in the U.S. in the last few months, it seems like there’s an increase in resistance to Donald Trump and I just was wondering if you could talk about, or maybe assess some of the responses and where they fall on that solidarity spectrum that you talked about?
Laura Whitehorn: At this point, I kind of think everything is in formation. So I think there’s a lot of room for both creativity and error. And one of the themes of my life which has been support for the right of self-determination including armed struggle, and at different points in my history some of us engaged in armed struggle to make the point that solidarity doesn’t just mean cheering other people on but means attacking the enemy too. But my partner interviewed a man named Amin Hussein, who’s a Palestinian who lives in the United States. He can’t return to Palestine he’s been banned. He created a group with other people, a group of artists that goes by the slogan “Decolonize this Space”. And so he talked about the need for solidarity in the sense that you talk to and become involved with the communities that are directly under attack. For example, you’re a leftist in New York and you’re very militant and you want to go out and you want to chant and throw things and wave flags, so the best way to do that is to go to Trump Towers and do a demonstration that’s very militant. Meanwhile at one point Yemeni storekeepers had one day strike around the ban on refugees, and Amin said: you know he was at the little demonstrations in neighborhoods in Brooklyn and didn’t get the kind of Press that you would get from something in Times Square. But that was what the community was asking for. And around Palestine I think this is particularly important. Or for example political prisoners. When I was in prison, people would come visit and they said we’re trying to build awareness of political prisoners and that’s a lot of what the movement on the outside did and still does. But if you ask political prisoners who are inside what they want they do want recognition, but they want to get out. So you need relief projects too, which for a lot less glamorous and they’re harder. They involve all kinds of little strategic thinking about you know horrible things like parole. That’s a very hard thing to do and it’s a lot less glamorous and satisfying to do work that supports those efforts than it is to make posters and all that stuff, which we have to do too. But in New York State we have three black political prisoners Herman Bell, Robert Seth Hayes, and Jalil Muntaqimulim. And there’s also David Gilbert a white anti-imperialist who’s near Buffalo. And I know there are people from Montreal who visit them and support them, but asking them what they need and what they want, helping them get their writings out, you know all that kind of stuff is sort of the core of solidarity, I think, more than just saying Free All Political Prisoners. Although I would really like if every Left organization would say free all political prisoners.
David Z: It’s funny that you mentioned David Gilbert. I mean for me as a white Jewish person growing up, I looked a lot to your work and the work of David Gilbert. And I’m curious how you relate the world of the Jewish left, because it seems like in the past year or two that milieu, like with Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, has sort of taken a turn closer to the political positions that you’ve always put forward?
Laura Whitehorn: Yeah that’s definitely true. I think I’ve seen since Susie and I, along with 19 people went on a delegation to Palestine and when we came back we noticed that everyone said to us: oh did you go to Gaza and the West Bank, and we said we went to the ’48. The occupation didn’t start in 1967 it started in 1948. All of Israel is Palestine, and it was interesting to me that this was mentioned by every single Palestinian we met in our ten days there. And yet in this country the Solidarity movement continued to talk about everything as if the bad history started in 67. So that was something, but I think it’s changing. I have to say if JVP didn’t exist, we would have to invent them because they do such creative things in all these demonstrations that we can go to and all of the demonstrations around Gaza. I mean I just had a meeting yesterday which was wonderful with Selma James, someone who started the International Jewish Anti Zionist Network – IJAN, she started a lot of feminist ideology years ago: wages for housework. She was married for years to CLR James until he died, and she is an amazing activist at the age of 82. And we were agreeing that really the only time we say that we are Jewish is when we’re talking about Palestine.
David Z: Just talking a bit more about that dynamic, I’m curious how groups like the Vilde Chayas, like Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Adrienne Rich, and folks who are involved in that group, where their Jewishness was foregrounded aside from Palestine. It was funny when I was looking it up Melanie was actually born in the same year in the same neighborhood as you in Brooklyn. And you know she was the first director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, part of New Jewish Agenda, and it seemed like you both had different parallel approaches to a lot of similar questions?
Laura Whitehorn: Yeah, I got in trouble right after I got out of prison. My co-defendants Susan Rosenberg, Alan Berkman, and I all got an award from JFREJ, and in my acceptance speech I said it’s so wonderful to be among other anti-Zionist Jews and someone in the audience yelled that we’re not Zionist, we’re anti occupation. And then someone got up and said we have to clarify, JFREJ is not anti-Zionist, we’re anti- occupation. I thought oh my god what did I put my foot in, because when I got out of prison I said: OK what skills or what knowledge do I have that can be particular for some part of the movement for social justice that is understaffed and that of course is prisons and political prisoners. And I worked in an HIV magazine for years, full time. So that cut down how much activism I could do to. So I’ve had to make my work around Palestine sort of in terms of time and everything secondary which pains me. This is just all an apology of why I can’t really answer your question very well because I haven’t been involved intimately in the development of any of those groups. I think what I said before sort of gets my political approach to it all. I support JFERJ, I think they do great work. And I’ve always had a disagreement with them in New York about the fact that they shy away from talking about Palestine and Zionism because they’re doing something very important here which is trying to break down the support of Jews for racism in the community, you know around working conditions for domestic workers and all kinds of stuff, they do really great work. But to me there was a coalescing of racism and Zionism support for Israel in the Jewish community in New York. And I don’t think you can separate the two, the attitudes and behavior and where that community falls in terms of supporting or not supporting struggles. The community I’m talking about is the Jewish community if you can say such a thing exists.
David Z: Well I’m curious like in your advocacy for a Palestinian liberation have you come up against Zionist organizations that generally push back against people and I’m also curious like how that’s had a different flavour to this sort of repression that the rest of your work elicits?
Laura Whitehorn: Well actually in New York let’s say the JDL and the JDO, Jewish Defense League and Jewish Defense Organization are pretty active in attacking demonstrations at different points. A lot of times when there are large demonstrations that represent, you know all the different groups and all the different movements that are for Palestine, they’ll just ride by in their cars and shout things, other times they’ll hold counter demonstrations. But it feels very much like the Klan in New York state, you know there is or has been, I don’t know actually if it’s very active now, but certainly in the 70s there was a Ku Klux Klan in this state. And I was part of a group called the John Brown anti-Klan committee and fought against the existence of the Klan in New York. And we also did work in support of Palestine and against the Jewish Defense League. Meir Kahane came here to speak at City College in probably ‘78 ‘79 and we were part of a large organized demonstration against them. And it felt exactly like the demonstrations where we went up against the Klan and the Klan was coming, you know with the lead pipes. It was very much the same. Klan people call us, call white people who support black liberation, race traitors or they think of us that way and they get furious at the idea that there are white people who don’t agree with them. And I think the Zionist groups do the same thing and when they see Jews demonstrating in support of Palestine they lose it. You know they start sputtering and to tell you the truth I kind of feel the same way about them.
David Z: I was wondering if you’d feel comfortable talking a bit about the way you received movement support while you were incarcerated?
Laura Whitehorn: Of course because I appreciated the support I got it was interesting actually. For years when parts of the Left especially the black radical Left and the Puerto Rican movement and white allies such as the groups that I was part of engaged in all kinds of very no attacks against the U.S. government. We did not care for not support from a broad sector of progressive people in the United States. But when we were arrested we did. We got initially an enormous amount of support from anti-imperialist groups, and some progressive groups, and also from the queer community. When I say we I mean the people in my case the resistance conspiracy case and at that point two of us were out lesbians. Linda Evans and I, but all of us were doing work (AIDS education and counseling) in prison because that was in the 80s. And so through that we connected with the queer community on the outside and with ACT-UP on the outside. We also received a lot of support from the black radical movement and from the Puerto Rican movement because they understood that the work that we were doing and the things that got arrested for were done in solidarity with their struggle from liberation and freedom. We received an enormous amount of support I think because we were white and middle class sent a lot of people in the last recognized us as similar to them. But who remains imprisoned still is now almost 20 former Black Panthers. They’re still there and we’re still fighting to get them out. And we had hope that all of the support we got in our case would transfer to the remaining political prisoners, but really only some of it has. Not all of it. Which, I chalk up to the quiet racism that exists even in progressive circles where people don’t really act in solidarity deeply enough.
Sam B: Could you talk a little bit about how that kind of support has changed? Like obviously a lot of the Black Panthers are still on the inside but I’m wondering if you could just describe how you think the landscape of prisoner support work has shifted or stayed the same and in that period?
Laura Whitehorn: Well one good thing that has happened is that people have begun to realize that political prisoners are an integral part of what we call mass incarceration in the United States. The United States is the number one jailor in the world. We lock up more of the people who live in this country than any other country does with its citizens. And that’s largely black and other people of colour who are behind bars. So people who had begun their work around just supporting political prisoners have come to recognize that the repression of political prisoners is also represented in the phenomenon that’s called mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander calls it The New Jim Crow, and a lot of people talk about the continuation of slavery. It is a continuation of the consistent repression that has happened in the United States against black resistance since the days of slavery. So yes, Jim Crow but also the crushing of Black Reconstruction and COINTELPRO against Black Power movement etc. So that is something that has begun to be realized, and the government has been successful in convincing people that while this country is the biggest purveyor of violence in the world, and also has vicious killings of black and other people of color in the United States by the police. While those things go on day to day, that the resistance the people who are fighting for their liberation, their freedom, are supposed to stay inside the dotted line and never raise a fist. They’re never supposed to break a window, they’re never supposed to use a gun. So around the world people do recognize that there’s a right to fight for freedom and independence. There’s a right, it’s you know recognized in international documents and agreements that came after the Second World War, of the right to resist a racist regime. But in this country there has been such a premium on what’s called nonviolence, but it really means is to be passive, that the government has been able to divide communities and movements and isolate people who have been convicted of fighting back. There’s a gap in this country between what people understand about state violence and what they understand about the right to resist state violence, and that impacts the struggle to free political prisoners.
David Z: Something that I’ve wondered about is when your work in support of political prisoners began to extend to Palestinian political prisoners?
Laura Whitehorn: Well we’ve always been internationalists. I mean we, and when I say we I mean people of my generation who are former political prisoners, some 72 now. So we were always Internationalists. And because I support struggles of oppressed people for their land and their right to their nations, I always supported the Palestinian people. Their land is occupied by Israel not just in 1967 but in 1948, when with the help of the United States and Great Britain, occupied a nation that included Palestinians and Jews and made it a nation only for Jews with Palestinians as second class citizens. And in the years since Palestinians have been pushed into smaller and smaller enclaves as the Zionists try to take over more and more land. In the process of that, there have always been many Palestinian political prisoners. And I went to Palestine, my partner Susie Day and I were part of a delegation a year ago that went to Palestine specifically looking at prisons and political prisoners. And one thing that really struck me was that everyone we met, and we didn’t just meet with political prisoners per se: we met with labor people and academics and queers and everywhere we went in every meeting when we asked it turned out that almost everyone had done time in prison. Because if they were fighting for Palestine, for the right of return, for the right of their land and their own homes that were being destroyed by the Israelis, they were put in prison. So that was one thing was just the sheer number of people who have been incarcerated or are incarcerated. And the second thing, the next step for me was thinking that at the same time in the United States the struggle over Standing Rock was going on. And so the reality that the United States is itself a settler colony, has never done anything to give reparations to Native Americans whose land was stolen. It was just such a parallel. So the idea of solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners is like looking in the mirror. The conditions there are harsher, the level of ongoing genocide, it’s at a different stage and it looks different. But the essence of it is exactly the same. And so you know we have to be in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners because otherwise what are we saying when we say the US holds political prisoners, who are they?
Sam B: So David and I often talk about the kind of blind spot that a lot of Jewish Palestinian solidarity activists have when it comes to settler colonialism in North America. So often like people are 100 percent on point when it comes to Palestine. Or maybe not a hundred percent maybe like 60 percent on point. But it seems so glaring for folks to be organizing actively against Israeli apartheid and to be supporting Palestinian solidarity and really to not have a sense of what’s going on in the US or in Canada. And I guess I want to know if you’ve thought about this before – well you clearly have – but do you have any insight as to why this is taking place and how big of a failure this is on the part of the Left?
Laura Whitehorn: I think the reason why North Americans have a hard time dealing with the colonialism that exists in our own countries, in Canada or in the United States, but can see it in other places is because if we talk about defeating settler colonialism, let’s just say for me in the United States, that means that our lives are going to change dramatically. That what we consider now our lifestyle, which is built on such enormous privilege will change. That there would have to be tremendous changes to the way that government is run, the way that the economy is run. I can’t even predict what they are. And I remember that in the 60s that happened around Puerto Rico too. When I was in my 20s and 30s, the liberation of Puerto Rico was a huge issue. And I remember talking to white people who were progressive on so many issues, that were antiwar, supposedly supported rights and all this stuff, and they were adamant: oh no Puerto Rico is not a colony and it can’t have independence. Because it was so much part of the landscape of privilege. I don’t know what other word to use for it. And I think that it’s much harder to look at the oppression close up to you than it is to look at the oppression far away. And I think that ultimately it means being able to envision a world that would actually be just, that would not be led by white power. And when I say white power I don’t mean just people in hoods. I mean liberals, the people that everyone sort of thinks of as their friends in the Democratic Party or an independent party or even within the left. That it means giving up control, some really deep forms of control that we’re not even aware of every day, that we take for granted if we’re white. You know I find within the community of Jews who are pro-Palestinian that Zionism is a hard word for people to get out of their mouths. And I think part of it is that people like feeling like good people. It’s nice to feel like you’re part of a group that’s done some good things. And so when it comes to pushing back about what Israel represents and what Zionism represents and the specific responsibility of Jews to speak out about that we don’t you know we don’t get a pass for that. So taking on the issue of Zionism frontally and saying my people, which is the way that I do have to think about it, they don’t represent me but they are Jews and they try to speak for me. And that’s a very painful thing. So it cuts both ways for white Jews in the United States. And so that to me is the reason.
Sam B: I guess this is now turning into the TREYF asks for advice section of the podcast. But what do you feel are some of the lessons or insight that you’ve taken from organizing and from the social movements you’ve been involved in. And are those reflected today. And if not how should they be?
Laura Whitehorn: That’s kind of a large question, first of all. I think what we’ve been talking about, about the basis of solidarity and being willing to look at the question of privilege and how it connects people to the system and makes them not want to fight as much. People have to be aware of that all the time. I think that mass organizing, community organizing, which is being done by some groups in New York, and then not so much by others is incredibly important. In the 60s and 70s a lot of times a lot of our activism was involved with what would get media attention. And that happened during ACT UP too in those early days. By now there were a lot about getting media attention and there was a reason for that. But I think that if we look at seeing ourselves in the media or seeing our names you know anywhere, as being a sign of how well we’re doing with challenging the State then we’re making a big mistake and that we have to be willing to do the hardest work which is sitting and talking and going out and talking to people and not just holding big events and you know calling ourselves having done something. The other thing since I am now and always have been fighting for reforms within the system at the same time as fighting for a revolution, is that we have to really be clear that any change that we’re asking for doesn’t end up making the system look prettier, so that it’s harder to fight the next time. To look at whose interests are served. For example if we win a struggle around solitary confinement but it only applies to certain groups of people and not to every single incarcerated person, then whose interests are served by having fought for that reform? And the last thing is just don’t forget the people who were left behind. The people who are left in prison and that means not just the political prisoners but people who were incarcerated after the rebellions following the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore or Mike Brown in Ferguson. We just really have to be clear that a Left or progressive movement of any kind means nothing if we don’t fight for the people who’ve been picked off by the State and made examples of. Oh and the last thing…. don’t become myopic. We really can never look only at the United States. The United States kills so many people in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria. And those people remain nameless and faceless to us. And if that is true for progressive people then what kind of world are we fighting for?
David Z: Laura thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions, we have so many more if you ever have some more free time we’d love to bombard you with some more question.
Laura Whitehorn: Yeah, I’d love it.
David Z: We really appreciate it. And also really appreciate the work that you’re doing in New York.
Laura Whitehorn: It’s been great meeting you guys. So let’s stay in touch. Ok?
