On March 23rd, the Spanish government announced prison sentences of up to thirty years each for thirteen democratically elected Catalan leaders, under an ongoing coup.¹ Six were already in exile, others had already been in jail for months, now joined by others facing a combined bail set at the equivalent of $2.6 million U.S. (the estimated cost of the Oct. 1st, 2017 referendum on full separation from Spain). International protests were hastily organized, including in Boston and New York.

Over the last six months Solidarity members in the Kansas City area have helped to build a space for anti-capitalist organizations to meet, discuss and collaborate. The Kansas City Grassroots Network (KCGN) has had its share of false starts, yet the initiative has also organized events that no one group or collection of individuals could accomplish on their own.

Most importantly KCGN has provided a space for low risk dialogue, opening a window of opportunity for regrouping and refounding the left in this city. Many challenges lie ahead: ideological and strategic differences present formidable obstacles. These obstacles are compounded by the fact that KCGN’s participant organizations still lack a shared vocabulary for discussing and understanding the issues around which they seek to collaborate. Yet my focus in this report will be on KCGN’s accomplishments, which demonstrate the fundamental strength and promise of the initiative.

As I participated in developing the KCGN two concepts were central to my thinking: regroupment, “the fusing together of the revolutionary left around a broad set of rudimentary principles” and refoundation, the incorporation into revolutionary politics of analysis and strategies developed by a new generation of radicals not necessarily grounded in traditional socialist politics. Even if these attempts at ongoing coordination and collaboration do not produce any official regroupment, they are no doubt essential in the development of a thoughtful and non-sectarian left...

Norman Finkelstein’s lifetime of scholar-activism includes a long record of skewering highly acclaimed pundits and propagandists of the “pro-Israel” and media establishments. His first target was the fraudulent “demographic study” of Mandate Palestine by Joan Peters, purporting that the Arab population were newcomers attracted by Zionist economic development. Finkelstein’s demonstration of this fakery was published in his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

He went on to take apart Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (see A Nation on Trial, by Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Bern), the pompous hypocrisy of Elie Wiesel among others in The Holocaust Industry, Alan Dershowitz (Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, a book whose publication by University of California Press Dershowitz denied attempting to suppress), and the “liberal” star Israeli journalist Ari Shavit (Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land).

In response to these powerful indictments, Zionist organizations exerted extreme pressure on DePaul University resulting in the termination of his academic appointment there in 2007. Substantially excluded from academia since, Finkelstein has made his living as an independent scholar and lecturer....