U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif.
WASHINGTON – When Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union Address Tuesday night, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., will be bringing a very special guest – Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, who says she’s not sure America can have a society that values black lives as long as there are still police.
She describes her movement “to build alternatives that we want to see.”
“So whether that’s abolishing a criminal-justice system that feeds off the labor and the lives of black and brown people, whether that’s abolishing an economic system that thrives on exploitation, poverty and misery: this is the time for us to not just dream about what could be,” she told the Nation magazine last year.
For Barbara Lee’s part, her State of the Union invitation to Garza is in keeping with a radical history second to none in the U.S. Congress.
Following the George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict in the killing of Trayvon Martin, the very incident that launched Black Lives Matter, Lee declared it was evidence that “institutional racism is alive and well in America.”
In 2014, she called Rep. Paul Ryan, now speaker of the House, a racist. When Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly called her in that slur, she called O’Reilly a racist. In 2013 she called Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a racist. In 2011 she called a group trying to save black babies from abortion racist. In 2005, she called Bill Bennett a racist.
What’s behind all the racist accusations? An extremist background and political career that is perhaps unprecedented for a member of Congress.
Joseph Farah, founder and editor in chief of WND, has been following and reporting on Barbara Lee since she first became a member of the California Assembly in the early 1990s.
“Let me share with you just a little of what I have discovered over the years,” he said. “Lee’s radicalism dates back to at least the early 1970s when she was a confidential aide to Black Panther Party Minister of Defense Huey Newton. Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter and was involved in a shooting that killed a police officer. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California, by a member of the rival Black Guerrilla Family. Barbara Lee is a pal of longtime Communist Party militant Angela Davis. She paid her political dues – first as an aide to Rep. Ron ‘Red’ Dellums and later as a California assemblywoman and state senator.”
Farah was the first to report in 1993 that Lee served on the national coordinating committee of the “Committees of Correspondence,” an organization that splintered from the Communist Party USA in 1991. Davis, the three-time Communist Party candidate for vice president of the United States, served by her side.
“But that isn’t where her active involvement with Communist organizations begins,” said Farah. “Both Lee and Dellums were encouraged to enter politics by Carlton Goodlett, a long-time Communist Party activist, and Maudelle Shirek, a Berkeley councilwoman and Communist Party supporter.”
Earlier, while working with Dellums, she joined the U.S.-Grenada Friendship Society, a front group supporting the Communist dictatorship of Maurice Bishop, a close ally of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Just months before the U.S. invasion that toppled Bishop in 1983, Lee and Dellums visited the island on official business of the House Armed Services Committee to gauge the military threat posed to the United States by an international airport being built there by Cubans. According to documents captured by U.S. military forces in Grenada, Lee personally presented Bishop’s Politburo with a draft of Dellums’ report before it was presented to his congressional committee.
“What would you call that?” asks Farah. “In more innocent times, we might refer to such an action as treason. But it didn’t do anything to slow the political careers of either Lee or her mentor. But there’s even more to this horror story. The minutes of a Politburo meeting held in 1982 say Lee personally encouraged the Communist government to make a revision in the report to minimize the military significance of the airport.”
Less than a year later, the captured documents reveal, Lee helped coordinate a tour of the West Coast for Ian Jacobs, Grenada’s deputy U.N. ambassador, as part of a propaganda offensive “to counterattack President Reagan’s verbal attack on Grenada.” Once again, Angela Davis was by her side.
President Reagan later ordered an invasion of the island when U.S. medical students were taken hostage by the little police state. When U.S. Marines landed, they were met with armed resistance not from local forces but from Cuban infantry regulars.
Lee’s friendly relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba date back even further. In 1979, while on Dellums’ staff, she traveled to Havana to attend a conference of “non-aligned nations,” a Cold War euphemism for countries aligned with the Soviet Union. She attended the conference not as an employee of the federal government, which she was, but rather claiming to be a journalist for the left-wing alternative San Francisco paper, the Sun-Reporter – owned by Communist Carlton Goodlett.
Throughout the 1980s, Lee was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, an active front group of the Communist Party USA, directed at the time by the Soviet KGB. She served with Alice Palmer, who would go on to become a mentor to Barack Obama, until he betrayed her to run for her Illinois Senate seat.
In 1997 she attended the Communist Party’s Bay Area People’s Weekly World Banquet. In 1999 she co-sponsored a fundraiser for the Communist Party newspaper. In 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2006, honorees at the Communist Party newspaper’s banquet received certificates of congressional recognition from the office of Rep. Lee.
“Lee declined to answer my questions about her Communist connections, but after my original story about her subversive activities broke, she threatened to sue me for libel,” recalls Farah. “When her attorney was reminded that truth is still an absolute defense against libel under the First Amendment, the threats ceased.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/look-who-barbara-lees-bringing-to-state-of-the-union/
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