We've long considered Jill Stein [6], presidential candidate of the Green Party [7], too inconsequential to be worth calling out. But we are seeing her stuff being promoted more and more—particularly her calls for Bernie Sanders [8] to ditch the Democrats if (when) he doesn't get the nomination and run with the Greens. See, for instance, the pathetically gushing interview with her on Democracy Now [9]. We doubt Bernie would be so monstrously reckless as to split the anti-Pendejo [10] vote, fortunately. But leave it to Democracy Now's pusillanimous Amy Goodman [11] to not throw Stein a single hard-ball—either about the wisdom of tempting a Pendejo presidency, or about the Green candidate's atrocious politics. Stein is getting this kind of free ride everywhere. Check out this glowing account on AlterNet [12] about Jill's defense of anti-pipeline actvists protesting outside the home of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman. This from the woman whose party is practically a stateside propaganda organ of the Bashar Assad regime, which has serially massacred protesters [13] and is now escalating to genocide [14] against the Syrian people.
The Green Party platform [15] contains not a single word about Syria, despite a lengthy section on the "Palestinian-Israeli Conflict." This committment to human rights is rather (shall we say?) selective. Let's start by examining Stein's "Green Shadow Cabinet [16]"—which openly shills for the Assad regime. Stein's "Attorney General" Kevin Zeese [17] runs a website with the hilariously ironic name of Popular Resistance [18], which we have had to call out [19] as a platform for Assad regime propaganda, repeatedly seeking to exculpate Assad of the Ghouta chemical attack and portraying the Syrian opposition as monolithically jihadist. Worse yet, the Shadow Cabinet's Ajamu Baraka [20], identified as "Public Intervenor for Human Rights" (sic!), actually hailed Assad's thoroughly controlled psuedo-elections which confirmed his inherited dictatorial rule in 2014 as a victory against "foreign intervention," crowing about Assad's widespread "support," and how the opposition was "fomented" by the "gangster states of NATO."
Green Party Watch [21] notes that after the Ghouta attack, when Obama briefly threatened air-strikes against Assad's military forces, Stein said: "President Obama's rush to war risks a repeat of 2003, when President Bush's order to invade Iraq prevented UN inspectors from discovering that Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMDs, one of the stated reasons for war, did not exist." Talk about fighting the last war! To say this days after a chemical massacre in which some 1,400 perished simply demolishes all the Green Party's empty talk about human rights. The chemical weapons in Syria assuredly existed—and in fact, gas attacks have continued [22] (repeatedly [23]) even after Assad ostensibly disposed of his chemical arsenal under the deal that averted air-strikes. To complete silence from Stein and her party, of course. And as for "rush to war"—are we supposed to believe Syria (now the biggest refugee crisis [24] on the planet) is at peace as long as the US isn't involved?
In an interview on Soundcloud [25], Stein even repeated the discredited jive [26] about how the rebels gassed their own people at Ghouta as a provocation. The interview now seems to have been deleted—maybe Stein realized this was just a bit too much? But we'll note that Stein's predecessor as Green presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney [27] actually travelled to Damascus in the aftermath of the Ghouta attack to express her support for the Assad regime!
On the Issues [28] notes that the Green Party's response to 2014 State of the Union said that following the failure of the Geneva talks, "the US moves closer to their real strategic objective—regime change or the dismemberment of the Syrian state." First, this is nonsense. A close reading of the actual facts indicates that Washington has in fact been tilting to Assad [11] in the Syrian war, and has even opposed moves toward a federal system [29] for Syria. And second, "regime change" in Syria is not a neocon plot—it is the aspiration of the Syrian people, since they first launched what was then a peaceful revolution [30] in March 2011 under the slogan "the people want the fall of the regime." The refusal of the American left to see this is racism and imperial narcissism [31]. But active propaganda support for the regime goes beyond even that.
This is hippie pro-fascism [32], perpetrated by peaceniks simply incapable of grasping that there can be any evil in the world not directly hatched by Washington. It is no less repugnant for being basically clueless. It pains us that activists we respect—including Brian Tokar [33], David McReynolds [34] and Sean Sweeney [35]—continue to loan their names to the "Green Shadow Cabinet." We call upon them to step down immediately in solidarity with the Syrian people, and publicly state their reason for doing so.
