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Last Saturday, The New York Times<\/em> devoted more than two pages of its first section (in print) to a lengthy hit-piece, with the headline shown above. The article was also published in full online<\/a>. The editors\/management had assigned no fewer than nine reporters (and two \u201cresearchers\u201d) to preparing this piece, the main argument of which can be encapsulated as follows:<\/p>\n The two organizations that I have the honor to head, the non-profit Just World Educational<\/a> and the publishing company Just World Books, have both conducted significant projects in collaboration with organizations named in the article as having received some of Singham\u2019s donations, and with visionary leaders from those organizations. These valued allies of ours include the People\u2019s Forum, a great event space in NYC; the Code Pink antiwar organization and its ever creative and energetic co-founder Medea Benjamin; and Vijay Prashad, the whip-smart head of the (anti-imperialist and anti-war) Tricontinental Institute. Hence, I read the NYT article with great interest and, as I proceeded, an ever-mounting sense of concern.<\/p>\n The NYT was, let us not forget, one of the main platforms that back in late 2002 and early 2003 published extremely inaccurate and misleading \u201creporting\u201d on Iraq that helped to persuade wide swathes of the U.S. political elite that the U.S. military needed to invade Iraq. Its \u201creporting\u201d and editorial pages have had an increasingly anti-Chinese cast to them in the past four to five years. Why did its editors and managers decide to devote so much expensive talent into producing the August 5 hit-piece? <\/p>\n I have a couple of theories about this. But before I get to those, let me just quickly give some examples of these journos\u2019 methodology.<\/p>\n Their piece is full of unsubstantiated innuendo. For example, describing \u201cinformation packets\u201d handed out to African activists at a training session at the (Singham network-run) Nkrumah School in South Africa, the piece says,<\/p>\n The packets praised Chinese loans, calling them \u201can opportunity for African states to construct genuine, and sovereign, development projects.\u201d No mention was made of China\u2019s role in a recent debt crisis in Zambia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In the print version of the story, there was no link there. So the NYT \u201cjournos\u201d involved and their editors must lazily have assumed that all their readers would already know all about \u201cChina\u2019s role in a recent debt crisis in Zambia.\u201d I also read the piece online, which did have that link. So I followed it. It went to an NYT piece from last December about the debt crisis that several African \u201cemerging markets\u201d had been experiencing and said, inter alia, that in the preceding two years:<\/p>\n only Zambia, Chad and Ethiopia have sought debt relief. It has been a grinding process, involving creditor committees, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, all of which must negotiate and agree upon how to restructure loans that the countries owe. After two years, Zambia is finally on the verge of restructuring its debts to China\u2019s state banks<\/strong>, and Chad reached an agreement last month\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I have followed some of these debt issues for quite a long while and my very clear impression is that the US-dominated World Bank and IMF have been considerably<\/em> tougher on all the debtor nations from the Global South than have been the Chinese lenders. So what was the NYT\u2019s hit-piece on about? <\/p>\n Oh yes, the journos did succeed in getting two named \u201cdefectors\u201d from the Nkrumah School network to go on the record with their criticisms of Chinese influence on the school\u2019s work. But so what?<\/p>\n The article is also full of quite unattributed innuendo. Like this graf:<\/p>\n None of Mr. Singham\u2019s nonprofits have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, as is required of groups that seek to influence public opinion on behalf of foreign powers. That usually applies to groups taking money or orders from foreign governments. Legal experts said Mr. Singham\u2019s network was an unusual case.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Un-named \u201clegal experts\u201d? An \u201cunusual case\u201d? Is that the best they can do? (It is all , nonetheless, potentially very damaging innuendo<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Contrast that with the much more detailed NYT reporting just one day later<\/a>, on the case of Clarence Thomas\u2019s acquisition of a very expensive RV some years ago, with the cost paid by his wealthy friend Anthony Welters:<\/p>\n In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: \u201cHere is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We\u2019ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.\u201d Roughly nine years later, \u201cthe loan was satisfied,\u201d Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten \u201clien release\u201d date of Nov. 22, 2008.<\/p>\n [Two more grafs of details\u2026 ]<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Satisfied\u2019 doesn\u2019t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,\u201d said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. \u201c\u2018Satisfied\u2019 could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here we have a named (and credentialed) tax lawyer giving his opinion, on the record, in a direct quote\u2026 Very different from the way they present, and source, the suggestion<\/em> that Mr. Singham\u2019s donations may in some way have fallen foul of the Foreign Agents\u2019 Registration Act. (I guess the NYT\u2019s own lawyers must be more scared of potential pushback\/litigation from Clarence Thomas and his friends than they are of Roy Singham and his friends?)<\/p>\n Singham\u2019s spouse of six years is, as the August 5 NYT piece prominently mentions, Jodie Evans, who was Medea Benjamin\u2019s partner as a co-founder of Code Pink, 20 years ago and still helps co-direct the organization. The NYT article reports that, \u201cSince 2017, about a quarter of Code Pink\u2019s donations \u2014 more than $1.4 million \u2014 have come from two groups linked to Mr. Singham, nonprofit records show.\u201d It also claimed that Ms. Evans \u201cdescribes the Uyghurs as terrorists and defends their mass detention [by China.]\u201d In the Code Pink video<\/a> that they link to there, Ms. Evans did not explicitly describe all Uyghurs as terrorists, though she did refer to the fact that some ethnic-Uyghur terrorist groups have been active in Yemen and Syria\u2014as has been well documented over the years\u2014and said that from those locations they had gone back to undertake acts of terrorism inside China.<\/p>\n Indeed, the ethnic-Uyghur \u201cEast Turkestan Islamic Movement\u201d has been officially listed (and sanctioned) by the United Nations since 2008<\/a> as a terrorist organization, and by the United States, ditto, since 2002.<\/a>..<\/p>\n Code Pink itself, by the way, has never issued any declarations of organizational support for Beijing\u2019s policies towards the country\u2019s Uyghur minority.<\/p>\n Anyway, I promised above that I\u2019d share my own theories about why the NYT ran this apparently very damaging, but actually pretty sloppily produced hit-piece on Mr. Singham and the network of antiwar and anti-imperialist organizations that he has supported. A first theory is, unsurprisingly, that this article was part and parcel of the NYT\u2019s continuing attempt to demonize not just China but also any voices within the United States that criticize the dangerous escalation of tensions with China that is currently so evident within many sections of the U.S. political elite, from both the major parties. (Code Pink, Tricontinental, anyone who associates with them, etc\u2026)<\/p>\n Another theory I have is that the NYT\u2019s editors were already well on their way toward publishing the big investigative piece they did on Justice Clarence Thomas and his numerous, extremely sleazy financial dealings. So maybe they rushed to pull together the anti-Singham hit piece in a hurry, as a way of performing an act of \u201cbalance\u201d?<\/p>\n Of course, at the political level, a project to \u201cbalance\u201d the pretty strong investigative coverage they have been doing of Clarence Thomas might have been to launch an equally detailed investigation into Hunter Biden\u2019s many shady dealings? But no\u2026 It seems they decided that it was easier (and more convenient, from the perspective of their own political inclinations) to beat up on Roy Singham, Jodie Evans, and their allies.<\/p>\n Just one last note here. One valuable service the NYT story did provide was to provide a link to a tweet<\/a> that Vijay Prashad published in December 2021; and from that thread there I followed a link an article Vijay had published<\/a> about the inspiration he had drawn, back in the 1980s, from Roy Singham\u2019s (Sri Lankan) father, Archibald Singham. Very inrteresting to read that!<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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