[Eril-l] From a non-librarian: Attacks on librarians & free speech

[Walter Miale]

I am not a librarian but I subscribe because. . . well I don't know 
exactly except that I find it exciting to be in potentially close 
contact with so many librarians. . . . . . I am not sure this is an 
appropriate post under the guidelines if any of this email list, but 
here goes. Isn't it interesting? I would be interested to read 
responses of subscribers.  Here first is a highlight of the article:

As the guards grabbed Rothe-Kushel, Steve Woolfolk, the library's 
director of programming, who had been watching from off stage, 
interceded on Rothe-Kushel's behalf and defended his right to remain 
in a public building and ask questions at a public forum; in a cell 
phone video, Rothe-Kushel can be heard saying, "Ask me to leave [and] 
I will leave." The guards led Woolfolk and Rothe-Kushel through the 
green room toward the lobby. As Woolfolk rounded a pillar, several of 
the guards grabbed Woolfolk from behind. Woolfolk was kicked in the 
leg (resulting in a torn knee ligament), slammed against the pillar, 
and thrown into a chair. When he bounced out of the chair onto the 
floor, the guards forced him back into the chair, and handcuffed him. 
Both men were arrested by a uniformed police officer who had been 
summoned by Hawkins. Rothe-Kushel was charged with trespassing and 
resisting arrest, and Woolfolk with interfering with an arrest. 
Meanwhile, in the auditorium, the program continued; Ross answered a 
few more questions.

Since May, the cases against both men have been pending. Cellphone 
and security videos corroborate Rothe-Kushel's and Woolfolk's version 
of events.

Walter Miale
www.greenworldcenter.org
www.itsyourmovie.org
imagesmiale.com
When Librarians Are Silenced 
Francine Prose
October 14, 2016
<http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/14/kansas-city-librarian-arrest-for-defending-free-speech/>The 
New York Review of Books

A librarian in Kansas City, Missouri was arrested for standing up for 
a library patron's free speech rights. The right to read, to think, 
to discuss and listen to ideas in a public forum is essential to an 
open society, as is our individual privacy. One hopes that the Kansas 
City case-only the most recent of many-will be resolved, and that 
librarians there and everywhere will be able to do their jobs without 
taking on the added burden of battling for our freedom.
									 

Video footage showing Kansas City Public Library staff member Steve 
Woolfolk being arrested, May 9, 2016, 
<http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/kasas-city-library-arrest.jpg>www.pitch.com 
// The New York Review of Books,
									 

Search the Internet for news stories about public libraries in 
America and chances are that, sooner or later, the phrase "on the 
front lines" will come up. The war that is being referred to, and 
that libraries have been quietly waging since the September 11 
attacks, is in defense of free speech and privacy-two concepts so 
fundamental to our democracy, our society, and our Constitution that 
one can't help noting how rarely their importance has been mentioned 
during the current election cycle. In fact quite the opposite has 
been true: Donald Trump has encouraged the muzzling of reporters and 
the suppression of political protest, while arguing that government 
agencies aren't doing enough spying on private citizens, especially 
Muslims. Hillary Clinton has failed to be specific about what she 
would do to limit surveillance, while her running mate,Tim Kaine, has 
promised to expand "intelligence gathering." Meanwhile, public 
libraries continue to be threatened by government surveillance-and 
even police interference.

In the most recent such incident, a librarian in Kansas City, 
Missouri was arrested simply for standing up for a library patron's 
free speech rights at a public event featuring a former US diplomat. 
Both the librarian and the patron face criminal charges. The incident 
took place last May, but went largely unnoticed until several 
advocacy groups called attention to the situation at the end of 
September. In cooperation with the Truman Presidential Library and 
the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City, the Kansas 
City Public Library had invited Dennis Ross-a former advisor on the 
Middle East to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, and to 
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and currently a 
distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East 
Policy-to speak about Truman and Israel at its Plaza Branch. The 
library hosts between twelve and twenty speakers each month, and 
though some of the topics and speakers have been controversial, the 
events have always been peaceful.

As a matter of policy, the library declines to hire outside security 
guards. But because of a recent, traumatic event in Kansas City-in 
April 2014 a lone gunman attacked the Jewish Community Center and a 
Jewish retirement home, killing three people-the library 
administration agreed that three local off-duty policemen and Blair 
Hawkins, a former Seattle police officer now serving as Head of 
Security for the Jewish Community Foundation, could be present. 
According to the library, as part of the agreement nobody was to be 
prevented from asking a controversial question and the security team 
would consult with library officials before ejecting any nonviolent 
patrons. At the Dennis Ross event, audience members had their bags 
searched as they entered the library.

During the question-and-answer session after Ross's address, a local 
writer and activist named Jeremy Rothe-Kushel asked about US support 
for what he called Israel's "state-sponsored terrorism." Ross 
answered, and when Rothe-Kushel followed up with a more aggressive 
question, Hawkins and one of the other guards approached him and 
immediately tried to eject him from the building-despite the fact 
that Rothe-Kushel posed no danger to the speaker or audience members. 
One of the guards, Brent Parsons, shouted-incorrectly-that 
Rothe-Kushel was at a private event. Later Parsons added, "This is 
private property." It is revealing that a policeman should have 
imagined, even in a heated moment, that a public library was private 
property.

As the guards grabbed Rothe-Kushel, Steve Woolfolk, the library's 
director of programming, who had been watching from off stage, 
interceded on Rothe-Kushel's behalf and defended his right to remain 
in a public building and ask questions at a public forum; in a cell 
phone video, Rothe-Kushel can be heard saying, "Ask me to leave [and] 
I will leave." The guards led Woolfolk and Rothe-Kushel through the 
green room toward the lobby. As Woolfolk rounded a pillar, several of 
the guards grabbed Woolfolk from behind. Woolfolk was kicked in the 
leg (resulting in a torn knee ligament), slammed against the pillar, 
and thrown into a chair. When he bounced out of the chair onto the 
floor, the guards forced him back into the chair, and handcuffed him. 
Both men were arrested by a uniformed police officer who had been 
summoned by Hawkins. Rothe-Kushel was charged with trespassing and 
resisting arrest, and Woolfolk with interfering with an arrest. 
Meanwhile, in the auditorium, the program continued; Ross answered a 
few more questions.

Since May, the cases against both men have been pending. Cellphone 
and security videos corroborate Rothe-Kushel's and Woolfolk's version 
of events. Whether or not one agrees with the implications of 
Rothe-Kushel's question, he posed no physical threat to either Ross 
or the audience, and was simply trying to speak. Woolfolk remained 
reasonable and polite. The guards' rapid recourse to shouting and to 
physical violence to detain Rothe-Kushel and Woolfolk did not seem to 
have a basis other than that the guards were nervous in the presence 
of a former top US official and that Rothe-Kushel was a local 
activist who was well-known for asking confrontational questions at 
public events. On entering the library, Rothe-Kushel had been 
identified by Hawkins and subjected to a more thorough search than 
had the other patrons. The off-duty police acting as guards seem to 
have been confused about the exact nature of their duties-and about 
where they were.

The arrests went unmentioned in the national press, in part because 
of the library officials' hope that the incident-which Library 
Director Crosby Kemper III has described as an "overreaction"-would 
simply blow over and the charges against Woolfolk and Rothe-Kushel 
dropped. The case gained new attention, however, in late September, 
when the library drew support from the American Library Association 
and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. (Over the years the 
American Library Association's position has been that freedom of 
speech-and our right to information-is absolute and indivisible, 
regardless of the nature of that speech and the content of that 
information. In 2003, the ALA went to the Supreme Court in an 
unsuccessful attempt to reverse the Children's Internet Protection 
Act, which requires that publically funded libraries install filters 
to screen out material that might be considered obscene or unsuitable 
for children.) On October 5, the Forward published 
an <http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/351309/jewish-man-arrested-for-questioning-israeli-state-sponsored-terrorism-at-ka/>article criticizing 
the security guards' behavior, and this week, a local newspaper, The 
Pitch, 
has <http://www.pitch.com/news/feature-story/article/20836631/arrests-at-a-kansas-city-public-library-event-show-how-the-lines-blur-when-offduty-police-work-private-security>raisedquestions 
about the off-duty police officers involved in the case.

For a while, library officials hoped that an accord might be reached 
between the library and the prosecutor's office; if the defendants 
agree to refrain from filing a civil suit, the charges against them 
will most likely be dropped. But the prosecutor's office has 
announced that it (in co-operation with Hawkins's employer, the 
Jewish Community Foundation) will go forward with the cases against 
the both the librarian and the patron.




	Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri
	Photo credit: Jonathan Moreau via Flickr // The New York 
Review of Books



Whatever the outcome, the case adds to a growing history of attacks 
on libraries-simply for upholding the bedrock values that have 
historically made them so important. Originally passed in 2001 and 
since reauthorized and amended, the USA PATRIOT Act-in particular its 
section 215-has given the FBI the power to request library borrowing 
records, patron lists, computer hard drives and Internet logs. In a 
speech in 2003, then Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that the 
understandably concerned librarians were suffering from a "baseless 
hysteria," repeating the word "hysteria" several times.

Two years later a group of Connecticut librarians (who came to be 
known as "the Connecticut Four") resisted a government request to 
turn over the names and online activity of everyone who had used a 
certain library computer; the librarians were served with a gag order 
forbidding them to discuss the case. After their situation attracted 
the attention of the ACLU, the gag order was rescinded by the FBI in 
2006; the following year, the Connecticut Four received the Paul 
Howard Award for Courage.

In 2005, Joan Airoldi, a librarian in rural Washington State, 
received the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award for defying an 
FBI demand for a list of patrons who had borrowed a biography of 
Osama bin Laden. And just two weeks ago, four off-duty policeman from 
the Grandview Police Department (working part-time as security guards 
at another Kansas City library, the Mid-Continent Library) objected 
to that library's decision to put up a display case entitled "Black 
Lives Matter- Books About African American Experiences" and featuring 
novels by Toni Morrison and others. Even after the library agreed to 
adjust the exhibit sign's language to read "Books about Black 
Lives-The African American Experience," two of the four officers 
resigned in protest. 

Part of what's disturbing about both Kansas City incidents is the 
extent to which they illustrate the gap that has opened between 
police and the communities in which they work-a divide that, with 
horrifying regularity, produces far more disastrous and violent 
results in our inner cities. In fact, public libraries are among the 
very few remaining places where all Americans can meet to exchange 
ideas and listen to opposing viewpoints for free.

According to the <http://www.librariesforreallife.org/>Libraries for 
Real Life Project, an organization founded within Wisconsin's South 
Central Library System, 68 percent of Americans have library cards. 
Americans borrow more than two billion items from libraries every 
year. Anyone can go to a public library (again, for free) to learn 
computer skills and apply for jobs. Immigrants can receive help in 
obtaining green cards and passing citizenship tests, and can learn 
and practice English. Senior citizens can find out how to take 
advantage of their social security benefits, and children can attend 
story hours and early-reading classes. And at least partly because of 
their own experience with government surveillance, libraries all over 
the country have begun to conduct workshops designed to teach patrons 
how to protect their privacy online.

I spent some of the happiest times of my childhood in Brooklyn's 
Grand Army Plaza Library, which now, like many libraries, has 
expanded its services in response to the needs of the communities it 
serves. Along with eleven other Brooklyn libraries, it has created 
rooms in which the families of prisoners (especially those who cannot 
afford to visit their incarcerated relatives) can chat with them via 
video conferencing; in the same rooms with the monitors and cameras 
are children's books, and during these "televisits," prisoners are 
encouraged to read books with their kids. On October 29, again at the 
Grand Army Plaza library, a group of actors 
will <http://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/theater-war-hercules-broo-central-library-102916>perform a 
little known and especially violent Euripides play, The Madness of 
Hercules, and use it as the jumping-off point for a discussion of gun 
violence; the audience of several hundred will include local 
schoolchildren and members of the New York City police department.

The right to read, to think, to discuss and listen to ideas in a 
public forum is essential to an open society, as is our individual 
privacy. One hopes that the Kansas City case-only the most recent of 
many-will be resolved without further cost, trouble and damage, and 
that librarians there and everywhere will be able to do their jobs 
without taking on the added burden of battling for our freedom.

[Francine Prose is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard. Her new 
novel, Mister Monkey, will be published later this month. (October 
2016)]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.eril-l.org/pipermail/eril-l-eril-l.org/attachments/20161021/7afc5983/attachment.html>