Author Archives: Matthew

1981: Return to Lebanon

In 1981, Sheila returned to the Middle East again for more research and reporting.

She entered Lebanon via a ferry from Cypress to the Phalange-controlled area, and then taking a series of taxi rides to reach the Palestinian areas near Beirut.

During this time she was pregnant, and she would made the local women laugh by replying to their customary saying of “Inshallah walid” (God willing, it’ll be a boy) by saying “Inshallah bent” (God willing, a girl) and explaining that she already had four sons. Her wishes were granted when Caitlin was born that November.

1981: Palestine Solidarity Committee Protest

In 1981, the New York Times covered a PSC protest held adjacent to the annual New York City parade for the foundation of the state of Israel:

In a message from Israel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin appealed to Israel’s supporters not to allow any retaliatory actions against his country for destroying the Iraqi reactor. …

The crowd, which included marchers from 100 groups and thousands who lined the avenue to cheer them, applauded the Prime Minister’s statement.

The appeal was mocked at a counterdemonstration sponsored by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee attended by some 100 people nearby in Central Park . ”The Salute to Israel parade is a salute to racism, colonialism and repression,” said one banner held aloft there. ”Stop U.S. Aid to Israel,” said another. …

The Palestinian rally in Central Park off Fifth Avenue and 97th Street was called ”A Teach-In on Avoiding War in the Middle East.” Sheila Ryan, an organizer of the teach-in, said that her group’s aim was to ”stop the continuing flow of weapons to the Middle East.” She said this included Israel and Arab nations.

— From “Parade For Israel Reflects Fears Over Reactor Raid“, by Ari Goldman, New York Times, June 15, 1981.

1980: Reporting on Settlement Expansion

Sheila contributed on-the-ground reporting from Palestine as Israeli settlements were expanded:

To the east of Jerusalem a much more serious venture has been taking shape in the form of the Ma’ale Adumim Block which is “targeted to become a major residential and industrial complex which will complete the encirclement of Jerusalem”, and which, when completed, “will extend the municipality eastward more than eight miles towards the floor of the Jordanian Valley” (see eye-witness account of Sheila Ryan and George Cavalletto, “Israeli Settlements in West Bank and Gaza”, as reproduced in a supplement to Palestine:, dated September, 1980, pp. 9-17; quotation from p. 10).

— From the Report of The Fourth United Nations Seminar on the Question of Palestine, “The inalienable rights of the Palestinian people“, 31 August – 4 September 1981, Havana

1979: Palestine Solidarity Committee Protest

Sheila led these protests every summer for several years:

Sunday, June 3, 1979
By Ruth Landa, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: NEW YORK

Celebration of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was an underlying theme of the 15th annual Salute to Israel parade Sunday in which some 75,000 persons sang and danced up Fifth Avenue.

Mayor Edward I. Koch, City Council President Carol Bellamy and other city officials led the costumed paraders up the avenue, marching to the theme song from “Exodus” and waving to observers who lined the street despite intermittent rain.

But several blocks downtown, the peace treaty signed on March 26 was denounced by the Palestine Solidarity Committee which staged its own rally and marched uptown on other avenues in protest.

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1979: The Colonial Exploitation of Occupied Palestine

Sheila wrote a book chapter on the economics of the Israeli occupation:

Zionism, Imperialism and Racism

“The Colonial Exploitation of Occupied Palestine : a study of the transformation of the economies of the West Bank and Gaza”, by Sheila Ryan, in Zionism, Imperialism, and Racism, ed. A.W. Kayyali, Croom Helm (London), 1979.

This research was cited in a Village Voice front-page article:

Middle Eastern Bantustan

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1978: Protest Against the Camp David Accords

In November, 1978, the PLO Information Bulletin reported on a PSC-led protest rally at the United Nations. Sheila is quoted as the rally’s organizer, and is shown in the second picture, holding the “No to the Camp David Pact; Yes to Palestinian National Rights.” banner.

PROTEST RALLY IN NEW YORK AGAINST CAMP DAVID

NY Palestine demo

Demonstrators against the Camp David accords delivered messages to the U.S., Israeli and Egyptian missions to the United Nations during a protest march in New York City on September 23. The messages criticized the pact for ignoring the central issue in the Mideast conflict, the Palestinian national question, and declared that this question can only be solved by realization of Palestinian national rights.

The demonstrators protested in particular the role of U.S. President Jimmy Carter in the negotiations; the marchers chanted “Carter, your Camp David Pact won’t bring peace and that’s a fact.” In banners, placards and speeches they demanded that the U.S. government stop its aid to Israel.

The march began with a rally in front of the United Nations, where Hassan Abdul Rahman of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s U.N. office told some 200 demonstrators that only the PLO represents the Palestinian people, and that peace is not possible until the people have their national rights.

NY Palestine demo

Pro-Palestinian Demonstration in New York

The demonstrators bore Palestinian flags and colorful banners, including one proclaiming, “No to the Camp David Pact; Yes to Palestinian National Rights.” As they marched through crowds of Saturday shoppers the protestors chanted, “Carter, Carter, we’re no fools: Sadat and Begin are your tools.”

Sheila Ryan, speaking for the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which organized the event in coordination with Arab community groups, declared that if Carter were genuinely interested in peace in the Middle East, he would stop U.S. aid to Israel and arms shipments to the region. “Carter is a false prophet of peace,” Ryan said. “This is not a peace but a pact for a new kind of war against the Palestinian people.”

— From “Protests Rally In New York Against Camp David“, Palestine: P.L.O. Information Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 19, Nov 1, 1978. (Screenshot) Archived by New Jersey Solidarity–Activists for the Liberation of Palestine.

Claremont Research and Publications

From 1978 to 1989, Sheila worked with George on Claremont Research and Publications.

Claremont Research ran a clipping service called Mideast Press Report that collected press reports about the Middle East, indexed and summarized them, and sent out a binder full of photocopies each week to interested subscribers. As the Institute for Palestine Studies described it:

… articles from over 80 publications, including the major US, European, Israeli and Arab English-language press … are contained in Mideast Press Report, a weekly clipping service of Claremont Research and Publications in New York.

Claremont Research also published a monthly news magazine called Update: Mideast, and several books, including one by Noam Chomsky.

Sheila wrote the news analysis section of Update: Mideast every month, as well as a weekly news analysis for subscribers of the Mideast Press Report.

Every week she would read through hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles clippings about the region, come up with a mental synthesis of what it all meant, and sit down at her Selectric typewriter and bang out several pages that coherently summarized everything that had been reported that week, just in time for her report to be photocopied and express-shipped to various organizations and international clients who relied on this service to stay abreast of how their region was being described in global news reports.

As one example, the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad had a subscription for a while, although when they re-indexed their remaining holdings after the chaos and destruction of the war, they seem to have only retained a dozen or so issues from 1981:

Iraqi-National-Archive

1976 FBI Report: Agent of the Weather Underground

In 1976, the FBI assembled a report on the Weather Underground that included Sheila and George on the same list as Bill Ayers and Benardine Dohrn.

This is inaccurate. Sheila and George were never members of the Weathermen or the Weather Underground.

However, because they had known and worked with a number of the SDSers who chose to go underground as the Weather Underground, and because of their ongoing activism, they were included in FBI write-ups of possible Weather Underground associates.

Sheila disagreed with the “small vanguardist strategy” adopted by the Weathermen, which she saw as undermining the efforts to build mass movements in the United States that could bring about real political change.

Eventually released under the Freedom of Information Act, the document is available through the FBI’s web site.

Here’s the FBI’s profile on Sheila as part of the Weather Underground network:

FBI-WU-p257-sheila

FBI-WU-p258-sheila

(PDF Version)

1976 Congressional Report: “Extremist Organizations”

This paranoid report to Congress makes Sheila a member of a far-flung conspiracy to destroy America, run by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the Weatherman faction of SDS:

The Palestine Solidarity Committee, which was established in November 1975, is run by PFOC activitists George Cavaletto and Sheila Ryan. They operate this organization from a post office box in Manhattanville Station, New York. Cavaletto was a member of the Weatherman faction of SDS. He was identified by the Flint, Mich. Police Department as having been in attendance at the Weatherman “War Council” in Flint, Mich. in December 1969. He visited Havana in July 1969, presumably to meet with representatives of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. Ryan, who had also been active in the Weatherman faction of SDS, was one of the first members to visit Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. Ryan and Cavaletto both spent a year in Jordan and Lebanon writing propaganda articles for the Palestine Liberation Organization.

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1975-1982: Palestine Solidarity Committee

From 1975 through about 1982 or so, Sheila led the Palestine Solidarity Committee, a pro-Palestinian organization in New York City.

(In the mid 1980s, years after the PSC shut down, the name Palestine Solidarity Committee was adopted by an unrelated group, the November 29th Committee for Palestine, which was associated with the Workers World Party, but despite some surface similarities, the two groups were unrelated.)

Camping and Canoeing

When the kids were young, Sheila convinced George to go on a canoe camping trip. Although she had never been canoeing, she had read a few books and was confident they’d be able to figure it out. Sure enough, they did, and the entire family went camping and canoeing nearly every summer for the next four decades.

02-01-041DSC_0357

1969-1985: 200 Claremont Avenue

When Sheila first moved to New York in the summer of 1968, she shared an apartment with another young woman in the movement, but several months later she moved in with George.

George had been sharing an apartment at 200 Claremont with a few other Columbia students for several years, and then some LNS folks, but in the years that followed, the roommates left and the apartment was filled up with Sheila and George’s children instead.

During the 1970s, in response to the abusive behavior and neglect of the building by the landlord, Sheila worked to organize the tenants, and helped lead them to cooperate on rent strikes, to take legal action against the landlord, and eventually to take control of the building themselves when the landlord was forced to abandon it to City ownership.

Eventually the building at 200 Claremont completed the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board’s Tenant Interim Lease Program and became an HDFC cooperative, allowing the tenants to buy their apartments for a nominal sum.

200-Claremont

1970: “A negative image of Yasser Arafat”

Photographer Jeff Blankfort remembers Sheila having private criticisms about the leadership of the P.L.O. that she was reluctant to share:

Re the Palestinian question, on my first trip to the Middle East in 1970 with the two founders of Liberation News Service, Sheila Ryan and George Cavelleto, we generally had a negative image of Yasser Arafat, but felt, at the time, that it was not our business to be deciding who should lead the Palestinian people, particularly when most Americans knew little about the Palestinians in the first place.

He later felt that Sheila’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was too closely aligned with the P.L.O.

When I returned, I focused on support for the Palestinian people’s rights as opposed to support for the PLO, but was ready to and did work with representatives of all the Palestinian groups in the Bay Area.

When Steve Zeltzer and I founded the Labor Committee on the Middle East, in response to the failure of the Palestine Solidarity Committee to relate to that important issue, and its unwillingness to criticize the Histadrut (the Israeli Labor Federation) among a number of its failings, and became, despite our relatively small numbers, the most active group campaigning for Palestinian rights, we still maintained our distance from Arafat.

— From a posting to the change-links mailing list by Jeff Blankfort, Nov 28, 2000, archived at Yahoo Groups.

Underground Press Syndicate: “Sexism Must Be Eliminated”

Sheila advocated for women to take an equal role in the underground press:

In July 1969… Ann Arbor, Michigan… a four-day UPS [Underground Press Syndicate] conference that was hosted by a commune called Trans-Love Energies Unlimited. … the group managed to discuss many of the main issues that were roiling the underground press in this period. One focal point was sexism; a group of women’s liberationists complained that they were treated shabbily by their colleagues, and despite heavy opposition from the White Panthers, LNS’s Sheila Ryan was able to spearhead the passage of a three-point resolution proclaiming: “(1) sexism must be eliminated from the underground paper’s contents and ads, (2) undergrounds should publish articles on women’s oppression, (and) (3) women should have full roles in underground papers’ staffs.”

— From Smoking Typewriters, John McMillian, Oxford University Press, 2011, page 120-122.

A slightly longer version of this resolution is given in the Wikipedia entry on UPS which sounds like Sheila’s composition;

1. That male supremacy and chauvinism be eliminated from the contents of the underground papers. For example, papers should stop accepting commercial advertising that uses women’s bodies to sell records and other products, and advertisements for sex, since the use of sex as a commodity specially oppresses women in this country. Also, women’s bodies should not be exploited in the papers for the purpose of increasing circulation.

2. That papers make a particular effort to publish material on women’s oppression and liberation with the entire contents of the paper.

3. That women have a full role in all the functions of the staffs of underground papers.

LNS member Andy Marx accompanied Sheila to the UPS meeting and tells the story this way:

We went to this meeting … it was this really weird thing, it was out on this sort of farm outside of Ann Arbor, with — one of the organizing groups was the White Panther Party, who fancied themselves to be the equivalent of the Black Panthers, so there’s this sort of wasted looking guy named Fuzzy, that was his nickname, with a 22 and something — sitting at the end of the driveway, as if he was going to … fight them off [if the police came].

The papers, a lof them that were represented there were all into this — a lot of them survived on advertising that was full of sort of misogynistic images of women, and Sheila, just in this non-confrontational but absolutely persistant — I mean, she just wouldn’t let go of it — carried on this long debate / discussion, and it ended up they adopted a position saying that the papers should, both in their content page coverage and in their advertising pages, they should repudiate sterotype and demeaning images of women.

… So she was dealing with … these stoned guys who were sort of proclaiming about being too hard-core political, and being uptight about this — “so we have pictures of naked chicks, you know, what’s the problem, you know, we all want to be free.” … And she managed — it was impressive — to communicate across the board.

Targeted by the FBI and CIA

LNS was the target of government attention and a sustained campaign of dirty tricks.

As summarized in an article on “The Press” published by “Forgotten History”:

The Liberation News Service was an alternative wire service that spoke out against the war in Vietnam. It was very critical of U.S. involvement and provided a service to the mainstream press by providing sources of information for them. The reality was that the mainstream press was so out of touch, that they needed the content and contacts that services such as the Liberation News provided. During the war, the Liberation News became the target of the CIA, the FBI and Military Intelligence. The FBI went so far as to break into their offices, destroy their equipment and set fire to the building. The CIA set up informants to spy on the service, which is forbidden under the CIA’s charter, while the FBI moved to discredit them.

Further details were provided in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review:

The government’s offensive against the underground press primarily involved three agencies – the CIA, the FBI, and the Army. In many cases, their activities stemmed from what they could claim were legitimate concerns. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS, for example, was set up to look into the foreign connections of domestic dissidents; however, it soon exceeded its mandate and became part of the broad attack on the left and on publications that were regarded as creating a climate disruptive of the war effort. At its height, the government’s offensive may have affected more than 150 of the roughly 500 underground publications that became the nerve centers of the antiwar and countercultural movements.

A telling example of this offensive was the harassment of Liberation News Service, which, when opposition to the Vietnam War was building, played a key role in keeping the disparate parts of the antiwar movement informed. By 1968, the FBI had assigned three informants to penetrate the news service, while nine other informants regularly reported on it from the outside. Their reports were forwarded to the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Branch. where an analyst kept tabs on LNS founders Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom, and to the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Navy, the Air Force, and the CIA. The FBI also attempted to discredit and break up the news service through various counterintelligence activities, such as trying to make LNS appear to be an FBI front, to create friction among staff members, and to burn down the LNS office in Washington while the staff slept upstairs. Before long, the CIA, too, joined the offensive; one of its recruits began filing reports on the movements of LNS staff members while reporting for the underground press to establish his cover as an underground journalist.

During the 1971 May Day antiwar demonstration in Washington, Ferrera took photographs and reported on the event for College Press Service, an antiwar syndication service; he may well have been the agent mentioned in the Rockefeller Commission’s hearings on the CIA as having covered the demonstration for the agency. He also appears to have been the source of two reports to the CIA regarding staff members of Liberation News Service. In late April, when Ferrera was still working in the Quicksilver office, an LNS editor stopped in to ask if LNS staff members who planned to come down from New York for May Day could lodge there. A CHAOS informant’s report, dated April 25 and released to LNS editor Andrew Marx under the FOIA, refers to this visit. A second report lists all LNS staff members who attended the May Day demonstration.

 …

In some cities, when direct attacks proved unsuccessful, the government set up its own phony news service which, so long as it was unexposed, provided a means of penetrating the left; once exposed, it cast suspicion on legitimate underground reporters and helped to create a feeling of paranoia. … Meanwhile, on the East Coast, the FBI operated New York Press Service under the direction of Louis Salzberg. NYPS offered its services to left-wing publications at attractive rates, soliciting business with a letter that read, in part: “The next time your organization schedules a demonstration, march, picket or office party, let us know in advance. We’ll cover it like a blanket and deliver a cost free sample of our work to your office.” NYPS’s cover was blown when Salzberg surfaced as a government witness in the Chicago Seven trial, during which it was disclosed that he had been an FBI informant.

The New York field office shrewdly turned this setback into a means of casting suspicion on Liberation News Service. The office prepared an anonymous letter, copies of which were sent to newspapers and antiwar groups, accusing LNS of being an FBI front. “Lns [sic] is in an ideal position to infiltrate the movement at every level,” the letter stated. “It has carefully concealed its books from all but a select few. Former employees have openly questioned its sources of operating funds, I shall write to you further on Lns for I (and several others) are taking steps to expose this fraud for what it really is – a government financed front.”

 — From “Sabotaging the Dissident Press: The untold story of the secret offensive waged by the U.S. government against antiwar publications”, by Angus Mackenzie, Columbia Journalism Review, March-April, 1981, pp. 57-63. (Archived at UTWatch.) (PDF Version) (Wayback Cache at Archive.org)

1969: “Panthers & Pigs”

This article by Sheila was printed in the April 10, 1969 edition of the SDS New Left Notes:

Panthers & Pigs: New York
by Sheila Ryan
Liberation News Service

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (LNS) — “SMASH PANTHER BOMB PLOT!* “COPS: CUBA HELPS PANTHERS PROWL,” and “SEEK PANTHER LINK TO STOLEN YOUTH FUNDS” displaced the headlines of the previous week describing a city in disintegration— hospitals being closed because adequate funds were denied by the city and state governments, welfare appropriations cut so that clients would be hard-put to survive, the City College president resigning because the legislators had cut the budget below minimum, high school students in a state of rebellion.

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