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This week on Uprising:

* FARC Laptop Allegations Continue
* Black Agenda Report on Iowa and Prisons
* Reflections on the Sean Bell Verdict and Jeremiah Wright’s Comeback
* Empire Notes: Blaming Iraqis
* Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think

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FARC Laptop Allegations Continue

GUEST: Forrest Hylton, researcher in history at New York University, author of “Evil Hour in Colombia,” and frequent contributor to NACLA and New Left Review

The International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol, is in the midst of an investigation of documents on a seized laptop allegedly belonging to Raul Reyes. Reyes, the leader of the Colombian rebel group, FARC, was killed by Colombian military in Ecuador on March 1st, nearly igniting a confrontation between Colombia, Ecuador and neighboring ally Venezuela. Now, a Colombian government official has voiced new accusations of collusion between FARC and the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela. Speaking on condition of anonymity the official claimed that the Colombian government has proof that FARC had financial connections to a member of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly, and that the seized documents show that Venezuela’s government sought guerrilla warfare training from the leftist Colombian rebels in case of a U.S. invasion. As these new charges surface, twenty-one prominent U.S. based analysts and academics have signed an open letter to the media to state that should Interpol declare the authenticity of the files seized from FARC laptops, no links will be effectively proven between the guerrillas and the governments in question. The scholars caution the media to scrutinize Interpol’s analysis, which is expected as early as next week.

Read the Miami Herald article on the unnamed Colombian source: http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/511273.html

Read the letter signed by Forrest Hylton and other academics: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticlePrint/17352

Black Agenda Report on Iowa and Prisons

GUEST: Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report

This week’s commentary is on Iowa and prisons. Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Reflections on the Sean Bell Verdict and Jeremiah Wright’s Comeback

GUEST: Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and author of several books including “April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America”

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, confronted the recent controversy over his past sermons at the National Press Club in Washington DC on Monday April 28th. Clips from Wright’s sermons have been used in Republican commercials that try to paint Obama as unpatriotic. But now Wright is fighting back. In his spirited rebuttal of the Republican Party and mainstream media’s depiction of him, he contended that the attacks on him were really attacks on Black religious tradition and the Black church. Wright, who himself served six years in the military, shot back at accusations of being anti-patriotic by asking how many years Vice President Dick Cheney served in the military. In response, Obama denounced Wright calling his behavior “outrageous” and a “spectacle.” Meanwhile, as if to prove Wright’s point about injustice against Black America, a New York judge recently acquitted three detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, a Black man who was killed in a hail of 50 bullets in 2006. Outraged Black New Yorkers marched in protest while Reverend Al Sharpton has vowed to fight the judge’s decision. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, in response to a question about the verdict, called Bell’s death a “tragedy” but that the judge’s verdict must be respected.

For more information, visit www.michaelericdyson.com.

Empire Notes: Blaming Iraqis

GUEST: Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade

Empire Notes are weekly commentaries filed by Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade. Today’s commentary is about blaming Iraqis.

Empire Notes is online at www.empirenotes.org.

Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think

GUEST: Dalia Mogahed, Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, coauthor of the book Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, member of Women in International Security, serves on the leadership group of the Project on U.S. Engagement with the Global Muslim Community, and is a member of the Crisis in the Middle East Task Force of the Brookings Institution.

Nearly 7 years after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, and the subsequent US war in Afghanistan, and more than 5 years after the Iraq war, Western perceptions of Muslims and Islam is more distorted than ever. Radio shock jocks routinely spout anti-Muslim hate speech, newspaper Op-eds promote propaganda, and hate crimes continue. But how do American perceptions of Islam and Muslims square with the realities of diverse Muslim communities on the other side of the globe? The answers are revealed in a multi-year research study conducted by Gallup world poll and presented in a new book co-authored by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed. Gallup conducted tens of thousands of interviews with residents from more than 35 predominantly Muslim countries. The questions probed issues of terrorism, anti-Americanism, women’s rights and more. The answers were revealing, and often, surprising.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day

“Fear always springs from ignorance” — Ralph Waldo Emerson