Ralph Schoenman

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Long active in political life, Ralph Schoenman has been involved in international resistance to imperialism and active in the workers' movement in the United States.

Ralph Schoenman was Executive Director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in which capacity he conducted negotiations with numerous heads of state.* He secured the release of prisoners in many countries and initiated the International Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Indochina, of which he was Secretary General.

Schoenman initiated the Committee of 100 which organized mass civil disobedience against nuclear weapons and U.S. bases in Great Britain. He was founder and director of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and director of the Who Killed Kennedy Committee.

He spent seven months in Bolivia in 1967 and was imprisoned there after the death of Che Guevara. He worked with Malcolm X with respect to the battle for the Congo and in the anti-imperialist struggles of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. Ralph Schoenman was a founder of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran and spent seven months in Iran during the revolution against the Shah, was a president of the International Tribunal Against the Debt, Lima, Peru, assisted in the formation of the Africa Tribunal in Johannesburg, South Africa and Los Angeles, CA and is an advocate for prisoners incarcerated in the U.S.

He and Mya Shone were directors of the Committee in Defense of the Lebanese and Palestinian Peoples during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, of the Palestine Campaign, which at the time of the first Intifada called for an end to all aid to apartheid Israel and for a democratic secular Palestine, and of Workers and Artists for "Solidarity" (that is, Solidarnarsc, the Polish Workers' movement). They were the North American organizers of the International Conference Against Repression in Haiti that took place in Port-au-Prince during the oppressive Raoul Cedras regime.

Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone were founders and editorial members for ten years of the labor and socialist newspaper "The Organizer."

Ralph Schoenman has lectured widely on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. His books include "The Hidden History of Zionism", "Iraq and Kuwait: A History Suppressed" and "Death and Pillage in the Congo: A Study of Western Rule" which he co-authored with Khalid Ahmed Zaki, as well as, "Prisoners of Israel" and "Homage to Palestine" which he co-authored with Mya Shone.

Ralph Schoenman's analysis and discussion of the events of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, "World Trade Center: Uncensored History," left WBAI-NY's audience riveted to their radios waiting for the next installment and led to the broadcast of “Taking Aim with Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone,” now closing its fifth year of production. (Tuesdays at 5:00 p.m. on WBAI-NY 99.5 FM and on the Internet at http://www.wbai.org - Program archives at http://www.takingaim.info)

Ralph Schoenman's academic publications include “Plato’s Theory of Education’” for which he won the 1869 McCosh Dickinson Award of Princeton University; “Verifiability Theory and the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning.” He attended Princeton University and the London School of Economics.

Ralph Schoenman has conducted one-on-one negotiations with over thirty heads of state and their deputies on matters of international affairs, including Nikita Khrushchev, Chou En-lai, Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Hugh Gaitskill, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Moraji Desai, V.K. Krishna Menon, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Ayub Khan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, King Sihanouk, U Thant, Soekarno, Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Faisal, Abdel Karim Qassim, Sa’eb Salem, Ayatollah Ruhalllah Khomeini, David Ben Gurion, Shimon Peres, Yasir Arafat, George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyata, Oginga Odinga, Oliver Tambo, Nana Mahomo, I.B. Tabata, Jariretundu Kosonguizi, Yusef Dadoo, Oscar Kambona, Milton Obote, Mohammad Babu, Joshua Nkomo, Kenneth Kaunda and Simon Kapwepwe.