August/September 2005

http://alawda.newjerseysolidarity.org

Message to Antiwar Rally

They kill our children. Military and police sharpshooters hunt our children like animals. Does this sound familiar? They buy our leaders, and if they can’t buy them they assassinate them. They buy collaboration. In Palestine we call them umala; here you call them ‘Oreos’ or worse. They starve us, keep us poor, steal our land, our intelligent ones, our children. Our children, they arrest at a very young age when they have not yet formed their mature morality, and torture them while offering rewards, and they transform them into collaborators. The very bright children, they just assassinate.

They demolish our homes and our economy. They pass laws against us, put us in Bantustans, build walls around us to strangle us. They steal our art and destroy what they can’t steal. Remember the looting of the museum of art in Baghdad. They blow-up ancient buildings of ours that are thousands of years old. They have destroyed the ancient heart of Nablus, and they dig tunnels under AlQuds Jerusalem, yet they have not found two tones standing on top of each other dating from their ancient times that they can call their own.

They criminalize our religion, and prohibit our cultural practices. How many truck loads of Police and military does it take to watch us go to prayer on Fridays and during Ramadan? Similarly, for how long was the performance of the Sundance deemed illegal here in the US?

They attack our confidence and our self respect. They picture us in their mass media as poor, dressed in rags, angry as though without reason; and it is they who have starved us, put us in rags, and filled us with rage. They say that they are teaching us democracy while they enslave us. They call us terrorists when we defend ourselves against their terror. They are the terrorists

Am I talking about Harlem? Palestine? Iraq? South Africa? Afghanistan? I could be talking about any number of other oppressed nations? It is one pattern created by one enemy.

Israel and the US government are joined together as one machine of oppression. We have to organize to defend ourselves and our children. This war is not our war and we have to reject it. Become activists! Organize the workplace. But you say you do not have a job! Tthen organize the unemployed, the homeless. Be in solidarity with our youth and our children. Keep them away from of the system – from military recruiters. Teach them to be activists and to have the kind of fear that keeps them alive and taking action for a long time. The real role of youth is to protect their communities not to go out to attack other oppressed communities. In fact, the system teaches them to be hostile to their communities, to hate their communities instead of the system that oppresses them and sends them to war to die or be injured for the profits of the few—the few who build castles while the oppressed communities dig graves.

They claim that communism is over and dead and its time is gone. If that is so true, then why do they fear it so much? Maybe because it will bring peace and the end of their profits! Study communist and Marxist theory! Prepare and educate yourselves by studying the history of the working class!

Long live Palestine! Long live Iraqi and Palestinian Resistance! Long live Arab Power! Long live Black Power!