The Global South is Pro-Palestinian
October 11, 2023
“The Arab world is with the Palestinians. Africa is with the Palestinians. Latin America is with the Palestinians. Asia is
Oct 19
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Message to the Israeli People
October 14, 2023
“If you find this controversial, it is because you have never heard the conversation being had by most of the planet about the West, and don’t realize how ludicrous Western exceptionalism sounds to the rest of us.”
-Shahid Bolsen on the inferiority of Western values, Group identity must be shared beliefs, July 23, 2023
Who is Shahid Bolsen? Bolen responds to controversial allegations:
Western framing of Hamas vs Israel is Deliberate as Means of Delegitimizing Palestinian Resistance
Oct 18, 2023
Demonstrators rally during a ‘Stand with Palestine’ march in solidarity with Gaza, in Dublin, Ireland, October 14, 2023 [Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]
“Vanessa Beeley says the West’s depiction of the war as a Hamas-led aggression against Israel is a strategy to delegitimize resistance, influence public opinion, and bolster Israel’s position in the conflict.
The Syrian government has declared three days of mourning for the Zionist bombing of the Baptist Hospital in central Gaza.”
Dr. Naledi Pandor: A Conspiracy of Silence [Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign]
October 17, 2023
“Dr. Naledi Pandordemonstrates Africa’s potential for outstanding politicians, emphasizing the importance of speaking the truth, no matter how difficult.
While we stand with Palestine, let’s also focus on 2024 as a year to end the suffering in the Congo, where peace remains elusive due to ongoing mineral exploitation.
Gaza’s struggles are visible, but the Congo’s plight, spanning almost two centuries, remains largely invisible.”
[-KhalidLawalDigitalNomad]
Tribute by Dr Naledi Pandor on the occasion of the Memorial Service in honour of the late Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad:
Oct 16
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Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism
Capitalism Colonialism Communism Critical Thought Palestine Resistance Socialism Solidarity
“Historical Forces” – Stokely Carmichael Lecture at the University of Georgia
Parts 1 & 2
University of Georgia Media Archives
February 1, 1979
“It’s the historical forces.
Once it comes, you have only two alternatives.
Either you are with the people, or you are against the people.
It’s very simple.”
–Stokely Carmichael
Oct 14
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International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference – The World Can’t Ignore Palestinians’ Suffering
SABC News, Africa
October 14, 2023
“The Minister of International Relations Dr Naledi Pandor says the world can not look away while millions of Palestinians are suffering in the Middle East. Addressing delegates at the Dilemmas of Humanity Conference hosted by the labour organisation National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), Dr Pandor says she will oppose Israel being granted observer status at the African Union. This comes at the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas conflict.”
Leila Khaled’s Key Note at the International Dilemmas of Humanity Conference
SABC News, Africa
Oct 14, 2023
The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA is hosting the third International Dilemmas of Humanity conference in Johannesburg. The Dilemmas of Humanity process began in 2004 when popular organizations and movements from all over the world came together to confront the crisis of humanity caused by capitalism with concrete alternatives and solutions. Palestinian activist Leila Khaled delivers the key note address.
Oct 13
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Africa black Colonialism elaine brown george jackson greg thomas history huey newton Imperialism Israel kathleen cleaver liberation Malcolm X middle east Palestine panther party plo politics settler Stokely Carmichael White Supremacy zionism
The Black Panther Party On Palestine
May 19, 2021
By Greg Thomas
The following article by Greg Thomas, the curator of “George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine,” was published in Ittijah, a new Arabic-language publication by Palestinian youth issued by Nabd, the Palestinian Youth Forum. Dr. Greg Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Studies & English Literature at Tufts University, who crafted the exhibition, displayed first at the Abu Jihad Museum in occupied Palestine and then in Oakland and in several other US locations. The exhibition “includes drawings, woodcuts, political posters and other art tied to Jackson’s life and the Palestinian and U.S. prisoners’ movements, letters of solidarity between Palestinian and American prisoners, letters from Jackson and coverage of his life and death, photos of Palestinian art from the Apartheid Wall, and other artifacts tying the movements together.” It is named for Black Panther and Soledad Brother George Jackson, murdered in 1971 in a claimed “escape attempt;” poetry by the Palestinian leader and poet, Samih al-Qasim, including “Enemy of the Sun” and “I Defy,” was found in his cell after his death. (Handwritten copies of the poems where originally misattributed to Jackson, in what Thomas refers to as a “magical mistake” born of “radical kinship” between liberation movements.)
Download the original Arabic issue of Ittijah here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1Wg2eU7ijQhQnR1anBvNmUtdkk/view
The leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Huey P. Newton once wrote, “Israel was created by Western imperialism and is maintained by Western firepower.” He likewise said that ‘America’ must die so that the world can live. Neither Zionism nor “Americanism” would escape the wrath of these anti-colonialist/anti-racist/anti-imperialist Black Panthers, an organization founded in 1966 as the “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense” in Oakland, California.
Relatedly, by 1967, when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to transform itself from a liberal civil rights organization into a radical Black nationalist organization that would rename itself the Student National Coordinating Committee, it also took a bold position in support of Palestine. The text of SNCC’s statement was co-drafted by Stokely Carmichael, who would go on to make history as a revolutionary icon of “Black Power” and Pan-African movements for liberation. But SNCC paid for this position dearly. Its economic patronage by white liberalism in general and white ‘Jewish’ liberalism in particular came to a screeching halt. Historically, like all Black people who refuse to support “Jewish” Euro-imperialism, it would be represented as a band of ungrateful savages – “anti-Semitic” and “racist in reverse,” in other words – insofar as it would refused to put white and “Jewish” interests before its own Black nationalist and internationalist interests in North America and the world at large.
Nonetheless, it was a number of ex-SNCC radicals who published Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance in 1970 — after they had formed Drum & Spear Press in Washington D.C., and after that book project co-edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb had been rejected by a dozen other publishing houses. This was the same collection of poems seized from the cell of George Jackson (Black Panther Field Marshal), after his assassination by San Quentin prison guards on August 21, 1971: “Enemy of the Sun” by Samih al-Qasim was even mysteriously published in the Black Panther newspaper under “Comrade George’s” name in a magical “mistake” that would cement a certain Black/Palestinian connection for decades to come.
Condemning Zionist imperialism and white colonial liberalism led to no crisis for the Black Panther Party, for it was revolutionary rather than a reformist organization from its inception. The party issued at least three official statements on Palestine and the “Middle East” in 1970, 1974, and 1980, besides anonymous Black Panther articles promoting Palestinian liberation as well as assorted PLO editorials in The Black Panther Intercommunal New Service, a periodical with a global circulation of several hundred thousand copies weekly in its run from April 25, 1967 to September 1980.
The first official BPP statement in 1970 by proclaimed, “We support the Palestinian’s just struggle for liberation one hundred percent. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all of the progressive people of the world to join in our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live.” The Panthers made a point to mention that they were “in daily contact with the PLO,” provocatively, via the office that they had opened in Algiers as an “international section” of the party. This statement was made at a press conference in 1970 and republished in 1972 as a part of To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton.
What’s more, the BPP Minister of Defense put a sharp spin on the Zionist rhetoric of “the right to exist,” mocking its arrogance with a Black revolutionary flair: “The Jewish people have a right to exist so long as they solely exist to down the reactionary expansionist Israeli government.”
A second statement was issued by Newton in 1974. It would not budge from the BPP’s automatic support for Palestine. Yet the push here was now for an Israeli retreat to 1967 borders, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for a pan-Arab populism that would move toward a “people’s republic of the Middle East.” This was mostly a rhetorical critique of U.S. puppet regimes in the Arab world, which is to say, their comprador betrayal of Palestine: Elaine Brown reports that the masses of the party favored a position of complete Palestinian decolonization in any and every case.
A third official BPP statement followed Huey Newton’s trip to Lebanon in 1980. It is a virtual conversational profile of Yasser Arafat as well. The PLO Chairman vilified in the West was presented as an icon of peace with anti-imperialist justice in strict contrast to Menachem Begin. In minute detail, the Panther newspaper recalls Newton’s visit to a Palestinian school, the Red Crescent Society Hospital, and the Palestine Martyrs Works Society (SAMED), suggesting a significant parallel between these PLO programs in Beirut and the “survival pending revolution” programs of the Black Panther Party in North America. This written portrait of two revolutionary leaders and organizations in contact again conjures up some striking images found elsewhere: Huey greeting Arafat ecstatically in an airport somewhere and Huey smiling in front of a refugee camp in Lebanon with his arms around two armed Palestinian youth.
The afterlife of the Black Panther Party is noteworthy to be sure. Elaine Brown would proudly recap its history of Palestinian solidarity in 2015, while Kathleen Cleaver remembered in the same year that Fateh helped them construct their office (or “embassy-without-a-state”) in Algeria. Safiya Bukhari would continue to recite Palestinian poetry in tribute to “fallen comrades,” long after George Jackson became Samih al-Qasim and Samih al-Qasim became George Jackson thanks to the party’s newspaper. Lastly, Dhoruba Bin Wahad would be denied entry into Palestine in 2009 and briefly detained by the Israelis in Jordan. He was en route to a conference on political prisoners and representing the “Jericho Movement to Free Political Prisoners in the U.S.” And it is difficult to find a more radical or brilliant critic of Zionism, Negrophobia and Islamophobia in the Western Hemisphere today.
Moreover, before Stokely Carmichael moved back to Guinea and changed his name to become Kwame Ture, he was for a time affiliated with the Black Panthers as its “honorary prime minster.” Despite their subsequent differences, he arguably became the greatest Black giant of anti-Zionism himself. He described Palestine as “the tip of Africa” and said that he had “two dreams” (which were revolutionary, anti-Apartheid dreams in fact): “I dream, number one, of having coffee with my wife in South Africa; and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine.” This means that the legacy of his as well as SNCC’s historic solidarity with Palestine can be seen as intertwined with the legacy of the Black Panthers, not to mention Malcolm X.
Indeed, when Huey P. Newton referred to the Black Panther Party as the “heirs of Malcolm X,” he could have been talking about their shared anti-Zionist stance against white racism empire. In 1964, Malcolm made his Hajj and epic political tour of the Afro-Arab world. He spent two days in Gaza (5-6 September), where he prayed at a local mosque, gave a press conference at the parliament building, met Harun Hashim Rashad (as May Alhassen informs us), and visited several Palestinian refugee camps. Soon he met the first Chairman of the PLO Chairman, Ahmed Shukeiri, in Cairo – after the second Arab League Summit in Alexandria — and published his blistering polemic against “Zionist Logic” in The Egyptian Gazette (17 September 1964): “The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is “dollarism,” he wrote: “The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism…. The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians.” Here Malcolm (or, now, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) prefigures Fayez Sayegh’s powerful booklet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965); and he eerily portends Benjamin Netanyahu’s wretched tour of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia in 2016. The 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense) is thus a great time to remember the whole genealogy of a Black revolutionary tradition of opposition to Zionism and all forms of Western racism, colonialism and imperialism, perhaps especially in this special place that produced Black Panther/Fahd al-Aswad formations of own.
Links
[Dr. Greg Thomas is Associate Professor of Black Studies & English Literature at Tufts University.]
Despite What you Think, Palestinians are Not Celebrating Death
By Hebn Jamal
October 9, 2023
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
– Maya Angelou
Despite what you might think, no Palestinians are not celebrating death. We do not look at the news and rejoice over the number of Israelis killed. We do not salivate at the sight of blood drenched bodies. Despite what you might think we are not well. We do not look at death and feel happiness.
The “joy” you might be seeing is the idea that for the first time in history we might have a chance to reclaim our land. We might have a chance to end the occupation, we might have a chance to open Gaza’s borders, to visit our family without reprisal and to escape from torturous prisons- this time without a spoon in our hand.
Yet, even then, what is it to label it as “joy.”
Yesterday, my cousin-in law: my husband’s first cousin and my mother in law’s nephew was killed by the settler colonial state-Majed. He was beautiful and just graduated tawhiji last year. He was only 20. Now he is gone. We are in a deep phase of mourning, anger and confusion as to how this happened to us so quickly, so soon. Our tears have simply dried on our faces as there weren’t enough tissues to hold them.
My family’s neighbors’ are annihilated. A whole family was wiped out yesterday , the Abu Daqqa family, with 5 beautiful children that were killed. We are now getting reports of 19 members of the same family killed in a single Israeli air strike last night in the besieged strip. Old and young: men, women and children.. all..just gone.
Then this morning we learn that Israel is using white phosphorus gas on Palestinians in Gaza- a dangerous chemical that continues to burns the skin even if met with water. My husband recalls they did the same in 2008 when he was a child, “the gas can only be covered, but once it was uncovered it burned again for days and days” he said.
In the West Bank settlers are being instructed to kill Palestinians on-sight, and we read our Facebook homepages like they are obituaries. Seeing dozens of people we broke bread with disappear in a single moment.
When I read posts shocked at how I am not condemning Palestinian militants in this point in time, I feel once again inferior. My value as a human is not seen the same. While we are in the most traumatic and gut wrenching moments of our lives there are some who believe now it is the time to say that we have to condemn. We have to say that love trumps all.
I wish. I truly Goddamn wish that love trumps all. That it is love that leads revolutions. I wanted for my whole life to believe that by protesting long enough, by supporting BDS long enough, by writing long enough I am actively making a difference.
Well I wasn’t. Not in the way that might save my people’s existence.
In Gaza, despite bombs being dropped overhead, despite us losing tens and tens of our family members right this very second, they know that if it is not now, it will be later. They know this because their whole lives that is all they had to see. They had to see mutilated bodies, they had to see their children dismembered in front of them, and they had to see their futures destroyed.
2004, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023..
Each war and assault on Gaza it is the same. Each war the amount dead was dismissed and treated lesser than. Our humanity is not valued. For if it was, so would be our pursuit for liberation.
There has not been success in changing the perception of the Israeli public- to actually see us as humans and to accept we will not live in a cage. Whenever Israelis have an election we brace ourselves , because we know the only way you get polling numbers is by bombing or raiding or arresting us senseless. Usually when they bang the war drums, public support comes running. I am unsure how the colonized mind will decolonize itself to give us our freedom. It has not happened and I don’t think it ever will.
We demand and yell on the streets everywhere in the world “Gaza, gaza don’t you cry..we will never let you die.” We march in front of the Zionist embassies and write to politicians and we demand them to stop sending aid. We make vigils and hand out posters for them to be ripped up in bins. While our family dies we have to watch the apathy of Westerners who will never join our struggle for liberation, who will never see us as humans, who will never allow us to breathe.
I have anti-Zionist Jewish friends who are rightfully scared. Who are conflicted and hate that this has happened. I understand, because for a majority of your life this fear was only an abstract concept. The damage that has transpired was only described theoretically in the past and you worked tirelessly to try and change it. However, at the at the end of the day you can maybe turn your minds off, go to a cafe or enjoy a glass of wine, because it wasn’t your pain.
We couldn’t. We never could.
After we worked together, at the end of the day us Palestinians went back to mourning. Our pain never ended after the protest or the vigil. We had to deconstruct our pain to therapists we couldn’t afford and try to move on from the death..from the tragedies..from the violence because we couldn’t do anything else. At some point, this became too too much.
I pray for the day to walk through Jerusalem or to feel Yafa’s waters, or to sit at Acre’s ports with people of all faiths who see me as a human. I hope for open borders and the destruction of walls and for the ability walk side by side with you all for it is not us who has never seen your humanity.
I do not rejoice over death. I rejoice over the possibility to live.
We are simply tired, and hurt, and grieving and I cannot condemn the militants if I believe even for a second that there might be a possibility of all of this finally coming to an end..
“The Bulldozer” – Palestinian artist Beesan Arafat
[Hebn Jamal writes about the Palestinian cause and diaspora, state sanctioned violence, and Islamophobia.]
Malcolm X’s Moral Courage and the Challenge of Palestine
May 19, 2021
By
In this May 16, 1963, file photo, civil rights leader Malcolm X speaks to reporters in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/file)
The third Friday in May is celebrated as Malcolm X Day, but many choose to recognize the civil rights leader today (May 19), on his birthday. Either way, the Malcolm we honor — his towering frame, his articulate baritone, his piercing gaze — reflects the pride that so many of us take in the man. But this image often lends itself to a shallow, constrained memory of Malcolm, which at once burns intensely in depth yet narrowly in breadth.
In life, and in the mainstream public’s memory, Malcolm was sidelined as the quintessential angry Black rebel: a figure who was novel for the intensity of his passion, but who had nothing to teach society at large.
That dismissal of Malcolm’s legacy does not just do disfavor to the man himself, but to all of us. Malcolm reminds us of two historical constants: first, that every era requires people who can fearlessly speak truth to power; and second, that those who do so will inevitably be sidelined during their time.
It was Malcolm who warned us in his lifetime about the damage being done to the Palestinians, before any other African American leader or civil rights organization, just as he would take on the Vietnam War before anyone else would. He would be the lone popular leader to support Yuri Kochiyama in her quest for justice after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Moral courage is not often found within the confines of our rigid partisan establishment lines. Neither political party has a monopoly on morality. Courage is displayed precisely when we rise up against the comfortable, prevailing view of our times.
There are few places in American politics today where this courage is required more, and yet present less, than on the issue of Palestinian human rights.
The banality of the injustice against the Palestinians has allowed it to occur steadily and quietly over years. Israel continues to build settlements in occupied Palestinian territories in flagrant violation of nearly every international law. Moving the U.S. Embassy to Israel to Jerusalem in 2018 was dismissed as a political stunt by then-President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though it proved to be a usefully provocative one for both politicians. Gaza has become an open-air prison that is routinely bombed to pieces. This has become the status quo, one that President Joe Biden has thus far only cemented further.
Even outrageous attempts to expel Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem only gained global attention because Israel made the mistake of allowing a historic mosque to be the backdrop of Palestinian protests.
But now here we are again: Al-Aqsa, one of the holiest sights of Islam, being desecrated on one of the holiest nights of Ramadan; Israeli lynch mobs attacking Palestinian “citizens” with police protection; settlers forcibly displacing Palestinians from their historic homes. The bombardment of Gaza has already left more than 60 children dead and the one COVID-19 testing center destroyed.
Still, the two political parties in the U.S. Congress, who can otherwise barely agree to keep the government running, annually secure unconditional funding for Israel and punish any activity that challenges it. For years, any political avenues to supporting Palestinian activism have been cut off.
But Palestinian activism in this country will succeed. Already we see the pendulum swinging, as it inevitably must.
Despite the brutality of the Israeli military and intimidation of activists in the U.S., internal protests and acts of civil disobedience keep spreading. Despite the consequences to celebrities and athletes who dare voice their opinions, more of them are speaking out and not deleting their tweets under pressure.
Despite the shadowy watchlists kept to punish pro-Palestinian activists by making it difficult for them to find employment, more activists have decided those salaries aren’t worth their conscience. And a handful of political figures are forcing us to reopen the conversation about what moral courage looks like.
On the floor of Congress recently, Rep. Cori Bush said: “We are anti-war. We are anti-occupation. And we are anti-apartheid. Period.”
Moral consistency cannot, of course, just be limited to Palestine. It’s sorely needed in every facet of our political life. But speaking out on Palestine can be the first crack in ensuring that all walls, literal and metaphorical, begin to fall.
The more formidable the barriers become to speaking the truth, the more formidable the voices will be of those who do speak up. Malcolm’s message of racial equality cut all the more deeply because of its stark moral clarity, and grew all the more powerful because of the desperate attempts to stamp it out. We need to extend his legacy.
[The Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman is a world renowned scholar and theologically driven activist for human rights. He is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Southern Methodist University.]