The Latest From the United National Anti-War Coalition
(please
forward widely)
Neither do we condone the
bombings and murder of journalists at their headquarters, however much we are
repulsed by their racist, chauvinist and hateful Islamophobic caricatures of
oppressed people. Neither do we condone the subsequent murders at the Paris
Kosher supermarket.
Yes, we are for free speech,
freedom of expression and democratic rights for all, including the Muslim and
antiwar activists who were banned by the French government from street protests
in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, or the Muslim women who are banned from
wearing the veil. We are for freedom of expression and the right to exist of
Muslim Americans, 700,000 of whom have been investigated or interrogated in the
U.S. for being Muslim, or the 1.5 million Latino immigrants in the U.S. who are
imprisoned, detained and deported, or the entire world’s people who are victims
of the all-pervasive high-tech surveillance of everyone’s personal means of
communication by the U.S., France and all other so-called democratic nations.
We will NOT join the Paris
parades orchestrated by imperialist French President Francois Holland and the
heads of state of the world’s “great powers;” nor will we applaud their call for
the worldwide “Anti-terrorist Conference” that President Holland has set for
Paris. We are saddened at the participation of French working people in these
state-sponsored mobilizations, whose objectives are to further war in the Middle
East and Africa and to restrict democracy for Muslim communities in France and
around the world. Those who participate believing that they can advance freedom
of expression, peace and solidarity are being used for opposite
ends.
The war proclaimed by French
Prime Minister Manuel Valls as “… a war against terrorism. Against jihadism.
Against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity,
freedom and solidarity" is, in fact, a war to reestablish and strengthen French
economic hegemony in her former colonies. As Americans we heard this language
from President George Bush when he declared his own “war on terror,” shredded
the U.S. Constitution, imprisoned the innocent en masse and went to war
in Iraq based on the now-exposed false flag lie that the Hussein government
possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”
We don’t march with “leaders”
– including the government of the United States and the Barack Obama
administration – who oversee and direct mass murder and torture. Need we mention
the recent U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report revealing the extent of
U.S.-sponsored torture?
The heads of state of the
world’s past and present colonial conquerors today murder with impunity on every
continent. President Obama is the headmaster of terrorist wars, with six to his
credit since his 2008 election. Need we mention the U.S. drone terror bombings
and overt wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia and Iraq? Every
public poll demonstrates massive majority opposition. Yet the wars continue and
expand everywhere.
France’s largest party, the
neo-fascist National Front of Marine Le Pen, revels in the government-promoted
hate-mongering, thinking its time has come. In the past few days some 50 Muslim
mosques in France have been hit by bullets and explosives and/or tagged with
racist graffiti. In Corsica, a severed pig’s head was mounted on a Muslim prayer
hall. In Sweden a Muslim mosque was firebombed. Racist mobilizations in Germany
denounce the “Islamization of Europe.”
As in the U.S., where Latinos
flee Latin America to escape poverty and persecution stemming from the policies
of U.S.-backed corrupt and murderous regimes, Muslim immigrants flee their
homelands that have been ravaged by the wars and exploitation of foreign
powers.
We hear no imperialist voices
denouncing French troops in Mali. No corporate media voices recalling France’s
Vietnam in Algeria a decade earlier, where one million were slaughtered until
that nation’s war for independence was won. Imperialism’s memory is short, as
with the four million Vietnamese murdered in that ten-year U.S. colonial war. As
social justice and antiwar activists our memory is long. We are not deceived by
yet another imperialist campaign to justify the perpetration of new horrors on
the world’s people.
Neither do we support the
renewed calls for stepped up repressive measures, including billions more for
police and military repression and new laws further restricting civil liberties
and democratic rights.
As U.S. social and political
activists, we are witness to the horror of institutionalized racism, where
Ferguson-type police murder is the norm for most every city – where mass
incarceration of the oppressed ranks first in the world – where repeated police
murder of unarmed Blacks goes unpunished. We march for the victims in Ferguson
and in every city, not for their murderers.
We note the racist parallels
between France and the U.S. The great majority who are locked in U.S. prisons
are Black and Latino. In France up to 60 percent of the prison population are
Muslims.
France, England, the U.S. and
their associates have no standing among human beings who seek justice, peace,
civil and democratic rights and an end to imperialist wars across the globe. We
stand without equivocation with the millions who mobilize against them.
We refused to hail their
slaughter, as with their “humanitarian war” against Libya that was perversely
promoted by their kept media. Tens of thousands of Libyans were murdered while
the corporate “free press” remained silent. The imperialist air and naval forces
that pulverized Libya were employed with impunity, while on the ground
imperialism’s paid jihadists were called into service to “liberate” Tripoli on
the bombed ruins of that nation. They remain today, grotesquely fighting each
other over Libya’s oil and for scraps of “aid” from the various
imperialist-backed oil corporations who are the real “victors.”
Today’s modern-day crusaders
continue to join in the catastrophic destruction of Iraq. Twenty-four years of
saturation bombings, mass murder, starvation sanctions and U.S.-installed
dictators were and continue to be employed in the name of a war against
non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” One and a half million Iraqis have
been slaughtered by imperialist weapons. The slaughter continues – a classic
colonial-era oil war for control of the very fossil fuel resource whose
continued use spells doom for humankind. And yesterday’s U.S. allies in this
venture are today’s “enemies” – at least for now!
The United States, with French
support, has brought about the death and immiseration of hundreds of thousands
of Syrians through its backing, covert and otherwise, of “moderate” and
fundamentalist combatants, the latter mustered with the aid of the allied Gulf
States. The current U.S. bombing of Syrian sites continues the slaughter of
civilians.
We heard no cry of outrage from
the imperialist nations when Mubarak’s military heirs in Egypt, financed, to the
tune of $1.1 billion annually, slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims in a
U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected Mohamed Morsi government. The
30-year Mubarak dictatorship was always a U.S. favorite, as are his successors
today – democratic elections notwithstanding!
We heard no cry of outrage last
year when racist, Zionist Israel once again slaughtered over 2000 Palestinians
in Gaza. Indeed, the U.S. and its imperialist allies remain Israeli’s chief
supporters, granting it the largest “aid” package of any nation to maintain its
world-repudiated historic occupation.
We stand in solidarity with all
victims of imperialist oppression and exploitation everywhere on earth – for
free speech, the right to assembly, democratic rights and the right to be free
from intervention and occupation.
Never with their
oppressors!
Never with their oil
wars!
Never with their police state
measures!
Never with their ceaseless
racist “wars on terror!”
Never with their endless drone
wars, privatized army wars, overt and covert wars, mass detention and torture
wars, embargo, blockade and sanction wars!
End all imperialist wars,
occupations, and interventions!
Self-determination for the
world’s oppressed people and nations!
U.S. and all imperialist powers
Out Now!
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