After humiliating the Zionist regime by liberating themselves from the high-security Gilboa prison, four members of the Freedom Brigade were seized by occupation forces. For five days, they saw Palestine as free people – and they continue to show the world that the only path to liberation is resistance. Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails continue to struggle to resist colonial incarceration and repression.

In the early hours of Saturday, 11 September, occupation forces seized Mohammed Ardah and Zakaria Zubaidi, over five days after they liberated themselves from Gilboa Prison. Earlier that day, they seized Mahmoud Ardah and Yaqoub Qadri. Two liberated prisoners remain free, insisting on their freedom despite an ongoing manhunt by all levels of the Israeli occupation forces. Given the record of the Israeli occupation, we have every reason to believe that the four seized members of the Freedom Brigade will be subjected to severe torture and abuse in an attempt to garner information on the whereabouts of their liberated brothers.

The four are currently being held in the Jalameh interrogation center and are being denied access to their lawyers. Palestinian lawyer Khaled Mahajneh told Quds News that “the occupation intelligence is hiding all information about the prisoners who were arrested, and the court has imposed until now an order to prevent the four prisoners from meeting with their defense lawyers…We have not been able to obtain information about the prisoners’ conditions, nor about their health, physical or psychological state.” All of the Palestinian resistance organizations have issued stern warnings to the Israeli occupation against harming the four heroes of the Freedom Tunnel, while human rights organizations emphasized that the occupation holds full responsibility for their lives.

Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails announced escalating steps of struggle to begin on Friday, 17 September, with groups of the prisoners’ movement leadership entering into hunger strikes, and prisoners collectively refusing to participate in roll call and counting and closing their sections. Over 400 Palestinians held in Gilboa prison have been transferred to other prisons, they have been denied access to the canteen or prison store and denied family and legal visits, all while being subjected to violent searches and attacks including military dogs. In response to these attacks, Palestinian prisoners resisted, burning cells in several prisons.

All of the Palestinian political organizations in the prisons formed an emergency committee to follow up on these steps of struggle, especially following a series of attacks on the prisoners, to end the restrictions on them and stop the ongoing violent invasions of Palestinian prisoners’ cells.

Organizers throughout Palestine and internationally are responding to the call for action from the prisoners, organizing actions and protests in Baqa’a al-Gharbiyeh, Nazareth, Ramallah, Jenin and elsewhere, as well as international solidarity actions in Paris, Frankfurt, Gothenburg, Derry, New York, Vancouver and elsewhere. Youth groups and Palestinian leaders and former prisoners such as Khader Adnan have called for general strikes in support of the prisoners.

The families of the liberated prisoners are also facing ongoing attacks, interrogation and collective punishment. Raddad and Shaddad al-Ardah, the brothers of Mahmoud al-Ardah, Ahmad and Bassam al-Ardah, the brothers of Mohammed al-Ardah, and their relative Nidal al-Ardah, had their detention and interrogation extended by the Israeli Salem military court for another 15 days on 11 September.

**

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network emphasizes and amplifies the call of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement to stand with the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people today to demand justice and liberation for Palestine, from the river to the sea.

The  liberated detainees of Gilboa prison represent the irrepressible hope of and commitment to liberation that no amount of militarized repression and Zionist colonization has suppressed, for over 73 years. The actions of this “Freedom Brigade” are not only a symbol of hope for Palestinians but also for everyone in the world who seeks justice and freedom. The rearrest of four liberated prisoners has done nothing to dim the light of liberation that they represent for humanity or to lessen the blow they have dealt to the mirage of Israeli invincibility and security control. They reflect the unbreakable Palestinian will to live, struggle and thrive in the most seemingly impossible circumstances.

Western imperialist governments are part and parcel of the ongoing attacks against Palestinian prisoners and the colonization of Palestine. From the U.S.’ over $3.8 billion annually in weaponry provided to the Israeli regime to the ongoing economic, political and diplomatic support provided by the European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom and others, all of these states are directly involved in the ongoing crimes perpetuated against the Palestinian people. Everywhere in the world, we can and must act now to stand with the heroes of the Freedom tunnel and all Palestinian prisoners struggling for justice, and for the liberation of Palestine!

Join us in action:

1. Demonstrations, rallies and street actions – including actions to boycott Israel!

Have a protest or action to free Palestinian prisoners, support the Palestinian struggle for liberation, stand with the Palestinian resistance and boycott Israel and its complicit corporations. Join the many protests taking place around the world — confront, isolate and besiege the Israeli embassy or consulate in your city or country of residence. Make it clear that the people are with Palestine and the liberated prisoners! Send us your events at samidoun@samidoun.net.

• 11 September, Frankfurt: Palestine Stand: Free all Palestinian prisoners!
• 11 September, Gothenburg: End the Occupation – Freedom for All Palestinian Prisoners!
• 11 September, Derry, Ireland: Stand with Palestinian Prisoners
• 12 September, NYC: Globalize The Intifada From Attica To Gilboa!
• 17 September, Vancouver: #BoycottPuma and Support Palestinian Prisoners

2. Creative Actions

Creative actions are a wonderful way to spread the word and highlight the struggle of the Palestinian prisoners. The banner hung by Samidoun España in Madrid at the University metro station highlighted the struggle of Palestinian students, while the campaign to symbolically rename streets after Georges Abdallah internationally commemorated his birthday and amplified the demand for his liberation.

These actions only require one, two or a few people. You can even simply poster and sticker around your neighbourhood. Contact us via email at samidoun@samidoun.net or via WhatsApp at +32466904397 if you are looking for image ideas or resources!

3. Demand Your Government Sanction Israel!

The racist, settler colonial state of Israel and its war crimes against the Palestinian people are enabled and backed extensively by the over $3.8 billion each year given to Israel by the United States — targeted directly to support the Israeli occupation military killing children, women, men and elders throughout occupied Palestine. From Canada to Australia to the European Union, Western governments and imperialist powers provide ongoing diplomatic, political and economic support to Israel as well as selling billions of dollars of weaponry to the settler-colonial state. Meanwhile, they also purchase billions of dollars in weaponry from the Israeli state. Governments in league with imperialist powers, such as in the Philippines, Brazil, India and elsewhere, also buy weapons and “security” services — all “battle-tested” on the Palestinian population. Call your representatives, MPs, political officials and demand your government sanction Israel now, cut off all aid, expel its ambassadors, and stop buying and selling weapons!

Please note: Samidoun has speakers that can participate in your events (in-person and virtual) in Arabic, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and other languages. Contact us via email at samidoun@samidoun.net or via WhatsApp at +32466904397 to inquire about a Samidoun speaker!

Submit Your Action

Please contact us via email at samidoun@samidoun.net or via WhatsApp at +32466904397 or over social media to send us your events and actions!

Download these signs for your action:

• Poster/Sign – End Administrative Detention (with Palestinian Flag)
• Zionism is Racism
• Support Palestinian Resistance
• Poster/Sign: Stop G4S – Boycott Zionism
• Poster/Sign: Free Hunger Strikers and All Prisoners
• Poster/Sign – Free All Palestinian Prisoners

Source: Samidoun

After 131 years of lording it over Richmond, Va., and much of the country, the towering statue of slavery-defending Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee has finally been removed from his perch, to the cheers of a jubilant crowd pumped up by the Black worker who had just cut through the bolts holding the 21-foot statue to its 40-foot base. 

The statue itself was cut into its original two pieces, loaded onto a truck and carted off to a state-owned facility for storage. (Fittingly, Richmond used a city sewer facility to accommodate the statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B Stewart and Confederate Admiral Matthew Maury. 

Despite sad attempts by local and state politicians to claim credit for this victory over a leading symbol of white supremacy, it is important to remember that it was a long, deliberate and growing movement of anti-racist, grassroots activists that finally forced the state of Virginia — which has owned the statue since its unveiling in 1890 — to agree to take it down.

Richmond’s Black community has always despised the statues honoring the slavery-defending traitors on Richmond’s famed Monument Avenue. Many people have spoken about how they deliberately avoided driving or walking down that high-end real estate boulevard because of the terrible feelings it evoked in them.

But, until very, very recently, Virginia’s state government has had no such feelings. Way back in 2007, the state spent $450,000 to try and clean the statue, in preparation for the wide range of activities marking the 200th anniversary of Lee’s birth. On the actual anniversary, Jan. 19, the Virginia State Conference NAACP and the Virginia Defenders held a press conference at the statue to denounce the state’s wasting money on a statue that can never be cleansed of its arrogant racism.

In 2015, the Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality led a community campaign to demand the organizers of the prestigious UCI World Championships bicycle race change the race’s course from Monument Avenue. Three of the race’s organizing committee co-chairmen responded to media inquiries about the demand. “This is our heritage. This is who we are,” said then-and-now-aspiring Gov. Terry McAuliff, a Democrat born in Syracuse, N.Y.

Two of the other three co-chairmen, then-Mayor Dwight Jones (Philadelphia) and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (Indianapolis) made similar comments. Not responding to the demand was Thomas F. Farrell II, then the CEO of political powerhouse Dominion Energy, who in 2014 had produced the pro-Confederate movie “Field of Lost Shoes.”

The issue of honoring Confederate symbols came to the fore after a Confederate fan and white-supremacist murdered nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015.

Then came the deadly confrontation between white supremacists and anti-racists in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, centered around the Lee statue in that university town.

Within weeks, neo-Confederate groups began coming to Richmond to “defend” the statues of Lee, Davis, Jackson, Stuart and Maury. And each time they showed up, local anti-racists, including the Defenders, were there to confront them.

Meanwhile, a statewide effort called Monumental Justice, initiated by Charlottesville activists, was demanding a change in the state law that forbade the removal of “war memorials,” as the Confederate statues were officially known.

Then came the horrific police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an event that proved to be the tipping point in the long-smoldering mass rage over police abuse in the United States. Millions of people took to the streets in massive protests that lasted some 100 days. In Richmond, the movement formulated seven demands, which included taking down the Confederate monuments — which had been gloriously tagged on the second night of the protests during a march of thousands down Monument Avenue.

Later, the statue of Davis was torn down by protesters, along with a statue of Christopher Columbus and a statue dedicated to police officers, both in Byrd Park, named after one of Richmond’s earliest slave owners.

After a change that February in the state law allowing the removal of the statues, it was the mass and militant anti-racist protests that finally moved local officials to take down the city-owned statues on Monument Avenue. Lawsuits by pro-Confederates and Monument Avenue property owners and a resulting injunction delaying the removal of Lee were finally rejected just last week by the Virginia Supreme Court.

And so it came to pass that today, Sept. 8, 2021, a Black worker cut through the bolts holding Lee to his pedestal, and the statue finally came down.

It was back in 1890 that ”Fighting Editor” John Mitchell Jr. of the Richmond Planet wrote about the Lee statue going up, clearly explaining that it was meant to announce that the old white oligarchy was firmly back in charge and that Black folks had better accept that, or else.

Referring to the Black workers who actually did the manual labor of erecting the statue, Mitchell wrote, “He put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, he’ll be there to take it down.”

And he was.

Yes, it’s a symbolic change, but it represents a real shift in the balance of power between the white supremacists in state government and the growing mass movement against white supremacy. We must now seize this moment to strengthen and expand the ongoing struggles against evictions, gentrification, inadequate schools, poor housing, low-wage jobs — and the obscene military budget that drains our tax coffers of the money needed to address all these problems.

Further, the struggle to take down the Confederate monuments has always run parallel with the now-more-than-20-year struggle to reclaim and properly memorialize Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom district, once the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade. That campaign is now at a critical juncture, with the City finally agreeing to the Defenders’ community-generated proposal for a Shockoe Bottom Memorial Park, but with questions remaining about how that development will concretely benefit the Black community.

The struggle continues.

Signed:

The Steering Committee of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality

Ana Edwards – Chair, Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project

Joseph S. H. Rogers – Public Historian

Phil Wilayto – Editor, The Virginia Defender

Sept. 8, 2021

Source: The Virginia Defender

Sunday, September 12, 2021

Online Event
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Rw6fZv1rRp2pUNcKnXuycA

Webinar discussion & film showing
Eyewitness Hurricane Ida:
Capitalist climate crisis, Peoples Emergency – Fighting back
Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Rw6fZv1rRp2pUNcKnXuycA

Hear eyewitnesses from LA & NOLA
See film “Trouble the Water”

Including a special interview with Tom Soto, Prisoners Solidarity Committee observer. 

On Sept. 9, 1971, approximately 1,500 prisoners in Cell Block D seized the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, after submitting a 27-point manifesto to the prison administration in an attempt to address the torturous conditions inside the prison.

At the time of the uprising, 2,300 prisoners were sandwiched into a prison built for barely 1,600 people. White supremacy behind the walls was evident everywhere, from how prisoners were housed to brutal work assignments. 

Prisoners were allowed one shower per week and one roll of toilet paper a month. They labored for five hours a day and were paid between 20 cents and $1 for the entire day. For 14 to 16 hours, they were locked in tiny 6-foot by 9-foot cells.

A revolutionary mood

It is critical to understand the broader historical context in which this rebellion took place. How could people who were so beaten down, whose lives hung in the balance at the whim of a guard, take such heroic action?

Outside of the jails and also inside many prisons, a battle was raging for the national liberation of Black, Puerto Rican, Indigenous and Chicanx people. A new revolutionary mood was sweeping the country to end all kinds of oppression. 

Millions of people were protesting the Vietnam War. The women’s liberation movement was beginning to blossom. The Stonewall Rebellion had sparked a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two Spirit (LGBTQ2S) liberation movement. Just two years later, the occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement (AIM) took place. 

The McKay Commission (New York State Special Commission on Attica) later commented: “With the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.” 

Organizing behind the walls

Serious organizing was going on inside Attica prior to the rebellion. Many of the groups outside the prison were reflected inside, including the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters. Many had study groups. The Attica Liberation Faction developed in this period.    

In July 1971, the Attica Liberation Faction presented a list of 27 demands to Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. This list of demands was based on the Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto crafted by Chicanx prisoner Martin Sousa in support of a November 1970 prisoner strike in California. (For more background, see Project NIA.)

Then, on Aug. 21, 1971, Black Panther leader George Jackson was gunned down by racist guards in California’s San Quentin prison. Prisoners all across the country, including several hundred in Attica, went on hunger strikes. The assassination of George Jackson became the glue that allowed the Attica prisoners to unite across religions, nationalities and political factions.

The prisoners’ Paris Commune

On Sept. 9, Attica prisoners seized the facility. They took corrections officers hostage to ensure that their protest would be heard, since they had received no response to their manifesto from the corrections commissioner or governor.

While the events that took place on Sept. 9 were spontaneous and began as a clash between guards and prisoners, the level of organizing and what became a full-scale uprising were the result of the revolutionary leadership and consciousness that had grown during this period.

What’s remarkable is the high degree of organization and discipline of the thousands of prisoners who took part. They elected a central committee, which rotated chairpeople; they organized a 33-person observers’ committee, which included not only attorney William Kunstler, Black Panther Bobby Seale, New York State Assemblymember Arthur O. Eve, and representatives of the Young Lords, but also Tom Soto of the Prisoners Solidarity Committee. 

Demands were continually being developed. A major one was amnesty for all prisoners.

Countless photos show the rows of tents, preparatory ditches and many of the other measures the prisoners organized. They voted on demands and rationed food and water for survival. During the entire occupation, the 40 hostages were treated humanely.  

The concrete demands that developed during the insurrection included all aspects of survival in the prison, including health, food, ending solitary confinement, the right to visitation and a list of labor rights, including the right to a union and an end to exploitation.

The first time the working class took power into its own hands was the insurrection known as the Paris Commune of 1871. The communards canceled rents, recognized women’s rights, abolished child labor, took over workplaces and set up their own form of government. The commune served as a historical example to many revolutionary socialists of the potential for a workers’ state. It was ultimately put down in blood, but the lessons remain.

A century later, on Sept. 13, 1971, Gov. Rockefeller ordered the storming of Attica prison. With helicopters flying overhead, close to 1,000 state troopers, national guard troops and prison guards fired into the yard, killing 39 people and wounding 85 in what can only be described as a massacre. This took place in just 15 minutes.

Many of those wounded received no medical care. The prisoners had no guns or bullets to defend themselves.

The press screamed that the 10 captive guards who died had their throats slit. But autopsies showed that all 10 had been shot to death by Rockefeller’s storm troopers. 

What happened in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter is too painful to fully describe.  Prisoners were stripped naked, beaten, made to run through gauntlets of guards and brutally tortured. Guards stormed into the yard chanting “white power.”

A battle cry for liberation 

Nevertheless, the Attica uprising and the massacre stirred prisoners everywhere. It’s estimated that 200,000 prisoners protested and held strikes in its aftermath. The number of prison rebellions doubled. 

It continues to serve as a beacon today for those fighting against racism and mass incarceration and for workers’ rights everywhere.

Video: Tom Soto, Prisoners Solidarity Committee observer, speaks

On Aug. 26, a suicide bomb was detonated at the airport in Kabul amid the chaos of the U.S. troop withdrawal. Two hundred people were killed, including 13 U.S. soldiers. Reporters paid tribute to the U.S. troops that died, but barely mentioned the deaths of up to 170 Afghan people in the same attack. 

Then, ostensibly in response to the attack that ISIS-K took credit for, the Biden White House ordered two successive drone strikes. The second U.S. drone strike killed 10 people, most of them children. None of them were terrorists. 

The dismissal of Afghan deaths typifies and speaks volumes about the character and the true goals of the 20-year war.

The deaths of innocents shouldn’t come as a surprise. The war was justified by lies about elevating the lives of the Afghan people, or promoting the rights and safety of women and girls. 

Inching closer to the truth, speaking at the Virginia Military Institute in 2002, President George W. Bush reversed his campaign assertions that he was against “nation-building,” an imperialist euphemism for installing a government that would be compliant to the needs of U.S. imperialism. “After 9/11, I changed my mind,” he said.

But “nation-building” or protecting the rights of Afghan women and girls could never have been achieved and could not have been the goal of the warmakers as they bombed and shot and shredded any hope of peace or progress for the Afghan people. 

The remainder of the war — even after the 2011 capture and execution of Osama Bin Laden — was just continuous widespread destruction and mass murder being meted out by the U.S. military and all its paid mercenaries.

U.S. troops open fire at airport

On Sept. 1, Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, called for a full investigation of U.S. war crimes during the 20-year war and occupation. He referred to the accounts of survivors of the Aug. 26 bombing at the Kabul airport who said that U.S. troops opened fire on the crowd after the blast. 

An article in Xinhua quotes a military officer who said only 20 of the 100 bodies examined were killed by the suicide bomb blast. The others were killed by gunfire. The article gives more detail and raises serious doubts about how the horrible event was reported by the Pentagon and U.S. media. 

Wang also referred to other massacres by the U.S. and NATO forces.

The history of the war is checkered with reports of U.S. massacres. There was a wedding banquet bombed in 2002, killing dozens and injuring at least 100. In 2008, a U.S. aircraft bombed a village in Herat, killing 100 — including 50 children and 19 women. 

In March 2012, a U.S. Army staff sergeant was arrested for going house to house murdering 16 people. Members of Afghanistan’s pro-U.S. National Assembly alleged that up to 20 U.S. soldiers had been involved. Exercising U.S. extraterritoriality, the Pentagon was in charge of the trial, and it was handled as the act of one individual.

Afghanistan is the most “droned” country in the world. Since 2015, there have been 13,072 confirmed U.S. drone strikes that have killed up to 10,076 people and injured up to 1,769, according to the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Another whistleblower jailed

In March of this year, former Air Force intelligence officer Daniel Hales was sentenced to 4 years in prison for leaking U.S. military documents which revealed that during a 4-year stretch, 90% of deaths from drone strikes in Afghanistan were of people who were not the intended targets. 

The papers were leaked in 2013, meaning that Pentagon and White House officials have known that drone strikes are mass murder and continued using them in Afghanistan for at least eight more years.

The war had transitioned into mainly drone strikes in later years. But combined with bombs from piloted aircraft and thousands of special forces raids aided by friendly forces on the ground or nearby, more than 70,000 Afghan civilians and an equal number of armed combatants perished. 

A center for the detention and torture of Afghan “terror suspects” — similar to Abu Ghraib in Iraq — functioned throughout the war at Bagram Air Force Base. As the U.S. withdrawal commenced, that center was burned and destroyed by its functionaries.

Although the “boots on the ground” phase of the imperialist effort has been defeated, every indication is that the imperialist drive to destroy any resistance in Afghanistan will continue. 

Given the possibility of China, Russia and/or Iran helping to rebuild Afghanistan, the U.S. has frozen $9.5 billion of Afghanistan’s money, held by the U.S. Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund. 

Another $1.3 billion is held in international accounts in euros and British pounds and subject to the “long reach of American sanctions and influence,” according to the Aug. 18 New York Times. Access to another $12 billion in aid that had been agreed on by 60 countries is also now blocked.

On Aug. 31, in Biden’s speech about the withdrawal, he asserted — as his administration has in the recent past — the right of the U.S. to continue using drones to wage war in Afghanistan. He said, “We have what’s called Over The Horizon [OTH] capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground, or very few if needed.”

The people of Afghanistan will find a way to regroup and rebuild. Abolishing the Pentagon, the CIA and all the U.S. agencies of death and destruction has to be the mission of the anti-imperialist movement.

Six Palestinians jailed by the Israeli occupation liberated themselves through a tunnel dug beneath Gilboa prison in the early morning hours of Monday, 6 September. The six liberated prisoners – Mahmoud Abdullah Ardah, Mohammed Qasim Ardah, Ayham Fouad Kamamji, Yaqoub Mahmoud Qadri, Zakaria al-Zubaidi and Munadil Yaqoub Infaat – have remained free despite the desperate attempts of Israeli occupation jailers to pursue them. However, occupation guards have been forcibly transferring, attacking and invading prisoners’ cells throughout Palestine while dragging the freed men’s family members to interrogation. There is an uprising inside the prisons that requires the support of all people around the world who stand with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation – join us in taking action!

In Megiddo prison, Ramon prison, and the Negev desert prison, Palestinian political prisoners burned their rooms in resistance to the prison administration’s attempt to transfer the prisoners affiliated with Islamic Jihad. The Handala Center for Prisoners and Former Prisoners in occupied Palestine reported that 7 rooms in Megiddo prison, 4 rooms in the Negev prison and 4 rooms in sections 4 and 5 of Ramon prison have been burned, and that the prisoners’ movement leadership has affirmed that any section that is invaded to transfer detainees will be met with fire.

Palestinians throughout occupied Palestine are rallying in support of the six self-liberated prisoners, whose “Freedom Tunnel,” dug through lengthy months of perseverance with only kitchen utensils for tools, has become a symbol of hope for freedom as well as an example that the technological and military might of the Israeli colonial power has been unable to suppress Palestinian resistance. The tunnel, stretching for tens of meters below Gilboa prison, represents the unquenchable thirst for liberation of imprisoned Palestinians, and the hope of an undying love of freedom. In Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus, al-Khalil, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Tulkarem, Gaza City, Jabalya camp and elsewhere, organizers are taking to the streets to stand with the liberated prisoners and those resisting behind the walls.

The uprising inside prisons was launched after an attack on the Palestinians detained in the Negev desert prison. Occupation special units stormed Section 6 with weaponry and police dogs, including military forces from a nearby base, prompting the prisoners to burn 7 rooms and resist the invasion. As all of this continues, there are six administrative detainees, jailed without charge or trial, who are continuing their hunger strikes for freedom: Kayed al-Fasfous (for 56 days), Miqdad Qawasmeh (49 days), Alaa al-Araj (31 days), Hisham Abu Hawash (23 days), Raik Sadeq Bisharat (18 days) and Shadi Abu Aker (15 days).

Palestinian political parties and resistance organizations have emphasized the urgent need for action to defend the prisoners and demand their liberation. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine urged Palestinians and their allies everywhere to respond to the call of the prisoners with actions, demonstrations and protests of support.

There are currently 4,650 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including 520 jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention, 40 women prisoners and 200 child prisoners. Political imprisonment affects all sectors of Palestinian society, and nearly 40% of Palestinian men in the West Bank and Jerusalem have spent time in Israeli detention.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network emphasizes and amplifies the call of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement to stand with the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people today to demand justice and liberation for Palestine, from the river to the sea. The six liberated detainees of Gilboa prison represent the irrepressible hope of and commitment to liberation that no amount of militarized repression and Zionist colonization has suppressed, for over 73 years. The actions of this “Freedom Brigade” are not only a symbol of hope for Palestinians but also for everyone in the world who seeks justice and freedom. Inside the prison walls, Palestinian prisoners continue to defend themselves against ongoing invasions and attacks.

Western imperialist governments are not innocent in the ongoing attacks against Palestinian prisoners and the colonization of Palestine. From the U.S.’ over $3.8 billion annually in weaponry provided to the Israeli regime to the ongoing economic, political and diplomatic support provided by the European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom and others, all of these states are directly involved in the ongoing crimes perpetuated against the Palestinian people. Everywhere in the world, we can and must act now to stand with the Palestinian prisoners and their uprising, and for the liberation of Palestine!

Join us in action:

1. Demonstrations, rallies and street actions – including actions to boycott Israel!

Have a protest or action to free Palestinian prisoners, support the Palestinian struggle for liberation, stand with the Palestinian resistance and boycott Israel and its complicit corporations. Join the many protests taking place around the world — confront, isolate and besiege the Israeli embassy or consulate in your city or country of residence. Make it clear that the people are with Palestine and the liberated prisoners! Send us your events at samidoun@samidoun.net.

2. Creative Actions

Creative actions are a wonderful way to spread the word and highlight the struggle of the Palestinian prisoners. The banner hung by Samidoun España in Madrid at the University metro station highlighted the struggle of Palestinian students, while the campaign to symbolically rename streets after Georges Abdallah internationally commemorated his birthday and amplified the demand for his liberation.

These actions only require one, two or a few people. You can even simply poster and sticker around your neighbourhood. Contact us via email at samidoun@samidoun.net or via WhatsApp at +32466904397 if you are looking for image ideas or resources! 

3. Demand Your Government Sanction Israel!

The racist, settler colonial state of Israel and its war crimes against the Palestinian people are enabled and backed extensively by the over $3.8 billion each year given to Israel by the United States — targeted directly to support the Israeli occupation military killing children, women, men and elders throughout occupied Palestine. From Canada to Australia to the European Union, Western governments and imperialist powers provide ongoing diplomatic, political and economic support to Israel as well as selling billions of dollars of weaponry to the settler-colonial state. Meanwhile, they also purchase billions of dollars in weaponry from the Israeli state. Governments in league with imperialist powers, such as in the Philippines, Brazil, India and elsewhere, also buy weapons and “security” services — all “battle-tested” on the Palestinian population. Call your representatives, MPs, political officials and demand your government sanction Israel now, cut off all aid, expel its ambassadors, and stop buying and selling weapons!

Please note: Samidoun has speakers that can participate in your events (in-person and virtual) in Arabic, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and other languages. Contact us via email at samidoun@samidoun.net or via WhatsApp at +32466904397 to inquire about a Samidoun speaker! 

Submit Your Action

Please contact us via email at samidoun@samidoun.net or via WhatsApp at +32466904397 or over social media to send us your events and actions!

Download these signs for your action:

• Poster/Sign – End Administrative Detention (with Palestinian Flag)
• Zionism is Racism
• Support Palestinian Resistance
• Poster/Sign: Stop G4S – Boycott Zionism
• Poster/Sign: Free Hunger Strikers and All Prisoners
• Poster/Sign – Free All Palestinian Prisoners

Statement from Women In Struggle / Mujeres En Lucha and the Socialist Unity Party 

Texas Senate Bill 8, which took effect Sept. 1, bans abortion after six weeks, before many women are even aware that they are pregnant.  

Anyone who sues an abortion provider under this law will be awarded a $10,000 bounty.  Texas Right to Life has already set up a “whistleblower” website where people can give anonymous tips about who might be violating the law.

In upholding SB8, the U.S. Supreme Court basically approved the notion that vigilantes can track down women and their “abettors.”

There are no exceptions for rape, incest or diagnoses of fetal anomaly. 

Who will be most impacted?  

It is Black, Brown and Indigenous women, the poor and youth, those who rely on reproductive rights centers for health care, including contraception, general checkups and cancer screenings. SB8 will effectively shut down care for transgender people, who will no longer be able to access needed hormone replacement therapy.  

Many women will be forced to flee to other states just to obtain the basic right to control one’s own body.  But even this will not be possible for many poor, working-class and very young women who will be forced to risk their lives or health in back-alley abortions.

The same reactionary forces behind SB8, and those who did nothing to prevent it, care little about children and less about all women, regardless of who they love or their gender identity, including transgender women.  

A box full of diapers and a car seat is of little help when families are facing joblessness and homelessness.  Where is the fight to stop unemployment benefits from being cut?  Where is the moratorium and cancellation of rents, foreclosures and utility shut-offs?  

Where is the fight to stop forced sterilizations of poor and oppressed women from Puerto Rico to Mississippi, or the fight to make sure that all children — and every person — have free healthcare, or paid maternity leave for working families?  

What about the lack of affordable, safe daycare that has forced women and parents of all genders out of the workplace? 

The importance of Texas

Many reproductive-rights advocates have already pointed out that SB8 and the Supreme Court’s ruling will give impetus to similar measures in other states. This is certainly true.

But Texas itself is important.  

It is the third-most populous state, after California and Florida. Twenty-nine million people are impacted. And SB8 is not the only right-wing bill that has swept the state.  

Exactly 666 new reactionary laws went into effect Sept. 1.  It is now basically illegal to be homeless, as a statewide ban on homeless encampments precludes any locality from opting out and fines the homeless $500 (for being homeless).  

Teachers are now forbidden to tell the truth about slavery. A new law provides funding for the so-called “1836 Project” that is set against the 1619 Project and projects a “patriotic education” about Texas’s racist “war of independence” from Mexico.   

Cities with over 250,000 people will be punished for defunding police budgets, effectively giving the green light to police murders of Black, Brown and poor people. 

And what about the basic right to vote that is still being denied to Black and Brown people?

Don’t mourn — organize and hit the streets!

Women in Argentina and all over Latin America, in Ireland, Poland and so many other countries, have shown the way by taking to the streets in the millions, forcing change.  

We need a “green bandana” movement in the U.S. like the one in Latin America. We must organize to stop every reactionary, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and anti-working class attack.  

From capitalist climate change to racist police terror, from imperialist war to attacks on workers’ rights — we cannot wait for or depend on the Democratic Party.  What is needed is in-your-face, independent action to push the clock forward.  

We need car caravans, people’s blockades and resistance to defend clinics. It’s time to march on Texas and the Supreme Court!

We will not go back!  

Healthcare and childcare, maternity leave, food, work and shelter, along with the basic ability to control one’s body — all of these are basic human rights.  

Black and Brown women must be guaranteed the right to walk out of their houses without fear that police will shoot them down, or murder their children or loved ones in the street. Trans and queer women must have the right to exist without fear of violence and bigotry.  

Im/migrant women, children and families need to be released from cages. So must the many women rotting behind bars in the colossal U.S. prison system. 

Indigenous women and communites must be guaranteed the right to their land and an end to violence and murder. 

Our children have the right to live on a planet that is not destroyed by capitalist climate change, imperialist war, occupation and sanctions.  

We pledge ourselves to this fight so that all women and all workers, at home and abroad, can finally be free from capitalist and imperialist misery.

Women and oppressed genders unite and fight back! We have nothing to lose but our chains!

While the dictatorship of the Fiscal Control Board (“la Junta”) imposed by the U.S. Congress and its lackeys in the local government do everything to destroy Puerto Rico as a nation and sink us into poverty and despair, the people continue to organize and fight on many fronts.

It is already clear that the administration of Governor Pedro Pierluisi will not favor the people at all. Both he and his sister Caridad, whom he took to reside in La Fortaleza to help him govern without being elected by the people, have as a priority to privatize any publicly-owned agency that remains.

But in their arrogance, they do not count on the fact that the people are already tired of the abuse due to poor health services, energy, education, housing, public safety, etc., in addition to the terrible increase in the cost of living and basic food items.

There are struggles everywhere, including entire communities against telecommunications antennas, against construction in land-based maritime zones, for the defense of education, by trade unions. But now the most urgent is the fight against the terrible energy privatization company Luma because there is already a lot of indignation over the incessant blackouts across the country.

There are several demonstrations scheduled in the coming days against both Luma and the Fiscal Control Board.

The fight is uphill, but progress continues. Down with Luma and the dictatorship of the Junta and its government lackeys!

From Puerto Rico for RADIO CLARIN of Colombia, this is Berta Joubert-Ceci.

Twenty-five workers were killed on Sept. 3, 1991, when a fire broke out at the Imperial Foods chicken plant in Hamlet, N.C. Workers choked to death from heavy black smoke after a deep-fat fryer ignited. Eighteen of the dead were women.

Another 54 workers were injured. Forty-nine children were orphaned.

Disability benefits for survivors were pitiful. The payments were just two-thirds of their average pay, which was around $5 per hour.

None of the workers had to die. The processing plant had neither an operating sprinkler system nor an evacuation plan. 

Bodies were found next to doors with footprints from workers trying to escape. The doors were ordered locked by the plant’s owner, Emmett J. Rowe.

The chicken nugget capitalist did so because he thought workers, many of whom were Black, would steal chickens. White and Black workers died together because of Rowe’s racism.

In its 11 years of operation, the plant never had a safety inspection. Rowe didn’t even register the plant with the state. 

Even if he had, the workers might not have seen an inspector. Like half the states, North Carolina is allowed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to run its own inspection program. North Carolina has 10.5 million people but less than a hundred safety inspectors. 

OSHA isn’t any better staffed. It currently has just 1,850 inspectors in the United States. That’s one inspector for every 82,513 employed workers.

Defunding trigger-happy, club-swinging, chokehold-using police is denounced by both Trump and Biden. OSHA has been defunded since the day it was established 50 years ago.

Yet dead chickens at the Hamlet plant were inspected every day by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One USDA inspector even approved locking a door — a violation of federal and state laws — to supposedly keep out flies. 

Nobody wants filthy food, but shouldn’t human lives be given as much consideration as chicken parts? Despite a 1994 agreement to report dangerous conditions to OSHA , there’s no record that the USDA has ever done so, according to “The Assembly” digital magazine.  

Rich man’s justice

It was only because of a community mobilization that Rowe was given any jail time at all. Playing key roles were the Black Workers for Justice in North Carolina and Brenda Stokely, former president of AFSCME Local 1707 in New York City.

Serial murderer Rowe was sentenced to 19 years, 11 months in prison. He served almost four years. That’s less than two months for every worker he murdered.

Compare that to Alvin Kinnard’s sentence. Before being released in 2019, the Black man spent nearly 36 years in Alabama prisons for allegedly robbing $50 from a bakery. 

Emmett Rowe began his criminal career up North. He opened Imperial Foods in Moosic, Pa. — near Scranton — in 1973.

The plant had two fires, injuring several workers, including one critically. It was sued for polluting water.

Just as northern textile mills went south in the 1920s so the companies could pay lower wages, so did Emmett Rowe. 

Besides his Hamlet factory, Rowe bought the Haverpride Foods plant in Tarrant, Ala., in 1988. He closed it in 1990 without giving the employees 60 days notice, as required by federal law.

More than $250,000 in severance pay was ordered to be paid to 115 workers by a federal judge. Rowe never paid a penny.

Rowe’s co-conspirators in these crimes were the fast-food outfits that bought his chicken fillets and nuggets. They rip off millions of workers, and not just at their drive-throughs.

Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor is pulling in $7,213,774 this year. Meanwhile the farmworkers who pick the tomatoes for Wendy’s hamburgers are ill-treated and miserably paid. 

Job cuts kill

Hamlet was an important junction on the old Seaboard Air Line railroad, now part of the CSX system. (The term “air line” referred to the railroad’s claim of a straight route.) Two Amtrak trains a day stop there.

Trains coming south from Virginia could go to four different directions from Seaboard’s Hamlet hub. These included lines to Florida, Alabama and Georgia. 

The line to Atlanta and Birmingham went through Monroe, N.C., where Mabel and Robert Williams organized armed self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan. They faced phony kidnapping charges but were able to escape to the socialist countries of Cuba and the People’s Republic of China.

Last year hundreds of workers tested positive for the coronavirus at Tyson’s poultry plant in Monroe. At least one worker died of it. 

The company forced workers to come in even if they were sick. Tyson’s management should be put in jail, too. 

Hamlet still has a large railroad yard. Why didn’t some of the workers at Emmett Rowe’s deathtrap try to get a job there?

While railroads are more profitable than ever, the number of railroad workers has shrunk from 1.5 million in 1947 to around 143,000 today. That’s over 1.3 million jobs destroyed — a 90 percent drop.

What made these job cuts more heartbreaking was that Black and women workers were finally being hired in many railroad jobs.

This took decades of struggle. Charles Hamilton Houston, who mentored Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, repeatedly went to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight discrimination on the railroads.

Instead of union railroad jobs, International Tie Disposal wants to build a plant next to CSX’s Hamlet yard to dispose of old railroad ties. The facility will emit harmful air emissions near a poor community. That’s called toxic racism.

Never forget the workers in Hamlet who died because of greed. Capitalism kills.