Thursday, October 12 at 5 p.m.
LOS ANGELES SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE! END THE OCCUPATION NOW!
Martin Luther King Blvd and Figueroa

Event by Union del Barrio – Los Angeles and Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice – L.A.

Join this emergency action to demonstrate our solidarity with the Palestinan people and their struggle against Israeli occupation of their land!

LOCATION: Martin Luther King Blvd and Figueroa (next to BMO Stadium)

This event is NOT an anti-Semetic event! It is in solidarity w the people of Palestine and against the occupation of their lands by the state of Israel.

This event is being organized and endorsed by Union del Barrio, Socialist Unity Party, Black Alliance for Peace, Jews for Palestinian Right to Return, Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, Association of Raza Educators, LA4PALESTINE and many more!

If your organization would like to endorse this action please contact us!

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has rejected accusations of targeting civilians.

Fighting raged across the occupied territories since the resistance groups launched Operation Al-Aqsa Storm on Oct. 7.

Osama Hamadan, senior spokesperson of Hamas, has told Al Jazeera that they are not attacking civilians.

“You have to differentiate between settlers and civilians; settlers attacked Palestinians,” Hamdan said.

“We are not targeting civilians on purpose. We have declared settlers are part of the occupation and part of the armed Israeli force. They are not civilians,” Hamadan added.

His remarks came after a number of Western-backed rights groups, including Amnesty International, accused the resistance movement of killing “Israeli civilians” in their retaliatory strikes.

Asked whether civilians in southern Israel were considered settlers, the Hamas spokesman said, “Everyone knows there are settlements there.”

On Saturday, the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement launched its large-scale operation,  with a heavy barrage of rockets in response to Israel’s desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and increased settler violence.

At least 400 Israeli settlers and forces have died as a result of the large-scale operation — code-named Al-Aqsa Storm — and more than 2000 others have sustained injuries.

Following the operation, a spokesperson for the Israeli defense forces confirmed that Israeli settlers and soldiers are held captive in Gaza. However, the spokesperson declined to specify the number of hostages.

According to Israeli media outlets, unofficial estimates suggest that approximately 750 Israeli soldiers and settlers have been missing since fighting broke out.

Hospital officials in the Gaza Strip have recorded the death of 320 Palestinians and the injury of 1,990 others. A large number of buildings, homes, and public facilities have also been badly damaged due to heavy Israeli bombardments.

The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said on its Telegram channel that the group had directed a “major missile strike on the settlement of Sderot with 100 missiles.”

The Qassam Brigades also called on Palestinians  “to join this battle” as fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters continues.

Meanwhile, Mohannad Aklouk, Palestine’s permanent representative to the Arab League, said he had submitted a request for an emergency meeting of the regional body’s foreign ministers in the wake of the latest Israeli onslaught.

“The urgent meeting comes in light of the ongoing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, including the escalation of incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by thousands of settlers and Israeli officials over the past days,” Aklouk was quoted as saying by the official Wafa news agency.

The retaliatory operation by Hamas on the occupied territories is the largest after the 11-day Israeli war against the Gaza Strip in May 2021, which took place after weeks of violence against Palestinians in Al-Quds and a brutal crackdown on worshipers at the al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as attempts to steal their land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

At least 260 Palestinians, including over 60 children, were killed during the Israeli offensive as the Gaza-based resistance movements retaliated. The regime was eventually forced to announce a ceasefire brokered by Egypt.

Source: Orinoco Tribune

Millions of migrants have braved incredible hardship to find shelter and jobs in the U.S. Many have fled U.S. supported repressive regimes. Hundreds of thousands of others have left their countries that have been targeted by U.S. Imperialism’s economic war of sanctions.

Crossing the U.S. border, migrants face deadly obstacles, including barbed wire fences and pontoons designed to injure and drown any who might try to swim across the Rio Grande River.

As the surge of new migrants unfolded in July and has increased daily, some have found welcoming demonstrations and assistance in communities on their arrival. But many have faced open hostility by both politicians as well as racist vigilante groups, reinforced by the Trumpist Republican Party, with assenting silence from the leadership of the Democratic Party. Cities like New York and Chicago face a growing humanitarian crisis as they try to care for growing migrant populations.

The U.S. corporate media here universally blames “mismanagement” and “corruption” by the socialist Venezuelan government for that country’s economic crisis. But a paper by distinguished Professor Francisco Rodríguez at the Center for Economic and Policy Research exposes this as a lie designed to hide the cruelty of the Imperialist sanctions:

Each round of sanctions (2017 financial, 2019 primary oil, and 2020 secondary oil) was followed by a decline in Venezuelan oil production, which, as measured by independent agencies, had been stable for an eight-year period starting in 2008.

The resulting decline in oil exports severely circumscribed the ability of a traditionally import dependent economy to buy imports of food as well as intermediate and capital goods for its agricultural sector, driving the economy into a major humanitarian crisis. Total imports fell by 91 percent, while food imports declined by 78 percent. The decline in the economy’s capacity to import made it impossible to maintain past levels of essential goods. Even if Venezuela were importing only food today (i.e., if it had decided to reduce to zero all other imports, including other essentials as well as capital and intermediate goods for its oil industry) it would not be able to pay for more than four-fifths of the food it imported in 2012.

Venezuela’s deep deterioration in indicators of health, nutrition, and food security occurred alongside the largest economic collapse, outside of wartime, since 1950.

By contributing to lowering the country’s oil production, sanctions also contributed to lowering per capita income and living standards and are a key driver of the country’s health crisis, including its increase in child and adult mortality.

Most of the Venezuelan migrants have been forced to traverse the infamous “Darién Gap”, a strip of land on the border between Colombia and Panama. PBS reported that 400,000 people, mostly from Venezuela, have already passed through this trail already this year, including many children. There is no count on how many failed to survive this journey.

On the website truthout.org, Amy Goodman interviewed leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who described this dangerous journey:

Three years ago, nobody was going through the Darién Gap. This year, it might end up being as many as half a million. And given the flow, which is 3,000 persons a day, next year could be a total of 1 million people going through the Darién Gap. After going through the Darién Gap, the figure is doubled, going through Central America and Mexico. And then, about 2 million people reach the United States each year trying to get in.

It’s an exodus. It’s an exodus that Colombia was not familiar with before. And it goes through the most inhospitable jungle worldwide. Not even the old guerrilla forces in Colombia had used that region as part of their geography, because it is just so inhospitable. Recall the difficulties that engineering faced when it came to building the Panama Canal, so many workers who died at that time. Well, here it’s even worse, because this is a jungle which is very biodiverse but at the same time is very inhospitable for human beings, and so no one would go through there. And now we’re approaching a million people, most of them children, older people, women.

In that same interview, President Petro put the blame for this mass migration squarely on the harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., particularly by the Trump regime and stepped up by the Buden administration:

That is to say, the blockade against Venezuela has had a boomerang-type response, now hitting the very United States, which are the ones who decided to impose the blockade. So, knocking at their door is the population that they drove into poverty.

Venezuela is a rich country. They have an endless amount of oil and gas, and Venezuela’s population was relatively stable, whatever the regime, whether it was under Chávez or what they call el Punto Fijo [this refers to the U.S.-supported military dictatorships that ruled Venezuela until 1958]. But with the blockade, the standard of living of these persons collapsed. They basically totally threw off the equilibrium that the majority of Venezuelans were accustomed to. Many of them have left, and now what they want is to make it to the United States. How can one partially reduce the exodus? Well, lift the blockade against Venezuela.

In a September 30 Associated Press  report, Mexican President López Obrador echoed President Petro’s words. He gave this issue a “continental” Latin American perspective:

He called for a U.S. program “to remove blockades and stop harassing independent and free countries, an integrated plan for cooperation so the Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Ecuadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans wouldn’t be forced to emigrate.”

The Mexican president also contrasted the U.S. spending on the Ukraine proxy war with how much is spent to assist the people in Latin America:

López Obrador said the United States should spend some of the money sent to Ukraine on economic development in Latin America.

“They (the U.S.) don’t do anything,” he said. “It’s more, a lot more, what they authorize for the war in Ukraine than what they give to help with poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Of course, with the termination of the pandemic student loan deferral and child care assistance programs, Obrador’s words could also apply to the working-class youth and oppressed communities in the U.S.

Attack on migrants: Used to enrich big business while buttressing vile racism.

Wall Street uses sanctions against poor countries to place the people and their leaders under neo-colonial rule. And it exploits the cheap migrant labor while at the same time uses its right-wing minions, along with the fascist repression by ICE and the Border Patrol, to attack migrants, to terrorize them into submission and acceptance of starvation wages.

On October 1, the New York Times published an article titled: “Why can’t we stop illegal immigration? Because it works.” As the article points out, it certainly works for the bosses:

Migrants dream of America because they are an entrenched part of our economy. This is nothing new; America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit. Even today, some sectors in the U.S. economy seem almost reserved for workers who have been deliberately kept vulnerable.

When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, establishing a minimum wage, they excluded most farmworkers and domestic workers from its protections. These workers were largely excluded again when Congress passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1970.

“These spaces that were once filled by slaves are now filled by immigrants,” Anita Sinha, a professor of law at American University told me. “They are exploitative by design.”

Migrant children are especially targeted for super exploitation:

Recent Times investigations by Hannah Dreier found unaccompanied minors packing Cheerios, washing hotel sheets and sanitizing chicken-processing plants. The United States has laws banning these and other abusive labor practices, but many companies have found a workaround: staffing agencies.

“They’re all designed to skirt litigations,” Kevin Herrera, the legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, in Chicago, once explained to me. Many of these agencies specialize in hiring people who will suffer any number of degrading or dangerous conditions because they are desperate for work.

Labor must stand up for migrants!

In this “Summer (and now Fall) of strikes”, labor must intervene on behalf of migrant workers! They are not “illegals” as described by the racist right-wing media and Trumpist politicians. They are our working-class sisters and brothers and their children. Right now, they could be used by the bosses to attack our growing union movement. We cannot allow that to happen!

We must join with our migrant sisters and brothers to demand:

• An end to all U.S. economic sanctions, particularly those directed at countries in the “Global South”.

• Immediate amnesty for all migrants entering the country, with social services enabled to offer care for their families.

• An end to all child labor.

•  An end to all current “exceptions” for labor laws regarding pay, health and safety, and so on that are designed to exclude migrant workers.

All of this is necessary for successful union organizing drives among migrant workers, which would be of great benefit to our whole class here. And it would greatly help the workers and poor farmers around the world.

Source: Fighting Words

“Cuba in Africa,” a new documentary film by Negash Abdurahman, was shown at the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles on Sept. 24. The meeting, which included reports from a recent delegation to Cuba, was opened up by Carlos Sirah of the Black Alliance for Peace and Jefferson Azevedo of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice.

The film, “Cuba in Africa,” is currently being screened at film festivals. It celebrates the long history of Cuban solidarity with the African struggle against imperialism, including their military intervention that helped bring about the downfall of racist apartheid in South Africa. Abdurahman answered questions by Zoom after the film.

Pastor Kelvin Sauls of Sanctuary of Hope (SOH) joined the meeting from South Africa via zoom. He introduced the youth leaders from the SOH delegation to Cuba. Each of them shared their enthusiasm and astute observations about their trip. It was clear from their talks that these young people were already scholars of the revolutionary process underway in Cuba. A short video of the visit was shown as well.

There was also an announcement about Los Angeles’ role in the national effort to get Cuba #OFFTHELIST.

The Black Alliance for Peace and Let Cuba Live – LA co-sponsored the meeting.

From the 2004 coup d’état against President Jean Bertrand Aristide until 2017, Haiti was occupied militarily initially by US and Canadian troops and subsequently by a multinational force of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), always under the clear direction of the governments of the United States and its allies, mainly Canada and France. For the North American and European elites, the political crisis in Haiti since the 2017 departure of MINUSTAH from Haiti presented a dilemma. They always had a presence of administrative and political intervention in the form of the Integrated United Nations Office in Haiti (BINUH for its acronym in French). But they needed another mechanism of armed intervention in order to suppress the growing popular resistance to the country’s neocolonial subjugation under the corrupt Haitian de facto authorities.

A new form of intervention

These puppets of their Western masters have held on to power for over a decade via grotesquely rigged elections, the abuse of the Constitution of the Republic, and the violent repression of popular protest. In response, grassroots political opposition and the population’s defensive armed resistance have grown progressively. Now, in order to prevent a democratic and people-based resolution of the crisis in Haiti, the US ruling elite have engineered the approval by the United Nations Security Council of a Multinational Security Support Mission to Haiti, authorized to use armed force in support of the de facto regime of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. In fact, the procedure used to create this mission may well be repeated in the future to facilitate other interventions in the region.

It amounts to another modality to be added to the imperialist intervention toolbox, which already includes lawfare, unilateral coercive measures, soft and not so soft coups, diverse varieties of direct military intervention, and the abuse of international financial institutions for political purposes. As Jemima Pierre has explained to us, this new modality of intervention follows the script outlined in the Global Fragility Act approved in the US Congress in 2019 by both political parties during the presidency of Donald Trump. The Act makes clear that the United States should adapt its neocolonial interventions to more indirect means such that the role of the US government will be to provide resources, advice, support and guidance to other key actors.

Unlike the failed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, this modality exploits US dominance so that the United Nations approves operations to achieve Western interventionist objectives. Their capacity for pressure and extortion will also be used to directly co-opt various local allies as protagonists of US and allied governments’ regional neocolonial policies. So now the government of an East African country, Kenya, has been co-opted as its main accomplice to lead the Multinational Security Support Mission to Haiti along with contributions from Caribbean countries such as Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Guatemala, and Suriname, in addition to Peru, Italy, Spain and another African country, Senegal.

Nicaragua and Haiti, the common history

In the same way that the United States invaded and occupied Nicaragua in the last century, Haiti also suffered from US military occupation from 1915 to 1934. And in the same way that they left behind the National Guard in Nicaragua, they left behind the Haitian Gendarmerie in Haiti. And also, in the same way that the United States ordered the murder of Benjamin Zeledón and Augusto C. Sandino, they murdered in the most cowardly way Charlemagne Péralte, the national hero of the resistance to the Yankee occupation of Haiti. For decades, both countries suffered under criminal regimes totally at the service of US neocolonial rule. While the 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution liberated Nicaragua from the US neocolonial system, at the same time it convinced Western elites not to allow something similar in other countries in the region.

So when a progressive and nationalist political force and its leader Jean Bertrand Aristide won the presidential elections in Haiti in 1991, it lasted only nine months before falling victim to a coup d’état promoted by the United States. While in Nicaragua, the United States imposed neoliberalism during the 17 years between 1990 and 2006 through the submissive governments of Violeta Chamorro, Arnoldo Alemán and Enrique Bolaños, in Haiti, the terms of neocolonial submission to the Washington Consensus were imposed, with all its structural adjustment apparatus, by force, with direct military occupation lasting until the year 2000, when Jean Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party won the elections for a second time. That second term of President Aristide’s elected government ended in 2004 with another coup, his kidnapping and involuntary dispatch to the Central African Republic, and subsequent forced exile in South Africa.

Elections under neocolonialism

The last elections in Haiti, with a high level of participation of around 60%, were the elections under the MINUSTAH occupation in 2006, won by René Préval. The process had been postponed four times since 2005. The subsequent elections of 2010 and 2015 were also chaotic processes with rigged results based, in both cases, on a voter turnout of less than 23%. With the Fanmi Lavalas party excluded from the process, Michel Martelly was awarded victory in the 2010 elections, and Jovenal Moïse, from the same party, was made the winner of the elections scheduled for 2015, but which finally took place in November 2016. Due to the absence of elections in 2020, President Moïse ruled by decree from January 2020 onwards in a situation of chronic constitutional crisis leading to the absence of a national legislature from April of that same year.

On July 7, 2021, a group of Colombian mercenaries assassinated President Moïse with the possible complicity of one or more of the members of his own ruling circle. The United States and its allies intervened directly to impose Ariel Henry as de facto prime minister. Right now, Haiti has no legitimate government and neither does it have a legislature. In fact, the country is run by the governments of several foreign countries designated as the Core Group, coordinated by the United States. Following the guidelines of this Core Group, Ariel Henry requested an armed intervention by the United Nations, which has now been achieved with the approval of the Multinational Security Support Mission. As Kim Ives, a veteran of solidarity with Haiti, has commented, it is as if a puppet were to make a request for support to its puppet master.

The new intervention

The spurious pretext for the approval of this new neocolonial armed intervention in Haiti has been the increase in armed violence and organized crime in the country. The consensus manipulated by the United States and its allies attributes this phenomenon exclusively to the activity of criminal gangs, especially in the capital Port-au-Prince. This false version of the situation omits two facts of fundamental importance. First, the criminal gangs are controlled mainly by the same Haitian elites who collaborate politically with the United States and its allies. It was during an internal dispute between these local elites that the assassination of Jovenal Moïse occurred in 2021. The criminal groups in Haiti fulfill a political function applying terrorism against the grassroots opposition to the de facto government and to foreign intervention.

Secondly, several popular forces have taken up arms to protect their communities precisely from armed attacks on the population by criminal gangs controlled by local elites, often in collusion with the corrupt Haitian police. In reality, the approval of this new armed intervention means increasing the forces of anti-democratic repression of the de facto government in Haiti and its American and European owners in order to suppress broadly based political opposition in the country and annihilate its capacity for armed resistance in self-defense. A large group of Haitian popular organizations explained this reality in an open letter to the leaders of the African Union last August, where they wrote:

“We have received with astonishment the surprising news that a brotherly country like Kenya has agreed to lead an American-UN occupation force disguised under the label of “multinational force” against Haiti in order to continue deceiving national and international public opinion better, thus trying to hide the Machiavellian side of this criminal initiative. It should be noted that in order to prepare national and international public opinion for the acceptance of this felony, armed gangs have been mobilized nationwide with the aim of creating total chaos capable of justifying the US-UN occupation of our country. Thus, armed gangs are authorized to collectively rape girls and young women, massacre, kidnap and terrorize the defenseless population on a daily basis.”

This assertion confirms a report in January of this year in which the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights in Haiti commented that “it has strong reasons to believe that the accelerated deterioration of the security situation in the country, after a few days of calm, intends to justify and obtain from the international community the deployment of a foreign military force in Haiti.….” This cynical, sadistic manipulation has been a crucial component of the pressure from the United States and its allies for precisely this kind of intervention. It has been disappointing that the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, in the declaration of its Seventh Summit in January of this year, endorsed this type of imperialist maneuver to force an illegal intervention in the internal affairs of a country in the region.

In healthy contrast to the regrettable declaration of the CELAC summit, the government of Cuba has insisted in a statement issued after the recent decision of the United Nations Security Council on Haiti that “We defend the legitimate rights of its people to find a peaceful and sustainable way out of the enormous challenges they face, based on full respect for their sovereignty. The main pending task of the international community with Haiti is not to send a military contingent. That sister Caribbean nation, to which the international community owes an enormous moral debt, needs more financial resources for its development. It urgently requires more and better international assistance and cooperation, not only for its reconstruction, but also to advance the sustainable development of the country.”

Cuba’s rational and sensible argument concurs fully with the call of the group of Haitian popular organizations to the African Union in August, where they observe, “We want to conclude by reminding you of the urgent need to offer us your concrete solidarity in this situation of extreme menace. We want to maintain the firm conviction that you will continue to take a clear position against the criminal project of an occupation of Haiti.”

Stephen Sefton is a Nicaraguan writer who has written on Nicaragua and Latin America since 2003. Since 2008 he has coordinated the Tortilla con Sal media collective.  

Source: Kawsachun News

The time has come for Zionism to fall. Political support for Palestine is more important than ever.

The fall of Zionist apartheid in occupied Palestine is long overdue. For the past 75 years, the colonial project of Israel has terrorized Palestinian people throughout Gaza, Golan, the West Bank, and the 1948 borders. What began as a British and U.S.-backed colonial project bathed in the blood of Nakba quickly reached its full evolution into Israeli fascist apartheid. 

With every passing year, Israeli violence against nearby countries only seems to escalate, whether it be Palestine, Syria, or Iran. From continuous illegal airstrikes on Syrian airports to the ghettoization of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s crimes against humanity in furtherance of the U.S. imperialist agenda have no bounds. 

Because yes, ultimately, the crimes of Israel are the crimes of the United States and their allies. Israel is not the master but is instead a loyal dog on a leash firmly held by the U.S. military-industrial complex. 

Resistance to this terrible regime is not terrorism. It is freedom fighting. If the methods of Hamas at times seem extreme, it is only because their Zionist enemies are that much more extreme in their everyday persecution of the Palestinian people. These horrors range from the systemic deprivation of basic human necessities in Gaza to the intentional IDF execution of pregnant Palestinian women in the hopes of wiping out a generation of resistance. How long are people supposed to live under that sort of violent, racist oppression? 

Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the defense industry will not want to cede their racist satellite without a fight. As such, war criminal Joe Biden ordered a carrier strike force closer to Israel. It is not yet clear whether this move’s purpose is to support the pending Israeli siege of Gaza or as a safety net in case the Israeli occupation forces cannot stem the tide.

It is clear that all those who consider themselves friends of working and oppressed people must raise their voices and take to the streets to support the Palestinian people. The world must come to the aid of Palestine in its fight against occupation the same way it came to the defense of Black South Africans living under apartheid. Ultimately, apartheid fell due to the combined efforts of international protests, the South African working-class movement, and African and Cuban military intervention.  

The people of Palestine are now the ones who require and deserve solidarity from the entire planet, people, and governments alike. Unions, churches, community centers, student organizations, and, yes, synagogues all must come together to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and no U.S. military intervention against the Palestinian people!

Personal note

Earlier in this article, I asked how long people are supposed to tolerate brutal, racist apartheid. For an answer, we only have to look as far as the communist Jewish resistance fighters of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Facing another round of forced deportations from Warsaw to Nazi death camps, the socialist Jewish Fighting Organization, or “ZOB,” attacked the column of Nazi troops sent to oversee the next shipment of Jews to the notorious Treblinka concentration camp. 

The fact that there were only 600 resistance fighters and they only had small arms to fight armored vehicles and heavy weaponry did not deter Mordechai Anielowicz and his comrades. The ZOB was fighting for the very existence of Jewish people, the same way that the Peoples’ Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Hamas are fighting for the very existence of the Palestinian people. 

To think that the people playing the role of the Nazis in Palestine are none other than the people whose grandparents and great-grandparents rose against the exact same type of oppression. 

I am a Jew whose ancestors were killed and terrorized by tsarist pogroms and, later, by the SS at Auschwitz. For the life of me, I cannot understand how so many of my people have allowed the last 75 years of genocide and war in Palestine to be carried out in their name.  

Every Yom Kippur, Jews convene at synagogue to ask forgiveness from a higher power for not just the sins of the individual but for the sins of the community. The structure of these confessions is “we sinned when we did such a thing.” This year, a woman and leader at my congregation read a psalm of sorts that she wrote. I paraphrase, but this was roughly her point: 

“We (the Jewish community) sinned when he stood silent as innocents were killed in our name. We sinned when we allowed olive trees to be demolished in the West Bank. We sinned when we looked the other way when Israeli stormtroopers attacked the funeral procession of a reporter. No more.” 

No more. Zionist apartheid is a stain on my people and a stain on humanity. Any Jew who considers themselves concerned with our people or the future of all people has the responsibility to say, No More. Israel does not deserve our support, only our condemnation and rage. 

It is time for our people to stop being stooges on behalf of the real enemy, the Western war profiteers and capitalist fat cats. That is our enemy. That has always been our enemy. It is time to stand with Palestine. 

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.

UPDATED, Oct. 9 — For 75 years, the Palestinian people have been driven from their land by the Israeli apartheid state. Millions of Palestinians live in exile, often in refugee camps.

Gaza is the biggest prison on earth, with over 2 million people living on just 16 square miles. That’s twice the population density of Manhattan.

Nearly 1 million of Gaza’s people are children. And 1.7 million are refugees. They or their families were driven from their homes in what is now “Israel” in 1948 by terror, force, and massacre. They can only return to their own land as day laborers, building shorefront hotels and condos for tourists and settlers. And if they’re not back in Gaza by sundown, they go to jail. 

Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza is the most densely populated place on earth. Israel is now attacking it with U.S.-made bombs, and missiles dropped from U.S.-made warplanes, which Washington supplies Israel for free. At least 50 people died there on the morning of Oct. 9 when the Israeli air force bombed a crowded market. 

Israel is also dropping U.S.-made white phosphorus on Gaza’s civilians. As of Oct. 9, Israel’s bombs and missiles have killed 500 civilians, including 91 children. Apartment buildings, schools, mosques, and hospitals have been destroyed. Entire families have been wiped out. These crimes are being committed with the full support of the Biden administration and Republican and Democratic politicians. 

For 16 years under a blockade

For 16 years, Gaza has been under a U.S.-backed Israeli blockade, reinforced by frequent aerial bombing. People cannot leave or enter. Medical supplies and equipment cannot come in. As a result, unemployment is 45%; some 53% of its people live in poverty. Gaza’s water, according to UNICEF, is unfit for human consumption. Raw sewage pours into its sea. People get electricity for about two hours a day.

On Oct. 8, Israeli “defense” minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. … We are fighting ‘human animals,’” he said, “and we are acting accordingly.”

Israel was founded with 70 massacres in 1948 during the Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic. Fifteen thousand Palestinians were murdered, and 531 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Zionists.

Thousands of more Palestinians have been killed since then. Just in May 2021, 67 Palestinian children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military. Israeli forces have murdered over 200 civilians in the occupied West Bank this year. Thirty-six were children. 

The U.S.-funded Israeli state is trying to complete the genocide it started in 1948. On the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, Israeli troops and armed settlers terrorize civilians, attacking towns and villages and driving people from their homes. They routinely invade mosques, including the holy site of Al Aqsa in Jerusalem, and beat and brutalize worshippers. 

Yet the corporate media is screaming “terrorism” because Palestinian freedom fighters are fighting back. That’s how southern slave masters and their newspapers demonized Nat Turner when he led a revolt of enslaved Africans. Palestinians are also breaking their chains.

The same capitalist mouthpieces are howling about the prisoners taken by the Palestinian liberation fighters. They have been silent about the 5,250 Palestinians held hostage by Israel, 1,350 of whom are being held without trial. One hundred seventy of these prisoners are children.

Washington funds racist apartheid regime

Racist Israel could not have been able to commit its crimes without the backing of the Big Oil and bankster government of the United States. Washington has shoveled $158 billion into the Zionist regime. In the United States, all those opposed to racism, injustice, and oppression must stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We must demand no more arms and money to the Zionist settler regime.

That’s money stolen from U.S. ghettos to keep Palestinians in ghettos.

In a dangerous move, President Biden has ordered ships of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet to move toward Palestine. This is an attempt to intimidate Palestinians, as well as to threaten Iran and the resistance forces in Lebanon, led by Hezbollah. The last thing we need is another U.S. big business war.

Poor and working people in the United States have no interest in propping up the Israeli apartheid regime that gave the old apartheid regime in South Africa nuclear weapons.

Many years ago it was written, “As ye sow, so ye reap.” For 75 years, the Zionist regime has been terrorizing the Palestinian people. The Israeli rulers and their Pentagon backers shouldn’t be surprised by the eventual reaction.

The only road to peace is for the right of the Palestinians to return to their homeland. Just as the people of Zimbabwe wiped racist “Rhodesia” off the map, so will Palestinians defeat the racist state of Israel.

Here in the United States, all those who oppose racism, injustice, and corporate rule must stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We must demand no more U.S. arms and dollars to the racist Israeli settler regime. 

From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) confirmed Oct. 8 that U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to provide all forms of support to the Zionist entity [Israel] comes in the context of continued American support for Zionist terrorist crimes of aggression, stemming from the depth of their organic partnership, which always aims to liquidate the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people.

The Front stressed that the statements of the U.S. president, which were similar to statements made by NATO, express the state of shock and astonishment at the defeat and humiliation that the Zionist entity suffered in the face of the Palestinian resistance. It also represents an authorization and a green light for the Zionist entity to launch more aggression and massacres against defenseless Palestinian civilians.

The Front believes that the U.S. administration hastened these urgent decisions to try to contain the strategic results of the Al-Aqsa Flood Battle and its major repercussions on the Zionist entity, and its negative repercussions on U.S. presence and plans to control the region.

The Front pointed out that when the U.S. administration emphasizes the right of the Zionist entity to defend itself, it ignores that it has thwarted hundreds of draft resolutions to condemn the massacres and crimes of the Zionist entity in the United Nations Security Council through a veto vote, and has always sought to block calls that reject the entity’s survival. 

The Zionists are above international law, and continue to ignore the role of the United Nations and international resolutions regarding the Palestinian issue, replacing them with a U.S. position biased towards the Zionist entity.

The Front concluded by emphasizing the necessity of exploiting the historical opportunity, following the strategic achievements of the resistance in Gaza in addition to the stormy international transformations, by calling for the formation of the largest international global front that brings together the living forces and the free people of the world to confront global imperialism and its protege the Zionist entity, and confront the American-Zionist plans in the region.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
Central Information Department
October 8, 2023

Translated by Melinda Butterfield

Source: PFLP.ps

A massive wedge of saltwater is coming up the Mississippi River, threatening drinking water for thousands in south Louisiana. This happened before in 1988, 2012, and 2022, though on smaller scales. The current saltwater intrusion is expected to last far longer — for many weeks. President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for the state on Sept. 27.

Freshwater flowing down the river normally prevents denser saltwater from moving upriver from the Gulf of Mexico. However, historic drought conditions affecting the entire Mississippi River Valley have caused low water levels, allowing Gulf water to move north. The long drought is intensified by human (that is, capitalist) driven climate change. Louisiana has gotten almost 20 inches less rainfall this year than usual.

On Sept. 20, saltwater overtopped the underwater barrier — or sill — constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in July. The Corps is currently scrambling to raise it from -55 to -30 feet to buy time.

The Corps also plans to bring in 36 million gallons of water daily to dilute the river water coming into treatment facilities. This will take a lot of boats, and that solution only works for the smaller facilities. To meet the demand of the Carrollton water plant, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board is planning to construct a $100-$250 million pipeline to bring fresh water from upriver. Neighboring Jefferson Parish plans to construct two.

In the far south, saltwater has already entered the drinking water for communities in Plaquemines Parish. People there are relying on bottled water distribution centers. The parish’s Boothville water treatment facility just obtained a reverse-osmosis system to remove salt. For weeks, the southern end of the parish saw tap water salinity exceed 1,600ppm, six times the EPA’s standard. 

Unrelated to the saltwater intrusion — though having the same cause, i.e., drought — the system was plagued by line breaks and boil-water advisories throughout the summer as the shifting of dry ground damaged aging pipes. Saltwater intrusion is one more problem added to the pile.

This is a major environmental justice issue. The poverty level in Plaquemines is 14.5%, three percentage points higher than the national average. Twenty-two percent of the parish population is Black, with 8.4% being Latin American and 1.7% indigenous. The oil and gas industry exploits the parish’s working class with Plaquemines being home to multiple refineries.

Initially, the majority of New Orleans drinking water supply was expected to be affected by Oct. 28, impacting about 1 million people. However, as of Oct. 4, the Corps reports that the wedge is moving more slowly. They now expect greater New Orleans facilities like the Carrollton and Gretna plants to remain unaffected until late November. If this new timeline holds, outcomes may be far better. 

Pregnant people with health conditions like high blood pressure are at greatest risk. There are also concerns that corrosive saltwater could damage pipes and appliances, as people in Plaquemines have reported. Also troubling: The corrosive saltwater could cause toxic heavy metal releases in the New Orleans area’s antique lead pipes, which are interspersed among newer infrastructure.

If the water crisis drags on, the NOLA area will be counted among other municipalities whose drinking water supply has been compromised due to systemic class violence and environmental racism. Flint, Michigan, is the well-known example, but Jackson, Mississippi, is even closer. This writer witnessed water gushing up out of the streets in Jackson in 2013 while canvassing with organizers around deceased Jackson mayor, Chokwe Lumumba Sr. In 2023, racist disinvestment continues to make Jackson’s water unsafe after climate-change-driven flooding damaged the system in 2022.

Outside the U.S., Basra, Iraq, and Alexandria, Egypt, are experiencing saltwater incursions affecting their water supply. Basra is a city of over 1 million, and Alexandria has more than 5 million residents. It is worrisome that such incursions have happened two years in a row in New Orleans and are now happening in at least two other regions at the same time. Even if the crisis in south Louisiana is largely averted, the lesson is clear: With sea-level rise and an increase in extreme weather, saltwater incursion may be a significant, and expensive, threat for the world’s populations living at the nexus of river and sea.

Over 75,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers across six states and Washington, D.C., went on a three-day strike starting Oct. 4 after contract negotiations failed. This is the largest healthcare strike ever in the U.S., with around 40% of Kaiser’s staff participating.

Workers — including nurses, technicians, assistants, and pharmacists — are picketing at hospitals and medical facilities in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, and D.C. Other strikes are planned for emergency department technicians, radiology technicians, X-ray technicians, medical assistants, pharmacists, and many other positions across facilities in California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state.

A coalition of several unions is battling the nonprofit health giant for safe staffing levels, cost of living pay increases, and against a two-tier pay system that Kaiser is trying to introduce.

The largest union in the coalition is Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) with 57,443 members, but the coalition also includes Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 30, SEIU Local 49, OPEIU Local 2 and others.

“We are in a healthcare staffing crisis, but Kaiser is unwilling to even meet with our bargaining team to discuss a wage proposal that would keep good healthcare workers at our facilities,” wrote SEIU-UHW. “That has never happened before in the 25 years of our partnership.”

Kaiser Campaign Updates can be found at www.seiu-uhw.org/kaiser-campaign-updates/