Sales of stolen Palestinian land must be stopped!

Super bigot Tom Cotton is no friend of Jewish people

Across the United States, demonstrations have been organized against the illegal sale of stolen Palestinian lands. Protesters compare these events to the “Indian Land Sales” that were conducted in the U.S. West.

Many of these protests have been viciously attacked by police and Zionist thugs. That was the case in Los Angeles at the Adas Torah synagogue on June 25. Brutal police attacks against protesters have also occurred in Pikesville, Maryland (just outside Baltimore), and Nassau County, New York (near New York City.)

These sales of stolen land are usually conducted in Jewish neighborhoods, often inside synagogues. Protesters — many of whom are Jewish — make clear that they are demonstrating in solidarity with Palestinians, not attacking Jewish people.

That doesn’t prevent the corporate media and capitalist politicians from smearing these righteous protests as “anti-Jewish.” Arkansas statesman Tom Cotton issued a statement demanding “action from DOJ [Department of Justice] and White House on synagogue attack by pro-Hamas mob.”

This is the same Sen. Tom Cotton who demanded that federal troops be used to smash the protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd. The senator urged invoking the Insurrection Act that was passed in 1807 to crush revolts of enslaved Africans. 

Cotton did so in a June 3, 2020, New York Times op-ed piece. This led to a revolt by the newspaper’s reporters and the forced resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet. 

The following month Cotton described the enslavement of African people by U.S. plantation owners as “a necessary evil.” Cotton was attacking the “1619 Project,” a series of New York Times articles that pointed out the racist foundation upon which the United States was built.

Civil Rights organizations, including the NAACP and the Urban League, demanded that the U.S. Senate censure Cotton for his defense of slavery. Cotton’s fellow senators, half of whom are Democrats, refused to do so.

Six senators instead joined Cotton in sponsoring legislation to cut off federal funds to school districts that include material from the 1619 Project in their curriculum. This was really an attempt to drive Black history out of the schools, just like Gov. DeSantis is trying to do in Florida.

Tool of Walmart and Tyson Foods

More recently, Cotton was under fire for his Jan. 31 questioning of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Cotton refused to believe that the corporate executive, born in Singapore, wasn’t a citizen of the People’s Republic of China or a member of the Communist Party of China. 

“Tom Cotton can’t tell Asians apart even when they tell him,” journalist Heidi Moore tweeted. The AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Victory Fund tweeted, “This line of questioning from Senator Tom Cotton is disgraceful, blatantly racist, and deeply dangerous.”

Cotton doesn’t represent the 140,000 poor people in Arkansas who were kicked off Medicaid last year. He’s a political servant of the Walton family who owns Walmart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The reason why the Walton family is so filthy rich with their $267 billion fortune is that 2.1 million Walmart workers are so poor.

Another billionaire Tom Cotton serves is the dead animal capitalist John H. Tyson. His family’s Tyson Foods — based in Springdale, Arkansas — had sales of nearly $53 billion last year. 

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, John Tyson took out full-page newspaper ads demanding that all meatpacking and poultry plants be immediately reopened. Within two days, President Trump issued an executive order doing so.

This resulted in 2,866 cases of the coronavirus in Tyson’s Arkansas plants from May 19, 2020, to April 8, 2021, nearly a third of the state’s workplace COVID cases. Across the country, twice as many workers died in Tyson’s plants than any other meatpacker. 

Unite against hate

Eleven Jewish people were murdered by a neo-Nazi at the Tree of Life – Or L’Simcha Congregation – synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018. The local Muslim community raised more than $150,000 for the victims. 

The gunman, Robert Gregory Bowers, blamed Jewish people for transporting migrants on his Gab.com account. Anti-immigrant hate is a weapon used by all reactionaries. 

Anne Frank’s family and thousands of other Jews were prevented from escaping the Nazis by the bigoted 1924 U.S. Immigration Act. It was repealed in 1965, the same year the Voting Rights Act was passed after demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, were clubbed by George Wallace’s state troopers.

Tom Cotton, J.D. Vance, and two other senators are sponsoring legislation that would strip citizenship from the children of immigrants. 

This unconstitutional bill would overturn the 14th Amendment, which was written in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Union Army soldiers who died in the Civil War. Cotton is a neo-Confederate.

President Biden also catered to anti-immigrant bigotry when he curbed the right to asylum for immigrants. 

When he began his first presidential campaign, Trump denounced Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” The next day, on June 17, 2015, Hitler supporter Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina.

It’s been Black places of worship that have been the biggest targets of racist violence. Ku Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Alabama on Sept. 16, 1963. Four Black girls — Addie Mae Collins (14); Carol Denise McNair (11); Carole Robertson (14); and Cynthia Wesley (14) — were murdered.

Everybody knew it was the Klan or some other hate group that was responsible. Not so the National Review, which in its Oct. 1, 1963, issue asked: “Whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur – of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.” Today this rag supports the genocide of Palestinian and Lebanese people.

The same Los Angeles Police Department that attacked demonstrators on June 25 protesting the sale of Palestinian land, attacked the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 27 on April 27, 1962.  

They shot Mosque secretary Ronald X Stokes in the heart, killing him. Six other NOI members were wounded, including William X Rogers who was left paralyzed. 

The campaign to stop the sales of stolen Palestinian land is linked to every other progressive struggle. Palestine and Lebanon will win!