The Good Friday Massacre, Palestine and Anti-Colonial Struggle

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Opening Theme

Comrades, you’re listening to Back in the USSR here on 93.3 FM CFRU, I am Siegfried.  And I stand by what I said in last week’s show that anti-colonialism remains the chief political task of our time.  Last week I was talking about Burnaby B.C. and the hundreds of people who were willing to get arrested to stop the construction of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline on stolen native land.  I talked about the solidarity march we had in Guelph one week ago, led by Fossil Free Guelph, where we took the street, marched on the MP’s office and made our voices heard while making the point, loud and clear, that environmental justice and the struggle against settler-colonialism in this country are not separate issues.  They’re hand in hand.  Because whose land is threatened when pipelines leak? Whose children are poisoned when tarsands bitumen gets into the aquifers and watersheds? It’s overwhelmingly the indigenous peoples of this land who suffer the consequences of fossil fuel expansion and the drive for profit.  It’s the same thing in countries like Ecuador, where indigenous people are still living with the mess that Chevron created in its relentless pursuit of oil profits in the Ecuadorian rain-forest and suffering skyrocketing rates of cancer while the oil giant continues to refuse to pay one penny in compensation.  It’s the same thing in Alaska, where indigenous people are still living with the aftereffects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill almost three decades later, which practically destroyed the marine ecosystems that they relied on for their livelihoods.  It’s the same thing in Chile where the indigenous Mapuche people are facing fascist police violence for protecting their land in the face of multi-national mining conglomerates.  It’s the same thing in India and Brazil where hundreds of thousands of indigenous people are forcibly uprooted and driven from their ancestral lands through military force to make way for power dam construction.  It’s the same thing in Australia where the government actually allowed Britain to test its nuclear weapons on indigenous land in the 1950s.  And it’s the same thing in the United States where the lands of the Navajo people remain contaminated by the radio-active effects of uranium mining and where Black American communities are disproportionately situated alongside toxic waste dumps and highly polluting industrial sites, not unlike the indigenous people who live in Sarnia’s “Chemical Valley” in Ontario.  The struggle against colonialism and the struggle against capitalist environmental devastation are one and the same and this is extremely important to understand. 

Last week I also talked about Syria, where the United States is holding a full 25% of the country, including 90% of its oil reserves, under military occupation.  I talked about countries like Libya, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, where, just like in Syria, the toxic effects of the American imperial warmachine are being felt, from cancer-causing depleted uranium to a whole host of other leftovers that have the effect of poisoning the air, the water and the soil.  I talked about Vietnam, where the toxic effects of Dow Chemical’s Agent Orange defoliant are being felt to this day and where the ecosystem remains tainted by the byproducts of an imperialist war after almost fifty years.  But you can see it in Puerto Rico too, a U.S. colony, where for decades the US Navy poisoned Vieques Island with toxic munitions testing and were only forced to stop by a massive protest movement among local people who had suffered birth defects and runaway cancer rates.

So when the Apartheid state of Israeli besieges and blockades two million Palestinians in the world’s largest open-air prison, forces them to live in squalor, and then shoots them down when they demonstrate for freedom, none of this should come as a surprise.

 

Yesterday, Good Friday March 30 2018, was when the colonized Palestinian people marked Land Day, a commemoration day remembering the murder of six unarmed Palestinians by Israeli forces during the 1976 strikes to prevent the seizing of land for illegal settlements.

To mark Land Day, Gazans organized a series of peaceful protests along the border with Israel.  The protests are scheduled to last six weeks and will end on the Nakba commemoration on May 15, a day after the anniversary of Israel's official declaration of independence, remembered by Palestinians as the catastrophe day in which they were expelled from their land by an invading army.

The Israeli army was prepared well in advance of yesterday’s demonstrations and had signaled its willingness to use lethal force against unarmed people.

In a series of interviews published Wednesday, just two days before the massacre, IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said that the Palestinian Land Day protests in Gaza would be met by one hundred snipers and other “special units”. “If there will be a danger to lives, we will authorize live fire,” he declared. “The orders are to use a lot of force.”

The occupation authorities decided to double the security forces presence on the Gazan border to safeguard the no-go zone fearing a mass break out into Israel, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) started shooting live ammunition at demonstrators.

Israel's foreign ministry declared the protests to be a "deliberate attempt to provoke a confrontation with Israel," ignoring the rights of Gazans to protests an illegal occupation and continuous harassment of indigenous people.

Early on Friday, Gazan farmer Omar Waheed Abu Samour was killed by a tank shell while working in his own land near Khan Younis, even before the demonstrations started, showing the occupation forces' true intentions.

When the demonstrations began and thousands of unarmed Palestinians assembled to assert their rights under international law, it did not take long for the Israeli occupation troops to start shooting.   

True to form, the New York Times on Friday tried to frame the bloodshed as being the result of “clashes” between opposing sides, when in reality it was a one-sided massacre with heavily armed soldiers pitted against unarmed civilians in what became a gigantic shooting gallery.

Good Friday 2018 was to be “the bloodiest day in Gaza since Israel’s 2014 offensive,” according to the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.  At the end of the day, Palestine’s Health Ministry reported 15 dead and 1,400 injured, 773 of which were hit by live ammunition.  Gaza hospitals, running low on blood and overstretched by the huge number of wounded, were sent reeling after the massacre.

The Israeli army posted a statement on Twitter on Saturday apparently accepting full responsibility for the killings a day earlier of 15 Palestinians as thousands took part in the Great March of Return in Gaza.

The army then quickly deleted the admission – as more evidence of war crimes by its soldiers came to light – but not before a copy was made by the human rights group B’Tselem.

The now-deleted tweet from the official @IDFSpokesperson account stated: “Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”

The UN has belatedly called for an independent inquiry, but it must be pointed out that last year, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, acting under US pressure, suppressed a report that condemned Israel’s colonial policies against Palestinians as an example of Apartheid.

For its part, The EU acknowledged that Israel used “live ammunition during clashes and demonstrations” but endorsed Israel’s “right to protect its borders” with “proportionate” force.

The PLO called for a day of national mourning in the wake of the shootings. Funeral services began with the burial of the 30-year-old Sari Abu Odeh on Friday evening.

According to Al Jazeera, other fatal victims include Mohammed Najjar (25), Mahmoud Muammar (38), Mohammed Abu Omar (22), Ahmed Odeh (19), Jihad Freneh (33), Mahmoud Saadi Rahmi (33), Abdelfattah Abdelnabi (22), Ibrahim Abu Shaar (20), Abdelqader al-Hawajiri, Sari Abu Odeh, Hamdan Abu Amsheh, Jihad Abu Jamous, Bader al-Sabbagh and Naji Abu Hjair.

Palestinian writer Shahd Abusalama stated, “There is no justification for suppressing people whose right to resist colonial oppression is guaranteed by international law. The fact that Israel has been able to continue this brutal violence against Palestinians with total impunity for 70 years reflects a deep-seated moral problem in our world”.  My response would be that deep-seated moral problems always arise from material conditions of oppression and exploitation.  The struggle against colonialism remains the key political struggle of our time and this is true all around the world.

(Fela Kuti - Sorrow, Tears and Blood)

You're listening to Back in the USSR.  The clip I'm about to play discusses something that is very poorly understood by Westerners: the right of a colonized people to armed self-defense.  This clip is of Jewish American scholar and Palestine solidarity activist Norman Finkelstein talking recently on the Real News about his latest book, which is about the situation in Gaza.  As you'll see, he argues that armed struggle is not effective but that the Palestinians, like any colonized people have the absolute right to use it under international law, in order to fight for their own self-determination.  The counter-argument that is put to him asks why the Palestinians in Gaza don't just engage in a mass campaign of civil disobedience instead.  Well, the massacre that happened on Good Friday was the answer to that counter-argument.  When the Israeli Apartheid state is willing to deploy 100 snipers against unarmed demonstrators engaging in an actual campaign of mass civil disobedience, shoot 15 people dead and injure a further 773 people with live ammunition, many of them critically, we're most certainly in a situation where armed self-defense is more than justified on the part of Palestinians.  In truth it's one of the few ways they have left of resisting a colonial occupation that only gets more brutal with each passing year.  Keep that in mind while you're listening to this interview.

(Norman Finkelstein on Gaza's right to armed self-defense)

(Bruce Cockburn - If I Had a Rocket Launcher)

You're listening to Back in the USSR.  One of the anti-colonial struggles that me and others have talked about a lot on this show is the black liberation struggle in America, and me and Brendan Campisi in particular have spoken a lot about the role that international solidarity played in that movement and how groups like the Black Panthers were genuinely inspired by the many anti-colonial struggles happening around the world in the 1960s and 70s, as well as by revolutionary governments that had emerged out of anti-colonial struggles, such as that of Cuba, China, Vietnam, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Algeria and others.   

 There was a real anti-colonial solidarity in these movements that transcended frontiers and was truly internationalist in form and content.  It is this international movement against colonialism that is for the most part missing from today's world, and given how interconnected these struggles are, and how global the impact of imperialism and capitalist exploitation are, it is essential that a new movement be created.  Eddie Conway of the Black Panther Party recently spoke on the Real News about how he and his comrades were affected by the Chinese Revolution in particular.

 (Siegfried Barazov - Lenin Poem)

(Eddie Conway - The Political Currency of Mao's Little Red Book)

(PRC - The East is Red)

(Brendan on Black Panther Internationalism)

Anti-Colonial Struggle in the Twenty-First Century

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Opening Theme

Hello brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, you’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU, I am Siegfried.  I realize my attendance record has been a little spotty over the course of that past month and I want to thank you for bearing with me on that.  But I am live in the studio now, and more or less fresh out of the demonstration in downtown Guelph that I participated in yesterday against the expansion of the Kinder-Morgan tarsands oil pipeline which is now being built on stolen indigenous territory in BC.  OPIRG was there, the GAP action group was there, the Guelph Young Communist League was there, Guelph and District Labor Council was there.  We marched from the Boathouse all the way to MP Lloyd Longfield’s office on Cork Street, we actually took the street on MacDonnell downtown and also made our presence felt outside the downtown branch of the TD Bank, a bank that has extensive investments in the BC pipeline projects and the Alberta tarsands.  We assembled outside the MP’s office, we delivered our message, an actual bottle of water from the BC watershed affected by the Kinder-Morgan pipeline, and several of us spoke, and spoke powerfully, not only against the pipeline itself and its corporate backers, but against the colonial state in Canada that makes it possible.  And those speakers were adamant, that this state needs to be broken down, the colonial system needs to be dismantled, it needs to be smashed, it needs to be overcome.  Because radical transformative change, revolution, is the only way that indigenous peoples and the land can receive justice.  There can be no justice under a system where profits are in command and where the endless expansion of profit is the bottom line in government and society.  This is especially true with regard to the environment and environmental justice, which was the focus of the demonstration, and it must be understood that the struggle to protect the water, the air, the soil, and so on, is inextricably linked and bound up in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism, both in this country and around the world.

 

Our demonstration in Guelph was only one of dozens which took place across the country on Friday, in solidarity with those activists and indigenous land defenders who put their bodies on the line to physically block and obstruct the construction of the Kinder-Morgan pipeline in BC.  130 of them were arrested this week, including elderly men and women, as the police moved in to protect the capitalists and their investments, as is their job in a capitalist society where profits are in command.  They are not there to protect the people, they are there to protect profit.  And that was reflected with how physical they got in arresting the demonstrators.  This is what one of the protestors, indigenous activist Clayton Thomas Mueller, had to say about what happened.

(Play “Aggressive Police Tactics Escalate Against Trans-Mountain Pipeline Protests”)

That was Clayton Thomas Mueller.  It has to be said that the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau has a truly amazing track record of saying one thing and doing something else entirely.  At the last round of global climate talks in Paris, he promised the world that Canada would take a leading role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and he followed up on that by dramatically escalating government support for the oil and gas sector, the tarsands and the pipelines, things that are not compatible with fighting climate change, let alone his vapid promises of “reconciliation” with indigenous peoples which have likewise been betrayed.  The Salish and other indigenous nations in BC and across the country have been struggling tooth and nail to defend what in many cases is completely unceded indigenous territory against the fossil fuel industry and the capitalist state that backs it.  This is not reconciliation, this is colonialism and colonial warfare against colonized people.  And just to show you how hand in glove the Canadian government is with the fossil fuel industry, I want to play this documentary from the Real News Network which is aptly titled “Is the Oil Industry Canada’s Deep State?” Please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.

(Play “Is the Oil Industry Canada’s Deep State?”)

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  It’s well known by now that the capitalist drive for profit is indeed pushing the world toward climate catastrophe.  It’s well known that indigenous people and their allies, both in this country and around the world, are fighting back to defend their lands against the extractive industries threatening to devastate them.  It’s well known that this struggle is an anti-colonial struggle.  But because we just had the anniversary of the US Empire’s 2003 invasion of Iraq this past week in which a million people were killed, because we just had the anniversary of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, because we just had the anniversary of the 2011 destruction of Libya, because of the US Empire’s military occupation of 25% of the land area of Syria, because of its renewed threats to destroy independent countries like Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, because of the contamination of countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Serbia by the depleted uranium weapons used by the US Empire, I think it is safe to say that anti-colonialism and anti-colonial struggle remains the chief political task of our time if humanity is to have a future at all.  Many of the necessary connections have not yet been made in people’s minds.  But perhaps this poem, written by the then journalist William Pepper, who bore witness to the horrors being inflicted on the people of Vietnam in 1966-67, will make things clearer. 

“I come and stand at every door,

But no one hears my silent plea,

I stand and yet remain unseen,

For I am dead.  For I am dead.

I am only seven though I died in My Lai long ago,

I’m seven now as I was then,

When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame,

My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind,

Death came, and turned my bones to dust,

That was scattered by the wind.

All that I ask is but for peace,

You fight today, you fight today,

So that the children of this world may live and grow and laugh and play."

And the children of My Lai and their mothers and their grandparents were of course slaughtered by American soldiers in March 1968, yet another grim anniversary of colonial brutality that we mark this month. 

 When previous generations witnessed the devastation of Vietnam by Agent Orange in the Pentagon’s “Operation Hades”, the link between imperialism and environmental catastrophe was laid bare for all to see, but nowadays too many of the environmental activists who stand in solidarity with indigenous land defenders in BC do not stand with the Syrian people in their resistance against the American Empire that is both occupying and devastating their land, just as it did in Libya and Iraq.  When peoples and governments of the Third World resist imperialism today, Western activists are too often either silent or fall back on spurious legal arguments as opposed to expressing genuine solidarity.  For example, liberal anti-war activists continue to make a big deal about how the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold to the American people on the basis of false claims of the country possessing weapons of mass destruction, the implication being that if there were weapons of mass destruction it would have been OK to go in there and pulverize that country.  Liberals like to make the same argument about the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the Vietnam War, making one of the bloodiest colonial wars in history out to be a mistake rather than a crime of shocking proportions.  They’ve done the same with Iraq.  And, unfortunately, today there is no radical mass anti-war movement which makes anti-imperialism its core commitment, unlike in the days of the Vietnam War.  But what CIA defector John Stockwell outlines in the following discussion from 1988 is truer than ever.

(Play “The Crimes of the CIA”)

The following is a clip from Press TV’s correspondent Mohammed Ali in Damascus, Syria, discussing today’s liberation of the Harasta suburb of Eastern Ghouta from foreign-backed militants.  In contrast to Western media lies, the Syrian Army and the Syrian people have been taking their country back from Western trained and Western-funded terrorist groups, and, whenever civilians have been involved, they have opened humanitarian corridors to get them out of the combat zone.  The Syrian Army has rescued almost 100,000 people from terrorist held parts of Eastern Ghouta over the past week alone.  They are not massacring people, they are not using indiscriminate force.  Their goal is to defeat the Western-backed colonial project in their country and to protect the Syrian people and they are doing just that.  The battle in Eastern Ghouta is currently winding down and its full liberation is expected very soon.  This is something all opponents of colonialism should celebrate.  Please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.

(Play “Harasta fully emptied from terrorists”)

(Play Philip Agee “Inside the Company”)