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.
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)
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