(Press TV “Death toll from Gaza protests rises to 10”)
Comrades, you’re listening to Back in the USSR on 93.3
FM CFRU. I am Siegfried. Over the last few weeks, over the last few
episodes of the show, I’ve been focused on struggles against colonialism and
how the struggle against colonialism around the world remains the key political
struggle of our time. I discussed the
massacre that took place in Gaza on Good Friday, which is Land Day in occupied
Palestine, which we now know claimed the lives of twenty unarmed Palestinian
demonstrators and injured literally thousands more, at least 773 with live
ammunition shot by the more than 100 snipers that the Israeli Army deployed
that day in response to this unarmed campaign of civil disobedience by
Palestinians. That was how the Israeli
colonial authorities responded to unarmed demonstrators from an occupied
nation, demanding their rights under international law.
Asad Abu Sharekh, the spokesperson of what was dubbed
“The Great March of Return” said that "the march is organized by refugees,
doctors, lawyers, university students, Palestinian intellectuals, academics,
civil society organizations and Palestinian families." The protests are
set to continue until May 15th, when Palestinians will commemorate
the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe. The day marks the date
700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their towns and cities after
the creation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.
This is a recap from the Real News on what happened
last Friday.
(Ben Norton – Israel Massacres Unarmed Gaza Protesters)
According to international law and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, all refugees have the right to return to their
country of origin or of citizenship voluntarily. Palestinians have upheld their
right to return to the land from which they were expelled but also to the
properties of their forebears. It has to be pointed out that the Gaza-Israel
boundary, where the protests have been taking place, is not a border between
two sovereign states, but an armistice line between an occupying power and the
population living under its military rule.
More than half of the 2 million people who live in Gaza are
refugees.
This didn’t stop the Israeli Army from again using
lethal force yesterday, on Friday April 6th, when at least nine more
unarmed Palestinians were shot dead during protests along the separation
barrier between Gaza and Israel.
Yesterday, Palestinian journalist Yaser Murtaja, a 30-year-old cameraman
with Ain Media, became the 29th Palestinian killed since the start of the
protests on March 30th. Murtaja was shot in the stomach by
Israeli forces in Khuza'a in the south of the Gaza Strip while covering a
demonstration along the Gaza border and later died of his wound. Hundreds gathered Saturday to
accompany Murtaja’s family at his funeral.
Two of those killed were identified by the health ministry in Gaza and the human rights group Al Mezan as children under the age
of 18: Hussein Muhammad Adnan Madi, 13, shot in the stomach with live fire east
of Gaza City, and Alaa al-Din Yahya al-Zamli, fatally wounded east of Rafah.
Also in Rafah, Israeli soldiers shot at the
head of Muhammad Said Mousa al-Haj Saleh, 33, killing him. In Khan Younis, also in Gaza’s south, Usama
Khamis Musallam Qudeih, 29, died after he was shot in the head by soldiers.
In
central Gaza east of Deir al-Balah, two Palestinians died after they were shot
in the head by soldiers: Ibrahim Ziyad Salameh al-Ar, 20, and Sudqi Talib
Muhammad Abu Ateiweh, 45. Both men were from Nuseirat refugee camp. Hamza
Abd al-Al, 20, was also shot and killed in the eastern boundary of central
Gaza. In northern Gaza, Majdi Ramadan
Mousa Shbat, 38, died after he was shot in the neck with live fire. An eighth victim, Thaer Muhammad Rabaa, 30,
died on Friday from injuries he sustained during the first day of the Great
March of Return protest in northern Gaza, on 30 March.
In an effort to prevent a repeat of last Friday’s high
casualties, Palestinians had attempted to obscure the vision of Israeli snipers
by burning tires as a smokescreen. This
may have succeeded in lessening the number of fatalities as compared to last
week, but despite these efforts, more than 1,300 Palestinians were injured –
around 30 of them critically – by Israeli forces in Gaza on Friday. Nearly 500
were injured by live fire, the Gaza health ministry stated. Paramedics at the protests were
overwhelmed by the number of injuries, with two of the Red Crescent’s posts
unable to cope.
Just like last week, Israeli officials openly admitted
that they are willfully targeting protesters, with military spokesperson Avichay Adraee stating on Friday that “Anyone who thinks he can hide from behind the
lenses of our forces is wrong, we see you clearly”. Embedded
in Adraee’s tweet was an image that appeared to show Palestinian civilians,
including a child, seen through binoculars or a scope.
So far all attempts at initiating a thorough independent
investigation of the carnage under the auspices of the UN Security Council have
been blocked by the US. Both the US and
the EU have failed to condemn Israel, defending the Apartheid state’s use of
force “when defending its legitimate security interests,” while grotesquely
admonishing the Palestinians to “remain strictly nonviolent”.
Not that imperialists admonishing colonized people to
remain non-violent is anything new. When
Nelson Mandela visited Washington D.C. in June 1990, President George Bush, the
same George Bush who had just bombed Panama to smithereens and was about to do
the same to Iraq in the First Gulf War saw fit to lecture him on the virtues of
non-violence, going so far as to quote Dr Martin Luther King. This at a time when the African National
Congress was still locked in a life and death struggle against a violently
repressive Apartheid regime that the U.S. had supported for decades. Michael Parenti writes, "Bush's capacity
for selective perception had all the unexamined audacity of a dominant ideology
that condemns only those who act against an unjust status quo, not those who
use violence to preserve it." (Blackshirts and Reds, pg 34).
All of this ties into what I discussed last week,
about how anti-colonial struggle remains the crucial political struggle of our
time, all around the world: from Burnaby BC, where the Kinder-Morgan pipeline
is being expanded on stolen native land, to Gaza where the indigenous
population is actively being massacred by a ruthless settler-colonial state. Indeed, in a statement this week, the
Communist Party of Canada compared the Good Friday massacre in Gaza to the
Sharpeville Massacre in Apartheid South Africa back in 1960, where 69 unarmed
black South African demonstrators were shot to death by the police. The Communist Party stands in full solidarity
with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, and has remained
steadfast in that solidarity for decades now, just as it remained steadfast in supporting the long struggle against
Apartheid in South Africa.
What some of you might not be aware of is that last
weekend was the 102nd anniversary of the Irish Easter Rising against
the British Empire and British colonial rule in Ireland in 1916. As you know, Ireland was never granted full
independence by the UK, the six counties of the North remain under British
occupation to this day and resistance to that occupation continues. And perhaps it comes as no surprise that
Ireland, with its own ongoing history of anti-colonial struggle, remains a true
bastion of solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian struggle. This was made loud in clear on Easter Monday
2018 in the city of Derry in occupied Northern Ireland, a city which itself witnessed
a Gaza-like massacre on Bloody Sunday January 30 1972 when British paratroopers
murdered 14 unarmed civil rights protesters.
At the Easter Monday demonstration, which was a Palestine
solidarity rally organized by Irish Friends of Palestine, Newry activist for
the radical Irish Republican political party Saoradh, Stephen
Murney, gave the following address, which is definitely worth quoting in full.
(Read Stephen Murney Easter Monday Oration)
(Eire Og “Bloody Sunday”)
(Damien Dempsey “Colony”)
You’re listening to Back in the USSR. The most recent episode of the Empire Files
on Telesur, which covered the recent events in Palestine, was blocked in 28
countries for its opposition to the Apartheid state of Israel. So I cannot bring that episode to you, but
what I can do is air an episode of the Empire Files from 2015 in which Max
Blumenthal, who also appeared in the recent banned episode, outlines the
conditions in Gaza in the bloody aftermath of the last Israeli invasion of the area
in 2014 as well as the sophisticated and effective resistance to that invasion
by the Palestinian people. I talked
about last week how armed struggle is sometimes a necessary tactic for
colonized people, and that no liberal idealist Western activist has any real
right to criticize that. To me, Max
Blumenthal makes that point far clearer in this interview than Norman
Finkelstein did in the interview I aired last week. Colonized people have the absolute right to
resist colonization by any means necessary.
Please stay tuned to Back in the USSR.
(The Empire Files: Max Blumenthal on Palestine’s Rebellion and Israeli Fascism)
You’re listening to Back in the USSR. One thing I mentioned last week and on
previous episodes of the show, is the ongoing colonization of black people in
North America, and the role of racist police brutality plays in that. Seeing that on the 4th, we had the
anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King’s assassination, an act that almost
certainly was the doing of the American state according to the evidence. I’d like to play this recent interview from
Eddie Conway of the Black Panther Party, examining the deep and racist roots
police violence has in America. Please
stay tuned.
(Eddie Conway: The Deep Rooted Crisis of Police Violence in the USA)
(David James Hudson: "Another Unoriginal Poem About Police Brutality")
(David James Hudson: "Another Unoriginal Poem About Police Brutality")
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