Solidarity With Gaza

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Opening Theme

(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 15^th, 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 6^th, 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 30^th.  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 102^nd 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 4^th, 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")

On A Field Of Red: A Poem About Lenin

Good intentions are not enough.

What do you do? When the world around you is twisted and tainted, when the most hellish injustice passes before your wandering eyes, nourishment for the beast whose hunger has no end: beggars, thieves, filthy factory barracks, 3 year olds whose only toys are the lethal cogs and spinning wheels of iron machines, whose waking nightmare dreams carry them across the deadly jungle of the factory floor and into the cracks and crevices that mark the haggard, guilt-ridden, broken faces of their mothers. 

Innocence is no defence against the hounds of hell and cold streets swallow the prisoners of the night: child prostitutes who sell their bodies to the unwashed crowds – draining the excess lust of an oppressed people until its irrepressible raging consumes their flesh, snaps their bones, and leaves them done to death in a broken stairwell or a dirty back alley – their bodies, limbs, the organic tools of life itself, fuel for the city’s medical schools as they teach their students how to save the arms and legs of those who can afford the cost of living.

What do you say to cold eyes, lonely eyes, angry eyes, sad eyes, dead eyes? What is left for you to be?

For once you know you can never go back – from the Moskva to the Neva, rivers flow black with the tears of the condemned.

The ghosts of reality will never leave you alone; plunging at you in your sleep and gnawing at the edges of your dreams.  Tranquil boyhood homes transformed into citadels of lies – beautiful green fields, rushing streams and warm breezes screaming with the desperate cruelty of distended bellies gorged on clay.

What is left, trapped in darkness, trapped in hell, except to be the vanguard of the new dawn, the light to the hopeless, a living symbol of who they can be, a living hammer breaking living chains? What is left but to be a light? A spark.

What is left, in a world where 99.9% of politicians are servitors of a criminal system, except to have the courage to stand among that 0.01% who call themselves revolutionaries? To stand amongst those who have cast themselves into the fire, crossed the threshold into endless struggle, sacrificed privilege and comfort in the name of a dream they may never see fulfilled.  To throw oneself, in terror, into the unknown; navigating storm-tossed seas in search of new lands just barely visible on the far horizon and shrouded by enough reefs and shoals to make any sane man turn back in fear.  But the revolutionary leader is no martyr, no willing sacrifice upon that bloody political altar that eternally thirsts for the blood of the ambitious.

No, he is there to win!

An elder brother swinging from the hangman’s noose, a grieving mother, a naive bunch of idealists, a broken tribe of assassins, a shattered lonely Parisian commune that never had a chance, Spanish anarchists ground into dust because they refused to stand together against a pathetic, ill-disciplined, government army that could barely crawl let alone walk! This time we’ll walk a different way.

No, he is not here to play the martyr!

For there is only one thing that the living can do for the dead, one thing that can sooth the pain of those alive but barely living, those standing yet barely walking, those working yet barely surviving, those broken yet yearning to be whole again.  One thing! And that is to win, and to keep winning; to form up lines and never break them; to achieve the unthinkable because the organization is unshakable.

So when you ask, why won’t he let you give a dissenting opinion? He will respond that your dissenting opinion means more dead children, more tiny hands shackled, more tiny hearts with no love, and more tiny brains uneducated.  Why does he dislike debate? Because there is no time.  Why is he so hard? Because enough is enough.  Why is he so damn authoritarian? Because without discipline we lose and losers don’t make revolutions.  There’s only one way out of hell: we can’t afford to be innocent and we can’t afford to play nice when our only playmates are devils and fiends.   

Words mean nothing without action.

The greatest of warriors are born with the taste of injustice on their tongues and in a shackled land, Russian Simbirsk has spawned a Spartacus.  But he knows in his righteous might that he is nothing but a symbol, an inspiration, an organizer – for the people make revolution just as gods are made through the looking glass of oppressed eyes burning with a secret power, a strength that was never thought possible amid the rubble of crushed dreams.  But now the impossible has become reality: a thousand vast hopes painted on a field of red.  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin born anew – a revolutionary in full flower.

A life runs over with hopes, fears, exile and return – sparks fly and finally fire sweeps the land as one hundred million hearts burst into flame.  It is 1917 and the spring wind sweeps away the dust of winter beneath an April sun.  And the world hears a cry fifty years in the making.  The streets rebound to marching feet, the creaking of open gates and the beckoning of a million hands as dark clouds begin to break upon the anvil of history. Statues and old gods shatter as the child looks up from the oppressive spinning of the power loom to the sound of distant thunder rebounding from pavements watered in blood and the voices of a risen people. Ten days that shook the world! New words rise with the dawn and echo though time and space: “My name is Vladimir, I am the revolutionary, and I am here to win!”The impossible has become reality: a thousand vast hopes painted on a field of red.  In autumn’s ashes a new man, a new world is born and bright eyes stare into the future that stretches on endlessly.