New Evidence Surfaces in Post-Katrina Crimes

By A.C. Thompson

July 11, 2009

This article is republished courtesy ProPublica, where it originated. The original stories in this investigation were first published exclusively by The Nation on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2008. They also appeared as the cover story of the Jan. 5, 2009 edition of The Nation magazine. A.C. Thompson’s reporting on New Orleans was directed and underwritten by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. ProPublica provided additional support, as did the Center for Investigative Reporting and New America Media.

Television news reports are casting new light on the violence that flourished in New Orleans in the anarchic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

A.C. Thompson’s reporting on New Orleans was directed and underwritten by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. ProPublica provided additional support, as did the Center for Investigative Reporting and New America Media.

The reports–broadcast Thursday by WTAE TV in Pittsburgh and WDSU in New Orleans–focus on two unsolved crimes: the near-fatal shooting of Donnell Herrington, who was allegedly attacked by a group of white vigilantes in the Algiers Point neighborhood, and the murder of Henry Glover, whose charred remains were discovered on a Mississippi River levee. Both victims are African American.

At the center of the news reports is a disturbing and grisly amateur video shot by a pair of private investigators in September 2005 and obtained recently by WTAE journalist Jim Parsons. (Full disclosure: This reporter was interviewed for the WTAE and WDSU stories.)

The private detectives, Mike Orsini and Istvan Balogh, are Pennsylvanians who traveled to New Orleans to volunteer in the wake of the storm. Orsini is a former police officer, while Balogh is an ex-corrections officer. They spent nearly two weeks camped out in Algiers Point, a middle class, largely white enclave nestled on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

On the video, a former Algiers Point resident talks calmly about shooting people. That man, Paul Gleeson claimed that he and his fellow gunmen shot 38 people and said that the victims were looters. Asked if any of the shooting victims died, Gleeson replied, “Who cares? I don’t (expletive) know. Who cares? What does it (expletive) matter?” The Algiers Point shootings, which have prompted an intensifying civil rights probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were exposed late last year in stories published by The Nation and ProPublica. While the neighborhood gunmen say that they were simply defending the community against thieves, other witnesses say that the group targeted black men and spewed racial epithets.

Orsini and Balogh say that they saw as many as five corpses lying around the neighborhood, which did not flood and suffered only minor wind damage. Orsini told WTAE, “Nobody took care of these bodies, and these were all individuals who had been shot.” The men videotaped one of the corpses, which was lying beneath a sheet of corrugated metal.

Orsini and Balogh have turned over their video over to the FBI. In an off-camera interview with WTAE, Gleeson’s ex-wife, Nicole Geraci said that she didn’t believe Gleeson was capable of murder. Just how credible Gleeson’s claims are may be difficult to determine: Gleeson, an Irish citizen, was deported several years ago.

Another Algiers Point local, Cathy Carmack, told WTAE that the Algiers Point gunmen instructed her to not talk about the violence: “They told me to keep my (expletive) mouth shut and I’d be afraid. I mean, I don’t want them coming after me.”

The statements of Gleeson and Carmack further suggest that Herrington, who was shot on Sept. 2, 2005, while walking through Algiers Point, was the victim of an organized group. Herrington, who at the time was employed as an armored car driver, was on his way to an evacuation zone established by rescue agencies when he was attacked. He says that his assailants opened fire on him for no reason, and yelled, “Get that nigger!”

The video footage gathered by Orsini and Balogh also contains evidence of the slaying of Glover, a 31-year-old father of four who died after being shot in early September 2005.

The footage shows Glover’s scorched remains–bone shards, ashes and a skull–as they lay inside an incinerated car on a Mississippi River levee.

Witnesses have linked the death to the New Orleans Police Department. Glover was shot by an unknown assailant near a shopping mall on the west bank of the Mississippi River. After the shooting, he was rescued by a stranger, William Tanner, who loaded the wounded man into his car and drove to a nearby elementary school where police officers had set up a command post. Tanner hoped that the officers could aid Glover or rush him to the nearest hospital.

Instead, according to Tanner and another witness, Glover’s brother Edward King, police personnel at the school failed to offer the bleeding man any medical assistance, allowing him to die in the back seat of Tanner’s white Chevrolet Malibu. Police then seized the car and Glover’s lifeless body, the witnesses say.

Glover’s burnt remains were later discovered in Tanner’s incinerated Chevy, which was dumped on a levee not far from an NOPD station. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in June that federal agents are examining the possibility that NOPD officers were actually involved in shooting Glover; a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony on the matter for several weeks.

While Orsini and Balogh’s video is grainy and shaky, it clearly shows a large hole in Glover’s skull, which, according to forensic pathologists, could be evidence of violence–a gunshot or other physical trauma–or a product of the intense heat to which the body was subjected to. The video is significant in part because it appears that Glover’s skull never made it to the temporary autopsy lab in St. Gabriel, La., where his body fragments were examined in October 2005. There’s no mention of it in the autopsy report, and Dr. Kevin Whaley, a forensic pathologist who examined Glover’s remains, said that he didn’t recall seeing a skull. “We probably only had 15 percent of him,” Whaley told us last year.

And that raises more ugly questions: Did somebody steal the skull in an attempt to hide evidence of a crime? Or did someone take it as a souvenir of Katrina?

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NYC: 33 Years is Too Much! Parole for Peltier!

Friday, July 17, 2009 • 7–9:30 p.m.

Judson Memorial Church
Corner of West 4th St. & Thompson St, NYC
(Exact location inside Judson to be announced)

Music: WMD Poetry, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Others TBA

Speakers: Mike Kuzma, Tiokasin Ghosthorse

Interview: Bruce Ellison, Parole Attorney

Video excerpts: No Boundaries by Peter Matthiesen

Leonard Crowdog on Leonard Peltier

Sliding Scale: $5 to $10. Nobody turned away due to empty pockets

For more information: nyclpsg@gmail.com • nycjericho@gmail.com • 718-365-4407

Sponsored by New York Leonard Peltier Support Group and friends:

NY Anarchist Black Cross Federation (NYCABCF), NYC Anarchist People of Color (APOC), First Voices Indigenous Radio, NYC Jericho, ProLibertad, Resistance in Brookly, Autonomous/Anarchist People of Color Philadelphia (APOC Philly)

Trains: A,B,C,D,F,V to W. 4th St., 2 blocks E. to Thompson; N,R to 8th St., S. to W 4th, W. to Thompson

To download a flyer for this event, click on the image below:

www.whoisleonardpeltier.info

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Hamas’ choice: Recognition or resistance in the age of Obama

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 6 July 2009

In a major policy speech on 25 June 2009, Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, tried to do what may be impossible: present the Islamist Palestinian resistance organization as a willing partner in a US-led peace process, while holding on to his movement’s political principles and base. [1]

This is the dilemma that every Palestinian leadership, and perhaps almost every liberation movement, has eventually had to confront. It is a choice, as political scientist Tamim Barghouti has pointed out, between recognition and legitimacy. [2]

Meshal’s nearly hour-long “address to the Palestinian people and the world” was billed as a response to the speeches of US President Barack Obama in Cairo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in June.

In his Cairo speech, Obama called for Americans and Muslims to engage in a “sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.” If he is serious about that, he — and others — should pay close attention to what Hamas is saying to domestic, regional and international audiences. Meshal’s goals — very much in tension — were to show that his movement is ready to do business with the US, set out political red lines, reassure the movement’s supporters and Palestinians generally and deal with internal Palestinian divisions.

To begin with, the speech sought to present Hamas as a nationalist movement whose Islamism fits within a mainstream Palestinian consensus. Meshal used an explicitly ecumenical message to counter Netanyahu’s exclusivist Jewish claims to the land of Palestine. According to Meshal, Palestinians’ roots stretched back thousands of years “in this blessed land of prophets and messages, of [Muhammad's] night ascension, of Muslim and Christian holy sites — al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, the Nativity Church and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

More generally, he sought to portray Muslims as representing the very values Westerners claim to cherish most and dissociate Hamas from lurid and false comparisons to such groups as the Taliban. “We [Muslims] are the ones who introduced the world and humanity to science, civilization, culture and lofty humanitarian values,” Meshal declared, “values such as justice, freedom, equality, compassion and tolerance, and the values of interaction between civilizations and not a confrontation between them.”

Meshal welcomed a “change of tone” from President Obama but emphasized repeatedly that only a change of policy would matter. He nevertheless claimed the new tone as the fruit of the “stubborn steadfastness of the people of the region, while resisting in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.” Such resistance, according to Meshal, frustrated the former US President George W. Bush administration’s plans for regional domination, prompting American voters to seek a different path to extricate their country from mounting crises and quagmires.

He chided regional leaders who had “marketed and promoted” Bush’s policies. “Had the people of the region listened to them,” Meshal said, “the policy of Bush and the neoconservatives might have succeeded and the region’s situation would be worse than imaginable.” Meshal voiced the widespread skepticism and perhaps hopes that Obama’s promises amounted to more than the similar words about Palestine heard from the Bush Administration.

Responding to Obama’s recital of history, Meshal did not seek to deny the Nazi Holocaust but to appropriate it. He took Obama to task for dwelling in detail on the “suffering of the Jews and their holocaust in Europe, while ignoring our present suffering and Israel’s holocaust against our Palestinian people that has been continuing for decades.”

Meshal emphasized that even though Palestinians have heard only words, they were prepared to judge the US by its actions, which would have to “begin with reconstruction of Gaza and the lifting of the blockade, lifting the oppression and security pressure in the West Bank, and allowing Palestinian reconciliation to take its course without external pressures or interference.”

The “only thing” that can convince Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, Meshal stated, “is genuine American and international will and efforts to end the occupation and lift the oppression from our people, to allow them to exercise their right to self-determination and the fulfillment of their national rights.” When the Obama administration makes such an initiative, Meshal said, “then we and all our people’s forces will be ready to cooperate with it and with any international effort in that direction.”

Obama’s “new language toward Hamas,” Meshal underlined, “is the first step in the right direction towards direct dialogue without conditions.” And that is the crux of the matter. Dealing with Hamas, Meshal said, must be based on the recognition of its democratic mandate and not via the imposition of arbitrary conditions such as those of the Quartet which call on the movement to recognize Israel, abandon violence and commit by previously signed agreements.

Meshal reasserted Hamas’ political red lines while maintaining a sense of flexibility. In particular, Meshal:

• Rejected the Palestinian state envisaged by the Israeli leader as a “deformed entity, a large prison for detention and suffering, and not the national home a great people deserves.”
• Rejected Israel’s demand to be recognized as a “Jewish state” — and warned against any Arab or Palestinian acquiescence — “because it means canceling the right to return to their homes of six million refugees, and the forced expulsion of our people in the 1948 areas [Palestinian citizens of Israel] from their cities and villages.” Israel’s demand, according to Meshal, is no different than racist demands made by fascist Italy and the Nazis.
• Reaffirmed Hamas’ previous acceptance of “the program that represents the minimum demands of our people,” for “the establishment of a Palestinian state whose capital is Jerusalem with complete sovereignty on the borders of 4 June 1967, after the withdrawal of the occupation forces, and the dismantling of all the settlements, and the realization of the Right of Return.”
• Reaffirmed that “the refugees’ Right of Return to the homes from which they were expelled in 1948 is a national right and an individual right held personally” by the refugees “and no leader or negotiator can waive it or compromise on it.”

Meshal also offered a nuanced response to Obama’s call on Palestinians to abandon “dead end” violence in favor of nonviolent resistance. “We reaffirm our adherence to resistance as a strategic choice to liberate the homeland and restore our rights,” Meshal said, citing armed European resistance to Nazi Germany, American resistance to British rule and the Vietnamese and South African anti-colonial struggles as precedents for Palestinians.

“Nonviolent resistance is appropriate in a struggle for civil rights,” Meshal argued, “But when it comes to a military occupation using conventional and nonconventional weapons, such an occupation can only be confronted with armed resistance.” Palestinians were forced to take up arms, Meshal said. He could also have been implying that if Palestinians changed the definition of their struggle as being one for civil rights then the appropriate means of resistance would also change.

“Resistance is a means and not an end,” Meshal said, “and it is not blind. Indeed it perceives the changes underway.” Yet, while staunchly defending the right to armed resistance — and even threatening new operations to take Israeli soldiers prisoner if it was the only way to free Palestinians prisoners — Meshal also recognized other forms of struggle. He called for increased Palestinian, Arab and international solidarity efforts, including ongoing efforts to break the siege on Gaza, to resist the apartheid wall and settlements and to prevent home demolitions and “Judaiziation” in Jerusalem.

For Hamas leaders, the dangers of submitting to western preconditions can be seen merely by looking at the trajectory of the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership which recognized Israel in 1993, renounced armed struggle and signed the Oslo accords. Since that time, Meshal argued, the occupation and its oppression deepened as the number of Israeli settlements and Palestinian prisoners grew.

As Meshal put it, “These conditions do not end; as soon as the Palestinian negotiator commits to one, more conditions are imposed. For example, first the condition was to recognize Israel, now it is to recognize the Jewishness of Israel. Then, that Jerusalem is its eternal capital, giving up the Right of Return, accepting that settlement blocks will remain. Then [Palestinians] must not only abandon resistance, but themselves work to oppress, pursue and disarm the resistance.”

The latter point was a reference to the arrest campaign in the West Bank and what Meshal called other “oppressive measures undertaken by the [Palestinian] Authority and the government of Salam Fayyad and its security forces under the supervision of the American General [Keith] Dayton.” Meshal presented this ongoing cooperation between the Ramallah security forces, Israel and the US as the biggest obstacle to Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo aimed at restoring a unified national leadership.

After Hamas won the 2006 legislative election, the Bush administration began a program overseen by Dayton to arm and train anti-Hamas militias nominally loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The campaign has been accompanied by what Hamas and some human rights groups have described as a systematic crackdown on politicians, professors, charities and journalists suspected of sympathy or links with Hamas. Hamas has often retaliated by arresting Fatah-linked individuals in the Gaza Strip. In recent weeks, the Dayton-supervised militias have killed several members of Hamas in the West Bank ostensibly while trying to arrest them. Meshal cleverly drew attention to the external role in fueling Palestinian divisions — and how little has actually changed from the Bush Administration — by “calling on Obama to withdraw Dayton from the West Bank and return him to the United States, in keeping with the new spirit of change.”

Throughout the speech, Meshal sought to reassure Palestinians that Hamas would not abandon its core principles in pursuit of recognition and power. “The land is more important than authority, and liberation before a state,” he said at one point, and “no Palestinian leadership has the right to waive Palestinian national rights and interests as the price for recognition.”

Some Palestinians worry that despite such assurances, Hamas has already set off down the very path Meshal warned about and risks squandering the sacrifices Palestinians made, especially in Gaza. Haidar Eid, an independent analyst in Gaza, wrote before Meshal’s speech that some of the early enthusiastic Hamas responses to Obama’s Cairo speech, as well as acceptance of the two-state solution, indicated “the beginning of a process of deterioration — even Osloization — not only in rhetoric, but also in action.” This writer has heard similar fears voiced by Palestinians from the West Bank and recently in Amman. Given that many Palestinians consider that a previous generation of resistance leaders turned their backs on their people’s most fundamental interests and rights — all the while claiming to uphold them — such fears are far from irrational or uncommon.

Another analysis of Hamas’ shift currently circulating argues that Hamas has accepted the Palestinian “consensus” position of a two-state solution on every inch of the 1967 occupied territories with removal of all settlements and with the Right of Return. But it knows that no potential peace deal coming from the Obama initiative will ever reach even these minimal conditions, and that if Abbas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could not reach even the outlines of an agreement after two years of negotiations, the chances of any deal with a Netanyahu-Lieberman government are even tinier. In this scenario, Hamas need not stand in the way of a two-state solution because it will fail anyway. But by saying it would accept that minimalist outcome, it would avoid blame for the failure and its adherence to resistance would be vindicated.

What we do know is that Hamas’ leaders, and the Palestinians generally, have been placed under intense pressure, occupation, blockades, starvation sieges and recurrent Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the vast majority so far has not submitted to Israeli conditions. But while emphasizing the role of resistance and struggle to achieve liberation, Hamas has not offered a clear vision of what liberation looks like other than the unconvincing and increasingly unrealistic two-state vision (leaving aside its long, outdated, though much-cited charter that offers no guide to the movement’s current thinking).

Meshal’s speech confirms Hamas’ long-term shift away from Islamist rhetoric toward mainstream Palestinian nationalist discourse. It indicates that Hamas is highly sensitive to international and Palestinian public opinion and is aware that Palestinians need to build real international solidarity as part of a strategy to level the glaring power imbalance with Israel. But it is not prepared to seek recognition at any price. All this has implications for the movement’s message and methods.

This leaves the field open for an urgent debate among Palestinians about what that future vision should be and what role resistance in all its legitimate forms should play. No group of leaders, whether from Hamas or any other organization, could or should carry the burden of restoring Palestinian rights by itself. Hamas, like other Palestinian organizations, can only be a guardian of fundamental rights to the extent that it is embedded in a broader movement mobilized in Palestine and globally to defend those rights.

And if Hamas’ potential interlocutors are sincerely seeking ways to recognize the democratic mandate of the movement without trying to force it to forfeit its legitimacy, there are precedents. South Africa’s African National Congress and the Irish Republican Army were both able to take part in successful political negotiations that got their respective countries out of disastrous political and military stalemates without being required to submit to unacceptable preconditions. That took a measure of leadership, foresight and political courage by others that has been notably absent in international dealings with Hamas.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Abunimah also co-founded The Electronic Intifada. This analysis was originally published by the Palestine Center.

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Minister calls for Jewish takeover of Palestinian areas in Israel

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 6 July 2009

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

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San Francisco 8: Charges dropped – Jalil pleads no contest – Cisco’s case continues

Monday, July 6, 2009

Finally, after years of unified resistance by the brothers and a the building of massive support, California State prosecutors were forced to admit that they have insufficient evidence against the San Francisco 8.

Charges against four of the defendants were dropped and Jalil Muntaqim pled no contest to conspiracy to commit voluntary manslaughter. The State prosecutor asked the court to sentence him to 12 months calling it “a drop in the bucket.” Judge Moscone replied “unless you’re the one doing the time.” Jalil received credit for time served (close to 2 1/2 years in County Jail) and 3 years probation. He will return to New York to fight for parole.

All charges were dismissed today against Ray Boudreaux, Richard Brown, Hank Jones, and Harold Taylor.

The courtroom at 850 Bryant Street was packed with SF 8 supporters after a rally of hundreds and a huge “Free SF 8″ banner was displayed on the hillside of Bernal Heights to be seen from all over the city.

“This is finally the disposition of a case that should never have been brought in the first place,” announced attorney Soffiyah Elijah.

Francisco Torres still faces a court hearing on August 10. Francisco steadfastly maintains his innocence according to his attorney Charles Bourdon who intends to file a motion to dismiss the charges against his client.

Herman Bell Pleads Guilty to Reduced Charge of Manslaughter –
No Prison Sentence

Herman Bell was supported by a courtroom of supporters June 29th as he entered a plea in the SF 8 case. After legal formalities he left the courtroom raising a clenched fist to the crowd.

Herman Bell pled guilty to the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter for his role in the killing of San Francisco police officer John Young in 1971.

Part of the plea agreement is that Herman will not be a witness against his comrades and friends and cannot be called to any hearing as a witness by the prosecution.

His sentence is that he will be placed on informal probation for five years and will be allowed to immediately return to New York. He will receive absolutely no additional prison time for his actions.

Herman and his co-defendants have always maintained that because of the torture used by the New Orleans Police Department to gain alleged confessions and the lack of new evidence, these charges should never have been brought.

Herman’s letter to supporters and friends follows.

7/2/09

Dear friends

Your strong showing of support at my plea/sentencing hearing this past Monday was truly heartening. For me, removing the possibility of going to trial when a proposal (though unpalatable) is offered that would leave open a future chance at parole in another jurisdiction was something I could not pass up. So I accepted the AG’s proposal. There is no disunity here, just a tactical legal decision having been made. I could never be at peace with myself if I sat in a prison cell for the rest of my days knowing that I rejected a proposal that left open possible freedom one day. You expect me to think and act responsibly and to make responsible decisions. I expect no less of myself or of you.

I am so proud of you and all the work you’ve done in our behalf and in waking our movement from its lethargy – proud of your speaking, proud of your fund-raising, proud of your organizing (the Labor Council, the City Supervisors, the Caravan to Sacramento – such a sweet piece of “main stream” organizing, and the tribute to Panther women). So very proud that you were in court to smile your greetings whenever we appeared; proud that you made bail for those of us who could bail-out, and that you routinely visited those of us who could not. I shall miss your frequent visits, so how could I not go forward in this without a heavy heart. I do so thanking you for being true to yourselves and thanking you for the love and righteous support you gave and are giving the SF8.

I love you all.

Herman.

Committee for the Defense of Human Rights
P.O. Box 90221 Pasadena, CA 91109 (415) 226-1120
E-mail: freethesf8 [at] riseup [dot] net • www.freethesf8.org

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Hiyam, a Gaza teenager killed as she offered aid

Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 5 July 2009

Thursday was as normal and quiet an afternoon as you get in Johr al-Deek village in the central Gaza Strip. “Prepare yourself for I will be taking you to the dentist in half an hour,” Salim Abu Ayish recalled telling his 17-year-old daughter Hiyam.

Moments later everything changed. “At 5:30 PM an Israeli shell landed on my brother’s house,” the father told visitors who had come to offer condolences for his daughter at the family’s home on Friday. The shell injured a nephew and Salim Abu Ayish rushed to render aid.

“I asked Hiyam to bring me the car key from my bedroom,” Salim Abu Ayish said. As she went, he recalled, “suddenly another shell struck my room, killing Hiyam instantly, as shrapnel rippled through her body. I was injured with some of the shrapnel in my back and my neck.”

Two Israeli army shells landed in the family houses of the Abu Ayish clan in the Johr al-Deek village, just north of the al-Bureij refugee camp and about 1.5 kilometers from the border with Israel. The shelling caused critical injury to Husam Abu Ayish, Hiyam’s 21-year-old cousin and minor wounds to Hiyam’s father and sister, Nawal. For hours after the attack, the Israeli army denied any involvement and claimed the attack was the result of mortar shells fired by Palestinians. But late on Thursday, the Israeli army changed its story, admitting that Palestinian civilians were hit “accidentally” by Israeli army fire directed at Palestinian gunmen in the area, according to Israeli media.

Taking a deep breath, and trying to be strong despite his agony, Abu Ayish remembered his daughter: “She used to be humorous, active, well-mannered and smiling. I never turned down her requests. On Thursday, the day her soul went to heaven, she asked me to bring some watermelon, but her destiny was faster than me. Two months ago, she asked me to bring her a necklace, and I did buy her one,” he recalled.

“Hiyam was more than a sister,” recalled Emad, 24, Hiyam’s brother. “She was different from my other five sisters. Just about an hour before she was martyred, she wondered when I would get married.” Emad remembers her saying, “we want to celebrate your wedding, my brother.” Instead of such happy memories, Emad now has only pictures of his sister’s wounded face, taken with his mobile phone.

“Every time she visited our home, my children would get so cheerful as they enjoyed the laughter and fun she would bring to our house,” recalled Saleh Abu Hajjaj, Hiyam’s brother-in-law.

“She was one of my best students,” said Jamal al-Nabahin, a teacher at Qaysaria Secondary School for Girls where Hiyam had recently completed her 11th year certificate. “She was active and sometimes very funny. Her death is a great loss, and may she rest in peace.”

Mahmoud al-Aydi, the father of Raghda, one of Hiyam’s friends and schoolmates, recalled that the two girls had been chatting on the phone shortly before the shells struck. On hearing what had happened Raghda had “fainted for three hours,” according to Raghda’s father, “she could not believe Hiyam was killed.”

Um Jihad, Hiyam’s mother only uttered a few words, “May God hold accountable those who killed my beloved daughter.”

In December 2008 and January 2009, Israel carried out a massive bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip. The 22 days of Israeli attacks claimed the lives of 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians. Before and after the attack, Israel has maintained a strict blockade on the coastal territory grossly hampering the daily lives of its 1.5 million residents.

“We have nowhere to go to,” said Hiyam’s father, “Even if we wanted to move, the siege has prevented us from building as there are no building materials available. The situation is extremely difficult, and yet the world keeps silent about our continuing agony.”

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

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NorthEast Two-Spirit Society and Audre Lorde Project’s Executive Director Forced from Manhattan Pride March

June 29th, 2009 in United States Two-Spirits, People

NEW YORK – The NorthEast Two-Spirit Society (NE2SS) and Kris Hayashi, Executive Director of Audre Lorde Project were forcefully ejected from this year’s annual Heritage of Pride March in New York City yesterday.

Just before 2PM, Lieutenant Connoly of the Midtown Taskforce demanded that the People of Color Contingent leave the parade. The reason given was that a delay of 6 blocks existed between the People of Color contingent and the contingent in front of them.  NYPD raised the issue of the gap once and POC contingent marshals were in the process of closing the gap.   Kris Hayashi, Executive Director of Audre Lorde Project (ALP), and Loyda Colon also of ALP explained to Lieutenant Connoly, that they were in the process of closing the gap and Lieutenant Connoly refused to listen.  Lieutenant Connoly then insisted that the POC contingent leave the parade, and attempted to arrest both Colon and Hayashi. Lieutenant Connoly then ejected Harlan Pruden, the driver of NE2SS’ support vehicle and co-founder of NE2SS, other members of NE2SS (who led the People of Color Contingent), and Hayashi from the parade. Hayashi was physically dragged off the parade route.

“It should have been a day to celebrate and have fun,” Harlan Pruden, Co-founder of NE2SS.

After being ejected, Pruden and Hayashi asked to get NE2SS back into the parade.  Pruden was repeatedly threatened with a summons and towing of the organization’s vehicle. After 30 minutes, the official answer from the NYPD as communicated by Heritage of Pride was that NE2SS could continue to march as long as Pruden was not included. Without their support vehicle, of which Pruden was the only driver, NE2SS could not continue.

Kevin VanWanseele, NE2SS member, “This was supposed to be a proud day for LGBT Native American people in New York City and in the end it was not!”

About NE2SS: NE2SS works to increase the visibility of the two-spirit community and to provide social, traditional and recreational opportunities that are culturally appropriate to the two-spirit community of NYC and the surrounding tri-state area.  According to the 2000 US Census, our area is the home to the largest urban American Indian population in the country. At the heart of NE2SS effort is community development for all our peoples.

About ALP: The Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non Conforming People of Color center for community organizing, focusing on the New York City area.  ALP coordinates the People of Color contingent at Manhattan Pride.

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Building a Non-Eurocentric Anarchism in Our Communities: Dialogue with Ashanti Alston

Building a Non-Eurocentric Anarchism in Our Communities: Dialogue with Ashanti Alston

The following is an interview with Ashanti Alston Omowali, an African descent anarchist activist, who started his political militancy back in the ‘60s in the Black Panther Party. He was also a member of the Black Liberation Army, and because of his revolutionary activities spent more than a decade in prison. In prison he moved forward to anarchism and after his release he has participated with numerous libertarian initiatives and publications, and is one of the founders of Anarchist People of Color (APOC), a network that brings together anarchists of colour in the remarkably racist US. Ashanti also participates in a number of initiatives ranging from solidarity with political prisoners in the US to the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

This interview was done on March 9th, 2009, during the time he spent in Ireland when he came as a speaker for the 2009 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair. In the interview we talk about the APOC initiative, the links between exploitation and other forms of oppression, of the need to go beyond Eurocentrism and the place of people of colour and Third World struggles in shaping a really internationalist movement that learns from experiences everywhere. He also reflects on the roots and legacy of the Black Liberation Movement and of his own experiences in it.

Ashanti Alston speaks at the Anarchist Bookfair in Liberty Hall, Dublin, March 7th 2009.

1. How and why the idea of Anarchist People of Colour came about?

In the US the anarchist movement I would say since the ‘90s it grew a lot and a lot of people wanted to know what it was about, including many people of colour, because the traditional revolutionary groups that were Marxist-Leninist or nationalists were not appealing to them for being so rigid in their ideology and the loyalty they wanted you to adhere to, it was something that a lot of folks did not want. But folks that were moving into anarchism from Black, Latino and Asian communities, and even indigenous communities, found that their experiences within anarchist groups were racists.

It may have been good in the sense that they were practicing direct democracy, or they would be active in the street demonstrations, but they though themselves to be “exoticised” within these predominant white groups, because they were from African, Asian, Latino or Indigenous descent that they were treated as if they were so special, that wasn’t a good experience. Or the racism of white anarchists was just too much to put up with, and people weren’t fighting racism.

So at some point towards the late ‘90s, the call went out to have a conference that would be for anarchist of colour, anti-authoritarians of colour, or people who were interested in something beyond traditional ways of organisations, so in 2003 it was the first APOC conference. And I said about 300 people came to Detroit, Michigan, in the US, to a university called Wayne State University. And that was a great conference which allowed many of us to see each other for the first time, and we realized we had so much in common, but we needed to work from foundation where we knew that we would respect each other, and we’d have a way to work in our communities in a more wholesome way.

2. You talk about having to face discriminatory or racist practices within the anarchist movement, which was often not explicit practices but part of a culture, we could say… how do you think that this racism that is entrenched in people’s culture can be fought within the movement and within society at large?

In the anarchist movement we were basically asking to white anarchists to deal with racism within anarchist organisation. Many of them were not understanding that being born in a racist society, and if you were born white in that society, you were not only being raised with a sense of superiority but that you have privileges, and we wanted them to face that fact in their interactions with us, because most of them from the anarchist movement come from privileged background. So deal with the fact that you have some behaviours that come up very offensively to us, that are very insulting to us, since they have never lived the type of circumstances in which we’ve had to live in, and we want us just to be with you and not recognize that when we go back to our communities we are with our backs against the wall, but when we are with you things are pretty nice and you just want everything to always be pretty nice. We want to tell you that in the US you pretty much got communities of colour that are locked down. So we need to fight racism not only in the institutions, whether it is schools, around jobs or police brutality in communities of colour, but fight it within anarchist institutions, as a way to fight racism in the US in general, what’s all still one struggle.

3. Women found the same experience within the movement, and they were pushed to form women only groups. How do you fell that this relates to the fact that there are other types of oppression that interact with class struggle, but in which class struggle alone does not explain everything… I feel some sectors within the anarchist movement seem to be blind to these other forms of oppression, what do you think about it?

Something I’ve learnt, and that I’m still learning by reading and listening to other people, is that we have to look at the fact that most of our understanding of anarchism comes from Europe. And I don’t think that we realize that it may have taught us a lot, in terms of another ways to live and organise, or how to be open to differences, but we don’t really get that coming out of Europe it will also brings us a perspective on class struggle that they pretty much want to adhere to as if it was something Biblical, that if other struggles are anarchistic and they don’t come out of working class struggles that does not make them any less anarchists because it is not workers taking it on. It may be peasants taking it on, it may be people tied to the land in other ways. So for me one cannot just read the anarchist classics coming out of Europe, but one have to learn from other people’s living experiences and writings on their experiences. Even if those experiences and writings are not from people that say “I am an anarchist”. But you can tell pretty much from their writings and experiences that these are anarchistic struggles, you know, that play a big part even today in being at the foremost of some of the most challenging struggles against the Empire.

4. You have mentioned Chiapas as being a big influence to you. How do you think the struggle of the people of Chiapas relates to the type of anarchism you defend?

I think the struggle of the Zapatistas played a big part because it made you realize that revolutionary thinking can come from many social categories… for instance, in Chiapas you are talking about the South East of Mexico, which is one of the poorest regions of Mexico, predominantly Mayan people that have been written off by capitalism and imperialism. And yet here there’s a struggle that is producing the most cutting edge thinking on revolution today. To me the Zapatista struggle really made important, for example, not only ethnic community struggles, but the struggle of women, struggle in the universities, struggles in the cultural field of life, and how all of these are part of a larger picture. But when they say that we can create a world where many worlds exist, they also want you to recognize that you are in a world where many worlds do exist and that no one world can come along and predominate over all the other ones, “I have the only solution, I have the only revolutionary way to go”.

5. You mention other important point, and it is that classic socialist thought has been a struggle for a hegemonic thought for a uniform culture, and yet your views come from the opposite view, that is diversity. How do you think the anarchist movement can shape this view of diversity with the need for unity of struggle, so we can talk of a movement that while having unity preserves this diversity?

Well, it is interesting that some of the things that have allowed me to look at struggles around the world and even struggles in my own community differently, was me reading a lot of revolutionary thought that came out of some of the older liberation struggles and some of the most recent university struggles that may have taken place in France and Germany, so we are dealing with people like Michel Foucault, or we are dealing with German thinkers who were talking for example of hegemony and some other different concepts on the intersection of different oppressions and how we have to look at the world in a more complex way. What it tells me is that if anarchism wants to be vibrant, if anarchism is to remain vibrant it must be open to difference, it must be open to be enriched by other people’s struggles, other people’s thought, other people’s practices which challenge even some of the core beliefs of anarchism proper.

So for me again the Zapatistas the thing around difference becomes so important, because you have to have struggles from people from different worlds, from different realities, yet we can figure out a way within the same space and push our commonalities forward but in a way that respects the individuality of the struggles. So if I’m an African in America, if I’m of African descent in New York, I want to be involved with the Mapuche, I want to be involved with the struggles in Africa, Asia, the Irish Republican movement, in a way that they all see me in the way I am, and I see them, and we realize that we can still move in a common way that brings down the Empires that affect all of our lives.

But we’ve to do it in a way that we don’t have to submit any part of our identity that makes us who we are. We are not all workers, we are very much multifaceted people wherever we come from, but our specific histories and specific space in time, makes us who we are, and with that comes out our richness and it has to be respected. We don’t have to submit who we are like the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and even I would say the Cuban Revolution, and all the major so called revolutions wanted people to submit to a mass line, and if you did not fit there, if you were still living in traditional ways or what they may call the jungle, tribal ways, some State power is going to say no, you are coming to the modern world or we will wipe you out. Today we see that that’s not the way we want to go.

6. What you say makes a lot of sense in terms of learning from other people’s experiences. Anarchism was a very strong movement earlier in the XXth Century, then it declined and now it is certainly coming back with great strength at potentials. But somehow it seems that we largely ignore what happened in terms of struggles in the middle… Yes, we are going back to the Spanish Revolution, to the Russian Revolution but we forget that in the meantime the whole of the African Continent was in revolution. Yes, they did not lead to anarchist socialism, as neither Russia nor Spain did, but something came out of it in terms of experience, lessons, and a lot of other stuff… do you think there are experiences such as this that could actually enrich anarchist thought today?

It’s like you say. When you can get away from all of the classic struggles that are pushed over and over for you to learn about, whether is China, Russia or Spain, we forget that there are struggles that are right around you most likely, or in local areas all around the world that provide examples. So for example in the US those of us in the Black nationalist movement, in the Black liberation movement, we studied the examples of the Maroon communities from the North American to the South American continent, of Africans who broke away from slavery, who were in many cases able to hook up with indigenous communities and formed free communities, communities in resistance, of resistance. They are worth studying. For instance, in Africa you also have the Igbo women’s war in 1929. If one wants to see an anti-authoritarian struggle lead by women against British colonialism, you have to start studying the Igbo women’s war of 1929 in Nigeria.

These are just examples of how people dealt with their economic needs, the needs to feed themselves. In places in Africa where you have borders, you have folks that out of necessity, who say, well, fuck the borders. We want to trade with folks across the border because we were connected with them until the Europeans put up an artificial borderline to our lands. But in them defying the borders they are creating new anti-authoritarian experiences where they say, we don’t need borders. Borders are oppression. The Chicanos say all the time about the border between Mexico and the US that it is not them crossing the border it is the border crossing them. Because that border was artificially border was put there to oppress them and now the US has the balls to say that Mexicans coming over into the US is illegal, when they are really coming to what is historically their own land.

So there are many things we need to re look and study, and not just confine ourselves to certain areas that we feel can only give us an example of some kind of proper anarchist struggle or anarchist revolution.

7. In the US Anarchist Tradition you have some remarkable anarchists who were also people of colour… I’m thinking of people like Ben Fletcher, Lucy Parsons, who also was a woman… do you think that they made a sensitive contribution to the movement as such, what would you take from their experience and teachings?

Ben Fletcher you know is someone like workers in the US still don’t know anything about him, neither do they don’t know about Lucy Parsons. But Ben Fletcher was part of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, an organisation which was so powerful in the US like in the 1910s, ‘20s and probably up to the 30s… and they were very effective because here there was a revolutionary movement that also fought to include many different ethnic groups, you know. So they had indigenous folks who were members of the IWW, they had folks of African descent, they had folks who spoke Spanish, the Italians were coming, everybody was making their way to the IWW. But a lot of people don’t know that this movement waged a fierce battle against what can be called the labour aristocracy up to the government and the corporations at the time, who were brutally ruthless in their repression.

One of the things about Lucy Parsons that many people don’t know is that she was a woman of mixed heritage… I mean, she was Mexican, African and Indigenous, and although at a time in her life she denied to have an African ancestry, to many people at the time it was obvious that she did. Yet, she was a woman who was extraordinary and played an extraordinary part in the growth of the anarchist movement within the US. She did things so outrageous as to marry Albert Parsons, who was a white man who was a part of the Confederacy, that was on the side of the racist who wanted to enslave black folks, but at some point, like the soldiers who went to Vietnam, he came into a consciousness that it was the US and the capitalists who were the enemy, so he and Lucy Parsons married and they moved to Chicago. Both of them become outspoken proponents of anarchism for working class people. Lucy Parsons even though she may have had her problems with people calling her black, she still spoke against lynching and for the rights of people of African descent in the US. So she goes down history in the anarchist movement as being a key figure, but few people to this day know about Lucy Parsons. But she was a courageous woman up to the day she day.

But it’s like for her, Ben Fletcher, all these other people… there was also a very important Native American that was assassinated, but there’s a lot of other heroes and heroines we need to know about, especially folks of colour, to see that there were many people that were inspired by anarchist ideas, what it basically is “we don’t need bosses even though they should be considered themselves as revolutionary bosses; we need to be collective, we need to be communal, we need to be as they say today horizontal in all that we do”. So I am looking for ways today to spread information about people like Ben Fletcher and Lucy Parsons.

8. You know better than me, but the two key figures of the African-American movement seem to be Malcolm X and Martin Luther Kin… what would you get from them and learn from them? And what would you reject from them?

They were definitely two very key leaders. I would also include among them people like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and a few others… Ella Baker was key in the early Civil Rights Movement where she pushed for the students and the young folks to reject the older black leadership that were pretty much held by the black ministers, the preachers, you know, because they kept holding the students back. And Ella Baker, who was an old woman at the time, told the students: “you must become your own leadership” and she pushed for a kind of leadership that was community based. She wanted people to get away from the charismatic preachers or the leadership of the educated ones. Fannie Lou Hamer because she was just this poor Black woman who got involved with the Civil Rights Movement and became such a dynamic leader, because she brought everything she learned from being just a regular community person, a church person, in to the movement, what meant that she cared about people.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had a relationship with them. One of the preachers that Ella Baker criticized was actually Martin Luther King! Because he was part of that preacher leadership, no matter how great he was in many other ways. And here you have Ella Baker telling the students “be your own leaders, no matter how brilliant and charismatic they are, be your own”. But Martin Luther King was great in other ways too. Because, just like Malcolm, they both showed that when they were challenged by a reality that they found hard to accept, they were willing to look at it and change their thinking and change their ways on it. So when Martin kept confronting the failure of the non-violent movement, he had a key thinking about the role of violence. When he was challenged to stop being so local and to start looking at the international scene, he began to look at the Vietnam war. When he was challenged to look at the role of workers, or the activity of workers, he began to support workers. And those three things, how he began to oppose the Vietnam war, how he began to support workers, and it was obvious even to the FBI that he was rethinking his position on non-violence, a lot of us believe that it was then when the system had him killed.

Similarly, Malcolm challenged us even like not to confine ourselves to thinking about civil rights. Malcolm said civil rights is when you keep everything in the hands of the enemy, we got to get out of that, we need to get our own thinking. Malcolm X also challenged us to think that if you want to be free, you must be willing to do it by any means necessary. This “any means necessary” part became so popular, because it gave us a way to really think that if we want to be free, even if that means bring down the American system, we got to be willing to engage our life in that direction. But Malcolm’s life too was one where when he saw that he was wrong, he had the courage to face it, admit it and move on. So many of us look at Malcolm as someone who’s not that egotistical to keep on going on one path, even when it is clear that this path don’t work. When his mentor, Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, started to obviously betray his own teachings, it took Malcolm a way, but when finally he had to face it, he had to reject the practices of his mentor and move on his own as it was necessary. But Malcolm was so important with moving people towards revolutionary thinking that when he went to Africa and other parts of the world, he came back talking about socialistic revolutions. He brought back messages saying that people were moving more towards socialism and getting away from capitalism.. And that was important for us to know, because most of us did not think about that. We just wanted to get rid of racism, but he got us to see that there was a connection between racism and capitalism, that you can’t get rid of one, without getting rid of the other. So Malcolm was really important.

If the two of them had come together in some kind of unity, we don’t know how it may have changed the course of our struggle, but we can’t live with that now, we just got to learn from them and just keep moving and learn from our own mistakes and go forward and figure out how we are going to win. They are dead, everything is on us now, the future is on us, but their lives they still are here, close to us.

9. If there’s something you think was a crucial learning in your period in the Panthers, what is it?

Ok, then that would be sitting in prison as I did. This is the long stretching prison, this is like 12 years. And all that time you are turning that prison into a university; you got to think, you got to reflect on the past. It helped me to see the strengths and the weaknesses of the Black Panther Party (BPP). And I think that both of them are key to me to this day, because I think they are still relevant today.

The strength of the BPP was that we were willing to think about the revolution. We understood the role of criticism and struggle and we were willing to go into our communities with programmes. We were not the intellectual types that all we did was being intellectual towards each other, day in and day out. If you got something that you think is good, you put it into practice. Practice will tell you whether it works or not, if it doesn’t, you go back to the drawing board.

I think the weaknesses of the BPP was that we were young, that our enemy was very experienced and that we did not have a strong enough what may be called a “decolonisation programme” whereas while we are doing this work in our communities, while we are combating out enemies, that we are consciously trying to work this system out of our bodies and out of our minds, and out of our most intimate relationships. Because I think those are the areas that our enemies use to bring us down: the sexism, the authoritarianism, the fears of freedom, the fears of death, all those things. We didn’t have ways to deal with those areas and I think it weakened us a lot.

10. You are talking about the intimate relationship between capitalism and racism, sexism and other types of oppression… I think it’s a tough one, because they are not necessarily linked in very obvious ways at all times. So do you think there is any single main link between them? How do they interact within a capitalist framework? How can you bring together a programme to end exploitation while at the same time finish all kinds of oppression what is the main purpose of anarchism?

Now, going back to prison, I did a lot of reading into revolutionary and feminist psychology, on Critical Theory that gave a lot of understanding on authoritarianism and a lot of the writers had been Jews who were put away in concentration camps. But what it helped me to understand, and this goes back to Franz Fanon, is that oppression gets internalized, that you are not just fighting a system out there, outside of you, is like when the anarchist say “you have to kill the cop inside your head”. The capitalist system is also inside of you. So I think one of the most important lessons while in prison was thinking and reflecting on the movement, was that we have to find ways to combat the system inside of us, the enemy inside of us, as it comes out in our relationships. And I’m talking of relationships very broadly, because it is not only family, personal, intimate, friend relationships, but is also your relationships with your comrades, and what ways do you act out oppressions within your relationships.

So it is important, of course, to be anti-sexist, but we can’t just take an anti-sexist verbal position; we got to really understand what is it about us men and the way we act that shuts down women, and shuts down people who are less powerful, because it also shuts down children and it gets into an ageist thing as well. If we say that we want to end white supremacist society and a lot of times you look at all the ethnic groups which are not part of the white race as inferior to you, but you may not realize it, you are doing it in an unconscious way. So when we organise, even the most simple type of organisation, a mutual aid organisation, we need to be conscious what we do with each other within that organisation that axe out the system that we are trying to bring down.

So if I’m in an organisation with women, I want to be aware of my sexism. If I’m in an organisation that is mixed in terms of ethnic groups, I want to be conscious of who has been historically silent within that group. If I’m in an organisation that has queer folks I want to be very mindful, if I’m not a queer person, what do I do that shuts that person down and make them feel unsafe. Because as an anarchist I want to be in organisation that in some way create the kind of world we want. So if I’m raising my kids, I don’t want to raise them traditionally, the same way my parents raised me… I want to be very careful that I’m raising them in a manner as free as possible, no matter how insane that may be sometimes, but I want to make sure that their individuality and initiative is respected. I’m going to be careful, I’m the parent. But I’m going to make sure also that I don’t make them just obey me, as an authoritarian preparation for the world we are going to release them into. We want to raise anti-authoritarian children, we want to raise children that have a deep love and respect for life. And at the same time we have to recover those same things within ourselves because we never realize how much we loss them.

11. How do you think that Anarchist People of Colour can play a positive role to make this movement you talk about a living reality?

I think APOC want to do two things: we want to push white anarchists and anarchists in general to deepen their understanding of oppression and liberatory practices. But also, within our communities, we know we got to deal with some oppressions that other folks don’t necessary have to deal with: for example, in the black community I have to deal with the low self-esteem of my community that has a history of four hundred years of being enslaved and having every American racist institution directed towards belittling us from the moment we are born. So it makes my struggle in many ways like a national struggle, you know, because there are certain things we need to do to help to raise our self-esteem and we need to see that we can self-organised without any white person involved at the same time we are always open to any kind of coalition work with any other groups, with white groups.

I think also in the US, anarchist of colour we can lead the way in terms of really being pretty good at being conscious on the oppressions that we act out on other people. So we try to be very conscious of shutting down women, shutting down queer folks, shutting down young folks. We seem to be more at to want to be very active in our communities, we seem to have more of a sense that our backs are up against the wall, so that we don’t have all the safeguards to fall back on that many other groups may have. But we want other groups, especially white groups, to know that if our backs are against the wall, our tactics and strategy may be more aggressive at points. But whatever they be, we want our white comrades support. We don’t want intellectual privileged ones to be in a position that they say, “well we don’t like what you are doing, so therefore we are not going to support you; we don’t like that you are going to try to stop the police from shooting you down in the streets with guns by arming yourselves”. We want them to understand that whatever we decide to do, we have brains, we are intelligent as anybody else and we can figure out our own way.

Some of that they should have learnt from studying to liberation movements of the past and is that every person has a right to self-determination, every people has to be respected and can figure out their way forward, whether it fits other groups prescriptions or understandings or not. Every form of free society is not going to be the same, yet we hope that every free society is one that does not allow any small group to put the masses of folks in a position of being exploited or oppressed again. But I envisage a society that allows Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Bikers societies, whatever, to be able to create their own societies yet to be still part of the same community and that we’ll use resources in a respectable way, that doesn’t put anybody else at a disadvantage, because we may live over a field of uranium or oil… we can think about those things now, but we don’t want to be in a position where those who feel they have all the intellectual readings on a particular thing can tell us what to do.

12. As you say there are many struggles, such as national liberation struggle, that a lot of folks dismiss because they don’t necessarily fit into this perfect scheme of how an anarchist struggle should look like, but they are not willing to go with the people to see how far we can go… I feel that you have covered many issues on community struggles and resistance very well, but I’d like to know if there’s anything you want to add to wrap up the interview, knowing that this will be read by comrades in many continents?

I want just to say thank you for the opportunity to talk with comrades from here to Brazil… I think the important thing is that folks understand that anarchism has to be vibrant, open to change, if it is ever going to be relevant… it has to be like jazz, I speak of US jazz a lot. Jazz comes out of African communities that are on the bottom in the US, where we were able to take nothing and create something. Obviously, part of the European experience and part of the Black experience come together and create this thing called jazz, which is improvisation. You know, for me is nothing but anarchy. People in the anarchist movement need to understand that anarchism takes different forms all around the world and all throughout history, whether they use the name or not. If we get holed up on whether a group publicly identifies as anarchist or not, we are no different from the Christians and the nationalists, and others who we are so quick to put off. I come from a Baptist family and I tell people that I’m close to the church, even if I’m an atheist, because it is very communal and that is even with the minister. If people can’t see anarchism in their daily lives, act it out in many different ways, how people live and treat each other, we will never see how we can seize the moment, you know.

If the moment is being seized by everyone having to declare Kropotkin or Bakunin’s anarchism in a particular day of crisis, that means nothing. But if we can see that people can seize their lives just adhering to what they really do on a day to day basis without authority, we’ll see that anarchism is probably here more than we can imagine. So in Brazil, for example, you have struggles with the landless peasants and what the anarchists are doing there, and in Colombia, and in Mexico, to the US and across the world all the way over here, which finds me in Ireland, there are struggles going on a daily basis, communities living their lives, and you got to realize that the task is to figure out the way to bring all of this together. But we need to do it with respect for each people’s struggles, so we don’t feel that we have to bring everybody in line with our particular interpretation. So I hope to see if a general strike comes here as is being talked, for me, I don’t look for that in terms of having to turn into an anarchist moment, other than an anarchist moment for me will be when many thousands of people in Ireland will realize that the solutions to the problems of Ireland lie on the hand of regular Irish people; that those who are bankers, those who are politicians, those wield the positions of power over the Irish people need to be the ones rejected. If they can see that, the anarchist will have done well.

If in the US, with Obama as president, if people come out of his term in office with this crisis affecting the US and just see that power lies with the people, it will be an anarchist moment. It will be what we need to do, as what Malatesta said: it ain’t important that everybody joins your organisation, but is important that we raise consciousness among people that they have to be their own liberators, their own leaders, their own authority and create conditions where never, never again, some people, because of money, because of the military, or politics can control our lives again.

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White people KILL MORE People of color

Cindy Von Quednow

Minutemen Do More Than “Secure” Borders, Also Kill Arizona Dad and Daughter

Earlier this month, nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her young father Raul were shot and killed during the night in their home in the border town of Arivaca, Arizona. Three suspects allegedly forced themselves into the family’s home dressed as law enforcement officials, shot the two victims and wounded a third.

Shawna Forde, the leading suspect of the murder of Flores and her father, is the leader of Minutemen American Defense and has had ties to Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), both of which have been labeled as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
This is another example of continuing violence against immigrants and people of color. The Minutemen and FAIR continually demonize and attack Latinos and immigrants. SPLC reports that FAIR is often quoted in the mainstream media and is taken as a serious entity, when they constantly spew racists rhetoric against immigrants.

Latino family murdered

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A Post Racial South Africa??

White Supremacy in South Africa

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