(please
forward widely)
Neither
do we condone the bombings and murder of journalists at their headquarters,
however much we are repulsed by their racist, chauvinist and hateful
Islamophobic caricatures of oppressed people. Neither do we condone the
subsequent murders at the Paris Kosher supermarket. Yes,
we are for free speech, freedom of expression and democratic rights for all,
including the Muslim and antiwar activists who were banned by the French
government from street protests in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, or the
Muslim women who are banned from wearing the veil. We are for freedom of
expression and the right to exist of Muslim Americans, 700,000 of whom have
been investigated or interrogated in the U.S. for being Muslim, or the 1.5
million Latino immigrants in the U.S. who are imprisoned, detained and
deported, or the entire world’s people who are victims of the all-pervasive
high-tech surveillance of everyone’s personal means of communication by the
U.S., France and all other so-called democratic nations. We
will NOT join the Paris parades orchestrated by imperialist French President
Francois Holland and the heads of state of the world’s “great powers;” nor will
we applaud their call for the worldwide “Anti-terrorist Conference” that
President Holland has set for Paris. We are saddened at the participation of
French working people in these state-sponsored mobilizations, whose objectives
are to further war in the Middle East and Africa and to restrict democracy for
Muslim communities in France and around the world. Those who participate
believing that they can advance freedom of expression, peace and solidarity are
being used for opposite ends. The
war proclaimed by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as “… a war against
terrorism. Against jihadism. Against radical Islam, against everything that is
aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom and solidarity" is, in fact, a war
to reestablish and strengthen French economic hegemony in her former colonies.
As Americans we heard this language from President George Bush when he declared
his own “war on terror,” shredded the U.S. Constitution, imprisoned the
innocent en masse and went to war in
Iraq based on the now-exposed false flag lie that the Hussein government
possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” We
don’t march with “leaders” – including the government of the United States and
the Barack Obama administration – who oversee and direct mass murder and
torture. Need we mention the recent U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report
revealing the extent of U.S.-sponsored torture? The
heads of state of the world’s past and present colonial conquerors today murder
with impunity on every continent. President Obama is the headmaster of terrorist
wars, with six to his credit since his 2008 election. Need we mention the U.S.
drone terror bombings and overt wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria,
Somalia and Iraq? Every public poll demonstrates massive majority opposition.
Yet the wars continue and expand everywhere.
France’s
largest party, the neo-fascist National Front of Marine Le Pen, revels in the
government-promoted hate-mongering, thinking its time has come. In the past few
days some 50 Muslim mosques in France have been hit by bullets and explosives
and/or tagged with racist graffiti. In Corsica, a severed pig’s head was
mounted on a Muslim prayer hall. In Sweden a Muslim mosque was firebombed.
Racist mobilizations in Germany denounce the “Islamization of Europe.” As
in the U.S., where Latinos flee Latin America to escape poverty and persecution
stemming from the policies of U.S.-backed corrupt and murderous regimes, Muslim
immigrants flee their homelands that have been ravaged by the wars and
exploitation of foreign powers. We
hear no imperialist voices denouncing French troops in Mali. No corporate media
voices recalling France’s Vietnam in Algeria a decade earlier, where one
million were slaughtered until that nation’s war for independence was won.
Imperialism’s memory is short, as with the four million Vietnamese murdered in
that ten-year U.S. colonial war. As social justice and antiwar activists our memory
is long. We are not deceived by yet another imperialist campaign to justify the
perpetration of new horrors on the world’s people. Neither
do we support the renewed calls for stepped up repressive measures, including
billions more for police and military repression and new laws further
restricting civil liberties and democratic rights. As
U.S. social and political activists, we are witness to the horror of institutionalized
racism, where Ferguson-type police murder is the norm for most every city –
where mass incarceration of the oppressed ranks first in the world – where
repeated police murder of unarmed Blacks goes unpunished. We march for the
victims in Ferguson and in every city, not for their murderers. We
note the racist parallels between France and the U.S. The great majority who
are locked in U.S. prisons are Black and Latino. In France up to 60 percent of
the prison population are Muslims. France,
England, the U.S. and their associates have no standing among human beings who
seek justice, peace, civil and democratic rights and an end to imperialist wars
across the globe. We stand without equivocation with the millions who mobilize
against them. We
refused to hail their slaughter, as with their “humanitarian war” against Libya
that was perversely promoted by their kept media. Tens of thousands of Libyans
were murdered while the corporate “free press” remained silent. The imperialist
air and naval forces that pulverized Libya were employed with impunity, while
on the ground imperialism’s paid jihadists were called into service to
“liberate” Tripoli on the bombed ruins of that nation. They remain today,
grotesquely fighting each other over Libya’s oil and for scraps of “aid” from
the various imperialist-backed oil corporations who are the real “victors.” Today’s
modern-day crusaders continue to join in the catastrophic destruction of Iraq.
Twenty-four years of saturation bombings, mass murder, starvation sanctions and
U.S.-installed dictators were and continue to be employed in the name of a war
against non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” One and a half million
Iraqis have been slaughtered by imperialist weapons. The slaughter continues –
a classic colonial-era oil war for control of the very fossil fuel resource
whose continued use spells doom for humankind. And yesterday’s U.S. allies in this venture are today’s “enemies”
– at least for now! The
United States, with French support, has brought about the death and immiseration
of hundreds of thousands of Syrians through its backing, covert and otherwise,
of “moderate” and fundamentalist combatants, the latter mustered with the aid
of the allied Gulf States. The current U.S. bombing of Syrian sites continues
the slaughter of civilians. We
heard no cry of outrage from the imperialist nations when Mubarak’s military heirs
in Egypt, financed, to the tune of $1.1 billion annually, slaughtered tens of
thousands of Muslims in a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the elected Mohamed Morsi
government. The 30-year Mubarak dictatorship was always a U.S. favorite, as are
his successors today – democratic elections notwithstanding! We
heard no cry of outrage last year when racist, Zionist Israel once again
slaughtered over 2000 Palestinians in Gaza. Indeed, the U.S. and its imperialist
allies remain Israeli’s chief supporters, granting it the largest “aid” package
of any nation to maintain its world-repudiated historic occupation. We
stand in solidarity with all victims of imperialist oppression and exploitation
everywhere on earth – for free speech, the right to assembly, democratic rights
and the right to be free from intervention and occupation. Never
with their oppressors! Never
with their oil wars! Never
with their police state measures! Never
with their ceaseless racist “wars on terror!” Never
with their endless drone wars, privatized army wars, overt and covert wars,
mass detention and torture wars, embargo, blockade and sanction wars! End
all imperialist wars, occupations, and interventions! Self-determination
for the world’s oppressed people and nations! U.S.
and all imperialist powers Out Now!
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