Baltimore & Israel: A Global Gang of Colonizers

Baltimore & Israel

A Global Gang of Colonizers

From Haiti to Puerto Rico and from the Congo to Baltimore, African (Black) people suffer from colonialism. Current atrocities happening to the people of Gaza and the West Bank clearly show the colonial reality of life and death in Palestine. What we see daily in Palestine is a project to completely replace the indigenous population with a settler population. The attempt to exterminate the Palestinians is being carried through collusion between Israel, the U.S, the European Union, and all western powers. This is nothing less than a genocidal campaign to occupy Gaza, and slaughter Palestinians trapped in the world’s largest open air prison. Clearly  Palestine is a colony born of a Zionist imperialist project. What is not so clear are the ways that Zionism extends into African (Black) communities like Baltimore.

Zionism is a political movement with a racist western imperialist ideology. The Zionist movement was initiated with an 1895 pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat written by an atheist Jew named Theodor Herzl. Herzl was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist and political activist, known as the father of the Zionist movement. Herzl’s objective was to obtain a land base that could be utilized as a “Jewish” state with political and economic power.  In 1897, Herzl convened the first Zionist conference in Switzerland to launch the official program of Zionism, the Basel program. By 1917, the global Zionist campaign manifested in Switzerland as the Balfour declaration, named for the British Secretary of State for foreign affairs, Arthur Balfour. This declaration designated Palestine as the place for Jewish people to escape anti-Jewish fascism rising across the European continent.  

The establishment of the Zionist colonial state in Palestine was championed by Britain after World War II. The Zionist movement co-opted Judaism and used it to justify the theft of Palestine from the Palestinians. By 1948, the occupation of Palestine by Western European Jews had become solidified with the Nakba (the great catastrophe). During the Nakba, 750,000 Palestinians were violently removed from their lands and homes. Today, large segments of Palestinians are displaced in a global diaspora (more Palestinians live in Jordan than Jordanians). Palestinians who remain are relegated to specific territories within occupied Palestine; primarily the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Gaza Strip. These Palestinians are prisoners in their own land, living in the racist, settler colonial, murderous apartheid state of Israel.

USA & Israel: Policing the World

Sharing Police Tactics Between the U.S. and Israel

In Gaza, Palestinians are subject to over policing, constant surveillance, indiscriminate beating, incarceration, unjust killings, and unusable water. Baltimore and other U.S cities align themselves with these practices, they fund the Israeli occupation by paying Israelis to train the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). The Original Americans (Indians) are locked on reservations. They are subject to over policing, constant surveillance, indiscriminate beating, incarceration, unjust killings, and unusable water. They are directly policed by the FBI and live the legacy of millions slaughtered by this settler colony called the United States of America. Reservation is another word for Open Air Prison, Concentration Camp, Gaza or Bantu Stand. It is all the same thing.

Policing in the U.S. has a history of racial bias against the colonized people within its borders. Anti-Black racism in this country still reigns in local, state and federal institutions. Like the obscene incarceration rates of the Palestinians, the U.S. prison industrial complex incarcerates African (Black) people at over five times the rate of white people. Today, militarized state violence practiced by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) on the people of Baltimore is the the Deadly Exchange Program, which brings together ICE, FBI, police, border control and Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), to share and promote discriminatory and repressive tactics and policies in both countries. Thousands of cops participate in security conferences and workshops with Israeli law enforcement, the IOF, and security officials in the U.S. Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, as well as the DC Capitol police continue to travel to Israel for training. 

There is a solid partnership between the U.S. and Israeli governments to exchange methods of state violence and control over civilians including mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent. Training through the Deadly Exchange Program places Baltimore police in the hands of racist systems that have racked up human rights violations for years. Last May, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates welcomed Israeli Police and thanked them for their annual police unity tour, with the promise to “strengthen” their “partnership.” 

Elijah Cummings Youth Program

Recruiting African Youth to Zionism

Baltimore City spends $8,959,736 each year in Israeli military efforts. But exchanges between Baltimore City and Israel also happen in less overt and more insidious ways with African (Black) youth. For the past 25 years, through the Elijah Cummings Youth Program founded by former Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD), hundreds of African (Black) high school students in Baltimore travel to Tel Aviv to “bridge gaps between the Jewish and black communities” and create “open-minded future leaders.”

Since 1998, the program has funneled Baltimore youth into a two year fellowship, with the goal of strengthening the relationship between African (Black) people in Baltimore and the Baltimore Jewish community This three stage process includes “Leadership Development, The ‘Israel Experience’ (two summers inside of the occupying state of Israel), and Community Service.” 

For two summers, students are hosted by The Yemin Orde Youth Village, a youth village named after the ‘father of the Israeli Occupation Forces,’ British Major General Orde Charles Wingate. At the end of the program, students return and meet with Zionist policy makers in the U.S. capitol, Maryland State House, and Baltimore City Hall (in addition to working within nonprofits, churches and synagogues in the city). The goal is to create the next generation of Africans that think anti-Zionism is equal to antisemitism and hatred for the Jews.

October 2023 marked 25 years of the Elijah Cummings Youth Program which is being continued, posthumously. For the recognition of the 25 years of this program, Maryland’s first Black Governor, Wes Moore, gave the keynote speech for the event aligning with the general sentiments expressed following the Al-Aqsa Flood, standing with “the right of Israel to exist,” dismissing the settler colonial foundations of Israel’s existence. This, ultimately, is the purpose of the youth program, to normalize conditions of settler colonialism for unsuspecting Black youth. 

The youth program does not teach students about the 75-year colonial occupation of Palestine and Gaza, imposed by intolerant, Zionist Israeli leaders. From the Nakba to the present day, the failure to teach the students in the program what has been done to Palestine is by design, in order to support Zionist propaganda—as the only true origin story of Palestine. This propaganda is used to legitimize  the theft of land, homes, assets, and basic human rights from the Palestinian people.

Settler Colonialism and Their Victims

People often ask why African (Black) people in Baltimore or the U.S, should concern themselves with Zionism and Palestine. The fact that the police and military who oppress both the people of Palestine and the people of Baltimore are collaborating should be enough to explain why we should be concerned. More importantly, Palestine is a settler colony just like the U.S, which has uprooted the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Both the U.S (Baltimore) and Palestine (Gaza) are lands occupied by western Europeans claiming to flee religious oppression. In both cases their intent was to exterminate the native people and take their lands as their own. Furthermore, the Palestinans are prisoners in their own land. Africans in America have been stolen from our land and held captive in a foreign land (U.S). We have the same enemy and should fight side by side to defeat colonialism, settler colonialism, neo-colonialism, Zionism, capitalism and imperialism.These enemies are the global, white supremacist, capitalist, Axis of Domination. Africans and Palestinians have the same objectives and aspirations. We all want unity, freedom, dignity and self-determination. It is imperative that Zionism is smashed, from Baltimore to Palestine.

Banner photo: Israeli police forces arrest a Palestinian protester in Jerusalem (courtesy Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

BAP Atlanta SAYS FREE THEM ALL!

BAP Atlanta SAYS FREE THEM ALL

Statement on Cop City Indictments

On September 5th, 2023, Georgia's Attorney General Chris Carr issued RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) indictments against 61 individuals who they allege to be part of a “criminal” conspiracy related to the Stop Cop City Movement.  Many of those indicted face concurring charges related to domestic terrorism or money laundering. 

At the core, these charges are both fraudulent and tyrannical. In the indictment, these charges were indicated as beginning on May 25, 2020 – the day George Floyd was murdered. How can that be anything but a warning shot to not only local Atlantans, but to everybody across the country fighting against police and state terror. Our history tells us that the State, when threatened, will drop all pretense of “rule of law” in order to crush resistance. Our current moment tells us this.

Compared to two years ago, the Stop Cop City Movement has spread far and wide into a burgeoning popular mass movement, no longer confined to the city limits of Atlanta, and our fire is getting bigger and they are doing everything to snuff it out! We must be vigilant if we are to stand against these tried-and-true methods of oppressions. We must be determined in freeing all of the political prisoners created from this struggle. 

And we won’t let anyone off the hook. Reports are saying that the same grand jury used to indict Donald Trump was also used to indict these activists. While we are not distracted by the Trump Trials, this context must be investigated. Therefore one must ask what level of collusion was there between Fani Willis, the Fulton County DA, State AG Carr, and of course the City of Atlanta? Grand juries are selected by prosecutors to virtually guarantee indictments. This must mean the Fulton County DA and State AG agreed to use the same group of people to rubber stamp both the Trump indictments (indicted under the same Georgia RICO statute) and these Cop City indictments.

We will not be distracted from what's happening in front of our eyes. It wasn’t just the Georgia State Patrol who carried out the extrajudicial murder of Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran in the Weelaunee Forest this past January, a murder they continue to cover up in these very indictments! And we can’t forget the City of Atlanta with Mayor Andre Dickens at the helm, spending the better part of his summer trying to sink a constitutional and legal referendum against Cop City with bogus legal challenges, leveraging some of the same legal tactics he slams his Republican opponents for!

The soldiers of the pan-European, patriarchal white supremacist system are in a United Front against Us, the People. It is imperative now more than ever that we strengthen our United Front against them. 

• BAP Atlanta demands that all charges against Stop Cop City protestors are dropped,

• BAP Atlanta demands that the Mayor Andre Dickens resign and the City of Atlanta cancel the Cop City lease,

• BAP Atlanta demands that all political prisoners incarcerated in the state of Georgia be pardoned and released. FREE THEM ALL!

No Compromise, No Retreat!

BAP-Atlanta

bapatl@blackallianceforpeace.com

Banner photo: Marching protesters in Atlanta, Georgia holding banner that says “Stop Cop City” , Friday, March 10, 2023. (Courtesy Camila Cuevas/Latino Rebels)

Black Alliance for Peace Supports National Day of Action Against Police Terror

Black Alliance for Peace Supports National Day of Action Against Police Terror

Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) member organization Community Movement Builders (CMB) is calling all organizations, organizers and community members to a National Day of Action Against Police Terror on March 9, 2023.

In the wake of the brutal killings of Tyre Nichols and forest defender Manuel Tortuguita, the city of Atlanta is going full steam ahead to build what activists have dubbed “Cop City.” Atlanta officials have proposed a $90 million complex be built on 85 acres of a forest. This would only arm and deploy more police—whom we refer to as the domestic army—in African and colonized working-class and poor communities. 

CMB has been at the forefront of efforts to defeat Cop City. CMB’s analysis suggests placing Cop City in the heart of a still-majority African city is an insidious reminder of the collaborative nature of the “Black misleadership class” that serves the white capitalist minority. It also makes clear this minority is preparing for the massive use of physical, repressive power to maintain control of its internal colonies. 

Cop City has been ostensibly framed as a neutral tool for fighting crime. But there is no neutrality when confronted with the asymmetrical power of the settler-colonial state in relation to poor and working-class communities. In that relationship of power, the police are instruments of control and containment, with Cop City being a part of the growing infrastructure for increased police terror in the United States, as well as in the U.S. state of Georgia and in the city of Atlanta.

For CMB, as well as for all of BAP’s member organizations and individual members, Cop City is part of the effort by city, state and federal governments to militarize the lives of African and poor people in the United States and around the world. This local, national and international military-police structure wages war in Ukraine, sends U.S. and NATO troops to Africa, advocates military intervention in Haiti, sanctions progressive governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and threatens humankind with nuclear annihilation. 

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! LET OUR VOICES BE HEARD!

Join us in the fight against police terror. 

#StopCopCity, end the 1033 Program and end U.S. sanctions against progressive governments. We are asking everybody to organize one or more of the following actions:

• Marches

• Rallies

• Civil disobedience actions

• Direct actions

• Banner drops

• Teach-ins

• Petition drives 

In addition, we want to flood social media with the hashtag #STOPCOPCITY.

Find an action near you.

Register for BAP’s March 9 webinar, “Countering Colonial Policing in U.S. Domestic Colonies.”

Use BAP’s resources on the 1033 program to hold a teach-in.

Defeat the War on Africans in the U.S. and Around the World!

We Are an African People and We Are at War!

The State Repression of U.S. Settler Colonialism in The South: BAP ATLANTA STATEMENT

Atlanta City-Wide Alliance

The State Repression of U.S. Settler Colonialism in The South

BAP ATLANTA STATEMENT

Atlanta is historically described as “The Black Mecca” and more contemporarily referred to as “Wakanda.” The Black Alliance for Peace Atlanta (BAP-Atlanta) rejects this deception because we know that since the 90s the population of Black people in Atlanta has decreased by more than 20% due to gentrification and that Black people overwhelmingly make up the majority of the houseless population. Although we have a Black Mayor, a Black City Council, and other Black elected officials, the income inequality gap has increased as more and more Black/African people have been displaced and forced into poverty, in large part due to the policies of these Black misleaders. The Black politicians, celebrities, clergy, HBCUs, and business owners are “readily prepared to ‘sell out the interests of the overwhelmingly working class Black masses’ (Ford, 2018) for the sake of capitalist, corporate, or imperialist interests.” (Springer 2020). Instead of defunding the police, the elected officials have increased funding for racist, violent policing.

BAP-Atlanta sees that violence in the U.S. and around the world are linked. One example of that connection is the relationship between two settler colonies - the U.S. and Israel. Since 2002, exchange programs have taken place that bring together U.S. police, ICE agents, the FBI, and other law enforcement with their counterparts in Israel. In these programs, worst practices are shared to promote the militarization and occupation of the working class and poor Black and Brown communities. Founded by Robert Friedmann, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University, Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) is the local manifestation of the Deadly Exchange program, in which U.S. and Israeli police and Israeli military share hyper-militarized policing techniques and technology and physically travel to zionist Israel to engage in this exchange.

Atlanta participates in the 1033 program, through which the U.S. Department of Defense transfers military equipment to local state and federal law enforcement agencies. It is the critical source of the most visible, big-ticket military items being sent to local law enforcement across the country. Originally known as the 1208 Program, this program was created in 1990 for two specific reasons: to eliminate military surplus waste following the Cold War, and to assist in the hardline federal push of the “war on drugs.” From 2009 to 2018, police departments in Georgia received $43.5 million in firearms, vehicles and other gear from the military through the program. Georgia has also received more than 2,700 military rifles, night vision goggles and laser gun sights, and literally hundreds of armored vehicles, including more than two dozen mine-resistant vehicles built to fight the war on terror abroad.

The Atlanta Police Foundation is a private non-profit that allows corporations and wealthy donors to fund police terrorism in Atlanta. It supports various police programs, including Operation Shield, “a network of advanced technologies that create more efficient policing including the citywide network of surveillance cameras and license plate readers, predictive policing platform and criminal analytics software.” Through Operation Shield, police officers view footage captured by the Foundation’s privately owned cameras. When the initiative was announced in September 2011, authorities had access to about 100 public and private cameras. Today it’s nearly 12,000. The police foundation has funded these cameras to monitor and surveil Black people every second of the day. 

The foundation has also been instrumental in the effort to establish a new “Public Safety” Training Center, also known as Cop City, to be located across 150 acres of the old Atlanta Prison Farm. This training facility — larger than 85 NFL football fields combined — would include shooting ranges, spaces for militarized drills, and a mock city complete with buildings and roads to allow APD to practice urban warfare tactics, including bomb testing and tear gas deployment. At this new installation, police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill Black people and control our bodies and movements. The Cop City new training facility is yet another massive, militarized, and corporate-funded project that the police foundation is trying to prop up behind closed doors.

Black people in the United States have a colonial relationship with the larger society. It is a relationship characterized by over-policing and institutional racism. This colonial status operates in three areas: politically, economically, and socially. We are politically stunted, with our political decisions made for us due to a lack of power. We are economically disenfranchised, depending on larger society. This is maintained by a social order that designates police in our communities as occupying forces, and the rationale and objective of increased militarism is to maintain the hegemony of the Pan-European, colonial/capitalist, and patriarchal, white supremacist system. 

The South is the base of U.S. military infrastructure. It’s also where 55 percent of Black people happen to live. BAP identifies this region as a priority for collective learning, organizing, and mobilizing the power and influence of Black workers and the poor to oppose militarism, war, and imperialism.

Footnote: Atlanta Police Foundation | Technology & Innovation

Downloadable PDF version of statement

Banner photo: Map of Cop City site plan (courtesy whatnowatlanta.com)

The Black Alliance for Peace Calls on Congressional Black Caucus and Leadership of Poor People’s Campaign to Demand the Dismantling U.S. African Command (AFRICOM)

On May 25, African Liberation Day, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) called on the United States government to dismantle the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) and withdraw all U.S. forces from the African continent. This demand is in line with the main objective of the newly formed Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases—of which BAP is a founding member—which was formally launched in January. The coalition demands the closure of 800-plus U.S. military bases in other countries, which would save more than $150 billion that could then be re-allocated to realize the economic human rights of the working class and poor in this country.

In our statement on African Liberation Day we called on the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to publicly oppose the aggressive militarization of the African continent, ramped up by the Obama administration and being continued by the Trump administration.

During the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) actions to end the War Economy, Militarism and the Proliferation of Gun Violence that began this week, BAP is calling on the campaign to take an unequivocal stance in opposition to AFRICOM. Just as we called on the CBC to take a public position against the aggressive expansion of U.S. militarism in Africa, we are also asking the PPC leadership and all activists supporting this week of actions to join us in demanding the United States pull out of Africa and close all U.S. military bases on foreign soil.

For BAP, it is clear the U.S war on “terrorism” in Africa was and remains a subterfuge to expand U.S. influence and its physical presence there. The destruction of Libya, the ongoing war in Somalia, the dismemberment of Sudan, the millions of lives lost in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the widespread political instability throughout the continent is the concrete result of U.S. policies and not some internal or externally motivated “terrorism” and therefore must be opposed by all who claim to represent the interests of Black people.

The PPC states “[t]he truth is that instead of waging a War on Poverty, we have been waging a War on the Poor, at home and abroad, for the financial benefit of a few.” There certainly has been a war. However, it is not “we” who are waging this war but them, the racist capitalist oligarchy that has been operating against the interests of the majority of the people in the United States and throughout the world.

BAP sees a clear connection between the war being waged against Black and poor people domestically through the Obama and Trump administrations’ Department of Defense 1033 program, which has resulted in the obscene militarization of the police, and the U.S. commitment to “full spectrum dominance” that translates into a permanent war against colonized people of color globally. That is why we agree with the PPC’s focus on gun violence, but we say the focus must be even more explicit.

Netfa Freeman, organizer with Pan-African Community Action (PACA) and a member of the BAP Coordinating Committee, points to both the internal and external on issues of militarism and gun violence: "The double standards and dirty-trick twists and turns of the U.S.'s industrial-police-military-intelligence complex has operated on two complementary and parallel tracks when it comes to war, repression, and militarism in Africa and in Black communities within U.S. borders,” he says. “Those tracks are militarized domestic repression in the form of over-policing, police murders and mass incarceration, and in Africa the phony war on terrorism.”

The PPC’s clear demand for “demilitarization of our communities” including “ending federal programs that send military equipment into local and state communities” is in sharp contrast to the support of repressive federal policies by a majority of Black lawmakers at the national level.

In July 2014, two months before the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 80 percent of the CBC voted against ending the 1033 program; last July, a majority voted in favor of the obscene increase in the military budget that exceeded the $54 billion increase demanded by Trump; and just a week or so ago, a majority of the caucus voted in favor of a right-wing federal “Blue Lives Matter” bill, making “assaults” on police officers a federal hate crime!

The Democratic Party that vehemently opposed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he finally broke with the Johnson administration and the party establishment to oppose the Vietnam War, and which gave political cover to and justifications for the murderous assault against the Black Liberation Movement, is the same party that today supports the war agenda of the corporate and financial oligarchy. It is the same party that under Obama accelerated the 1033 program and prosecuted only one of the dozens of killer-cops that executed black, Latinx and Native people across the country.

BAP is not fooled by the diversionary politics of the Democratic Party. We are clear that opposition to war, militarism and all forms of gun violence requires taking on both parties representing the two wings of the ruling class. A bill providing a blank check to the Trump administration to wage war across the planet in the form of the new “authorization to use military force” is an example of the bi-partisan commitment to permanent war and repression as U.S. policy.

Moral stances also require explicit political positions. Opposition to war and gun violence requires that real political connections are made and concrete positions taken against policies that perpetuate the moral offenses that we oppose.

It also means that those who claim to represent the oppressed must be held to account. The members of the Congressional Black Caucus have failed to represent the interests of their Black constituents who have consistently opposed war and domestic militarism.

BAP applauds the effort by the PPC to recapture the moral ground lost to the right-wing counter-revolution of the 1970s and ‘80s as well as to the moral bankruptcy of the Obama presidency. However, we believe that in this era of right-wing ascendency represented by Trump and the liberal authoritarianism of the Democratic Party, it is important the interests and politics of the working class and poor are clearly delineated from those of the capitalist oligarchy. This means that our politics must be clear and our rhetoric devoid of liberal ambiguities in order to expose the nature and interests of the oppressive system and state.

Our task today is even more pressing than it was 51 years ago when Dr. King called on the oppressed and their allies to defeat “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.”

That is why during this week of action called for by the PPC, BAP is making a clear call for the U.S. to leave Africa and for the people to control the police in their communities. Nothing short of this would reflect the morality and politics of the original Poor People’s Campaign and the revolution of values advocated by Dr. King.

For media inquiries, email info@blackallianceforpeace.com

Re-centering Anti-war and Anti-imperialism as Working-class Issues on May Day

MAY 1, 2018—May 1 is recognized as International Workers’ Day throughout the world except in the most bourgeois of bourgeois nations—the United States. Yet, even though the capitalist oligarchy has tried to erase the day from the awareness and memory of the working class and worker-oriented organizations and unions, the working class continues to embrace and take ownership of this day as its own.  

Today is the day that the multi-national, multi-racial working classes express solidarity with all those who labor, who have nothing but their labor power to sell in order to eke out a living for themselves and their families. Today, workers from all nations, races, genders and nationalities proclaim that—despite differences—common interests bind us and can serve as a basis for a common political stance and program of liberation from the ravages of capitalist exploitation and great power domination.

On this International Workers’ Day, over 140 million people are classified as low-income in the United States while tax cuts are given to the rich. Thirty-thousand people still die every year simply because they do not have access to health care. Thousands walk the streets not knowing where they are going to lay their heads at night. And millions of working people are paying over half their income on housing and laboring more than 50 hours a week just to keep their heads above water.

And every day, millions of undocumented workers who have been forced from their home countries by the devastating policies of a rapacious, vicious capitalist invasion of their economies must take on back-breaking work not knowing if they must evade ICE—the modern-day slave catchers—to make it home to their families that evening.

These are some of the realities facing workers in the United States, the richest capitalist nation on earth.

For the Black Alliance for Peace, it is these realities and the realities that are even more acute for Black workers and the poor, that inform our political understanding of the historic task of the day. We say without any equivocation that there will be no peace without justice, that the task of workers in the United States is to struggle for a vision of a new world that transcends the backwardness of this degenerate and anachronistic system. We have a name for the source of this degrading and dehumanizing oppression: the white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy.

Because we are clear on who/what the enemy is and our responsibilities to fight against oppression, we are also clear we will never support U.S. imperialism in any of its adventures. We are not fooled by the phony humanitarian justifications for interventions by a nation that has consistently proven to be what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called 51 years ago “the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet.”   

That is why on this International Workers’ Day we say once again: “Not one drop of blood from the working class and poor in defense of the gangsterism of the capitalist ruling class.”

We understand that state-sanctioned violence in the war being waged against Black and Brown people domestically is the flip side of the coin of the war being waged against people of color world-wide.

As colonized captives in this oppressor nation, we know that there is a necessity to struggle against domestic policies like the repressive Department of Defense 1033 program that is responsible for militarizing police forces across the country. We also know we must oppose the training of police forces by the Israeli apartheid state. We understand we have a responsibility in this oppressor nation to take on the U.S. state by opposing U.S. military interventions, destabilization campaigns, sanctions, and the subversion of nations in the cross-hairs of U.S. imperialism.

The struggle for Black liberation must be a struggle against imperialist wars.  Defending national sovereignty and self-determination of peoples and nations is not an abstract concept for BAP members—it is a guiding principle of our work.  

Therefore, an anti-war position is a necessary first step and an understandable and welcomed moral position for many in the anti-war community. However, for BAP, an anti-war position without an explicit anti-imperialist position would be a betrayal of the millions still subjected to assaults on the humanity of Africans, Asians and the people of Latin America and the Caribbean by the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination.

Four interrelated issues confront all of humanity, but especially workers and the poor in the United States and abroad today: white supremacy, neoliberal capitalist exploitation, permanent war, and the threat to the planet by capitalist industrial processes.

Confronting these issues will only happen as a result of power being shifted from the capitalist oligarchy back to the people. But we understand that will never happen without a revolutionary movement. The good news is the tide is turning in that direction.

Brave and determined teacher unions made up primarily of women have injected new life into the struggle for the collective human right to organize. New efforts to fight for a living wage are developing across the country. The immigrant/migrant rights movement is disconnecting from the suffocating influence of the liberal establishment and rebuilding the spirit of 2006. The anti-war and anti-imperialist movements are showing new life, and Africans and Black radicals are moving toward consolidating authentic left formations under the leadership of working class organizations and movements.

But we have no illusions about what we are up against. Through its grip on communications and all of the cultural and educational institutions, the rulers are still able to convince significant numbers of workers that no alternative exists and that they can only hope for reform of the system.

Fifty years ago, worker revolts rocked the world from France to Mexico. On this day, 50 years later, let us re-dedicate ourselves to the revolutionary project that re-centers resistance to imperialist war and global structures of white supremacy as representative of a new international workers movement.