Apartheid in Hebron

An in-depth report on the advance of the segregation policies of the Israeli state in Hebron was compiled by B'Tselem last year. There is a summary essay of its findings in Counterpunch by Stephen Lendman. As the map above graphically illustrates, this report tells us a lot about what the term "Peace Process" means.

The essay is important because it provides a window into the microcosm of how the entrenchment of Israeli segregation works. By focusing on one particular Palestinian city, the report is able to explain the general features of Israeli apartheid through their specific application in the details of the social fabric of Palestinian life.

Nearly 40 years ago, a small group of fascists set up in a hotel in Hebron and would not leave. After the Israeli army armed them and the government supplied them with subsidies, the privilege of their white skin, and 40 years later, the center of the city of Hebron is cleansed of its inhabitants and several hundred white supremacists, along with the Israeli army, control the whole city of 150,000 Palestianians. Zionist fascist gangs periodically go on progroms to kick out more Palestinians from their homes while the IDF guards the whole enterprise.

Several features of the Israeli policy of separation and displacement stand out in Hebron and are typical of how this system is entrenched:

-the explicit or tacit support of armed gangs to create the outposts of Jewish-only neighborhoods which, once established, must be protected for "security reasons"

-the establishment of a legal regime that rezones urban space and geographical areas to create the pretext for the creation of Palestinian-only ghettos

-the confiscation and/or destruction of Palestinian homes

-the disruption Palestinian economic life by restricting movement through checkpoints, the implementation of pass laws, and the establishment of curfews

-the denial of building permits to Palestinians; and the expansion of building permits for Jews

After almost 30 years of this strategy, Israeli apartheid was to be famously given formal legal recognition during the "Peace Process" of the 1990s, and specifically the Hebron Agreement in 1994. Hebron was meant to be a test case for this, to see if the newly Israeli and American created Palestinian Authority, stuffed with Palestinian elites who benefited from the Oslo years, would go along with this "legal" solution to the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, just as it has reached its normative status of Palestinians living inside the Green Line as Israeli "citizens". Every time you read "Peace Process" in the papers or hear it on the news, this is what they are talking about.

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Wake Up!

Last year was tough, but lots of courageous things happening in Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, France, England and right here in NYC, so it's time to get some perspective and stay uplifted thanks to Outlandish:

let's not cry tonight, I promise you one day it's through
my brothers, my sisters,
shine a light for every soul that ain't with us no more
my brothers, my sisters

As the great African liberation leader Amilcar Cabral, murdered by colonialism, said, "tell no lies; claim no easy victories". God bless all the freedom strugglers in the Middle East, Europe, America, Canada, and beyond, surviving and fighting white supremacy worldwide inshallah.

Check out Outlandish, O-Marz, Salah Edin, DAM, Arab Summit and others on the new Middle East download from Egypt and Lebanon over at African Hip Hop Radio.

Speaking of super group Arab Summit: here's Part 1 and Part 2 of a recent interview with Davey D talking about their album, Fear of an Arab Planet. Claiming a lineage with Public Enemy, and through that the history of Black Power, should tell us a lot about where the struggle should be going. Here's another interview over at Electronic Intifada.

One more hip hop note. Long time coming documentary, Slingshot Hip Hop, on Palestinian originators DAM, Arapeyat and others, directed by NYU's own Jackie Reem Salloum, is finally coming out. Although parts of it were presented at the Other Israel film festival this last Fall, it will hit theaters after its run at Sundance last week.

There's a release party on February 8th for Slingshot Hip Hop at the Knitting Factory with DJ Kayper, GC and The Soul Mafia, and Erika Rose as part of Israeli Apartheid Week here in NYC. Check it out.

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The Other Wall: Darkness in Gaza

The other wall

In Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love, which chronicles his stay with the Palestinian fedayeen in the early 1970s, there is a story about a highly symbolic incident in Beirut. One day, an apparently homeless Palestinian man suddenly showed up in the neighborhood. He smelled bad and seemed to have mental problems. People felt sorry for him and gave him food and money when they could. Shortly after, when the Israeli army invaded Beirut, this same man was standing in the turret of a tank rolling down the street where he played the role of harmless madmen, returned as another kind of madmen, a colonel in a uniform with a grim look on his face. The so-called Palestinian homeless man turned out to be an Israeli intelligence officer, returning during the subsequent invasion with his mask off to wreak mass terror on the civilian population.

In retelling this story, Genet gets at one of the mythic and psychological aspects of settler colonialism: that it is "identical with Power" itself. The power to manipulate the natives in this story is the other side of the colonel's return as a sadistic tormentor. This is possible, according to Genet, because colonialism equates its order with the "beginning" of history itself. The madmen is needed to constantly demonstrate the indestructability of the colonial regime, to continuously reimpose the racial order, and to revitalize the myth that history is either himself or nothing.

This same idea appears in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth; a book in which the living body of Palestine-Israel emerges from its pages today. The settler "is the absolute beginning," says Fanon, who must live by the idea that "This land was created by us" and that "If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages." Therefore, "the settler asks each member of the oppressing minority to shoot down 30 or 100 or 200 natives, he sees that nobody shows any indignation and that the whole problem is to decide whether it can be done all at once or by stages." This madman, lost in a delirium of racial phantasms, looms over Gaza today.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded over the border between Gaza and Egypt last week, temporarily breaking the blockade imposed by the U.S., Israeli, European, and Arab regimes. Palestinians fought Egyptian police and later blew up and toppled the border wall. It wasn't only that Palestinians overwhelmed the small police forces, but Egyptian authoritarian ruler Hosni Mubarak had to claim that he allowed a temporary halt to the siege because, once again, the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and the movement for democracy throughout the Middle East converged.

Once again, the Palestinian struggle strikes a blow against imperialism and white supremacy.

Anti-apartheid protests in Lebanon

The current crisis in Gaza has had the potential to spark off the kind of large demonstrations against Israeli apartheid and the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime that were seen in the spring of 2002. That spring saw the glimpses of a mass movement against the U.S.-supported dictatorship throughout the Middle East. This last week threatened to repeat 2002, with demonstrations in Cairo, Beirut, Amman and elsewhere. In Cairo, several hundred people were arrested, many of whom were hauled-off to Mubarak's torture chambers with U.S. applause. Meanwhile, a general strike in Lebanon has converged with its own demands, while U.S.-backed right wing gangs have been attacking strikers. The convergence of Egyptian anti-apartheid solidarity and anti-imperialist solidarity with Iraq and Lebanon and the Egyptian labor strike movement has continued to show the possibilities of struggle against the Mubarak regime.

At the same time, the temporary break of the siege in Gaza has been an equally powerful, though uncertain, victory over the depravity of Western imperialism, the apartheid regime, and its Arab vassal states. The U.S. and Israeli strategy of combining what the Washington architects of Central American policy in the 1980s called going "primitive", that is mass killings of the civilian population, with building up the military power of the elites, has failed. Imperialism's public relations advertisements for "democracy" in the Middle East are only more exposed in Palestine-Israel and Lebanon by the popular movements for democracy, where imperialism has not yet been successful in inducing aspects of civil war as it has in Iraq.

The Israeli effort to strengthen the embargo against food, fuel and money into Gaza, has been shown for what it is by the Palestinians. The Israeli government has always used blockades against Palestinian bantustans since it controls them, but since 2006 such embargoes increased in scale. Last week, the government imposed a complete blockade and all power was cut, and darkness overtook Gaza.

The Israeli government says that since homemade rockets continue to be launched from Gaza, it will impose a complete blockade until they stop. 2 people in Sderot were killed recently from these rockets. The NYTimes reports, "Israeli Prime Minister Olmert said he won't allow Gazans to live ordinary lives while Israelis next to Gaza are suffering from daily rocket attacks". So how have Palestinians been doing these last two years living "ordinary lives"?

The blockade has been in place to varying degrees since Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in the beginning of 2006. But that's only part of the story. The Israeli army has coupled this blockade with continued murders and arrests of Palestinian activists and civilians. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, in the last two years the Israeli regime has killed 1030 Palestinians, 193 of which were children. During these two years, 44% of these 1030 dead were civilians. Almost half of all Palestinians killed didn't even have a gun in their hands. In this same time, only 24 Israelis were killed. This doesn't even include the over 1000 civilian dead in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 2006, or the number of brave Lebanese who took up arms to defend their homes and not let the apartheid regime carry out another 20 year occupation.

How to make sense of these sick numbers? Since the second intifada began in 2000, it has challenged the legitimacy of the apartheid regime. This regime has responded by practicing mass terror and the destruction of the Palestinian social fabric itself, while further entrenching its segregationist and displacement policies. While American supplied F-16s, Apache helicopters, and tanks strafe the Palestinian bantustans, soldiers shoot up demonstrations, murdering hundreds of people. Meanwhile, Zionist fascist militias rampage through Palestinian ghettos, destroying shops, cars and crops in the field. It was a policy announced in the very beginning of the second intifada when more than a dozen Palestinians living inside the Green line, so-called Palestinian-Israelis, were shot down for organizing demonstrations in solidarity, while Zionist mobs prowled the streets looking for Palestinians to lynch.

A couple days relief

In the Gaza bantustan in recent years, these practices can only be characterized differently in that they're of a much greater scale. Water, medicines and food have been low and malnutrition and preventable diseases are growing. Since there are no supplies, Gaza's meager textile factories have come to a close and the entrances out of the bantustan are blocked by Israeli soldiers, preventing any further work inside the Green Line. Unemployment is at 75%.

Meanwhile, Israeli Jews live their ordinary lives undisturbed by any of this. Olmert's Orwellian flip is exactly the kind of psychological displacement by the colonial racist mind that Fanon notes in Wretched of the Earth: it is the whites that are under attack, and as for the condition of the native he has only brought upon himself. The scales of violence, therefore, are appropriate in the moral economy of white supremacy. We see this in American newspapers where, if a an Israeli Jew is occasionally killed, there is front page coverage, while every week Palestinians are killed in demonstrations and arrests and they remain unmentioned and faceless. Olmert's comment reveals exactly the calculus of white life as more valuable than non-white life.

This gets at Genet's Israeli madman as colonial sadist. In the social ideology of Zionism, colonial sadism is based on the racial ideas of Arab inferiority and barbarism. The Zionist madman must commit mass state terror because the native not only deserves it, but this is the only way to maintain the racial order in the logic of colonialism and apartheid. Gaza today is only the most extreme example of this dynamic in Palestine-Israel.

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New Flyer: Gaza and Ongoing Apartheid

The entrenchment of apartheid as one set of laws and practices for the indigenous population and another for Jews is ongoing and getting worse. As one well-known leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, the situation facing Palestinians is even worse than in South Africa. U.S. government and institutional support—like right on this campus—is integral to apartheid’s existence. In the United States, Britain, South Africa and Egypt, there is a growing campaign of boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from companies doing business inIsrael-Palestine. It is modeled on the successful solidarity efforts in support of the democratic movement to end South Africa apartheid. Similarly, the Palestinian movement to end apartheid cannot succeed if we here do not hold our own university accountable.

NYU students are building an anti-apartheid campaign here. Get involved!

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What Is The “Peace Process?”: The Annapolis Talks and the Future of the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Olmert, Bush, Abbas: trying to save apartheid

“If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” - Ehud Olmert, Annapolis talks, 11/07

Last November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas met with US President George Bush in Annapolis, Maryland for the first stage of a new round of “peace talks” – an official society song and dance that the world has not seen in almost six years since the "Road Map to Peace" talks in Taba. Most people outside of the United States (including most Israelis), understand that the so-called “peace process” is a public relations scam, that contrary to the supposed purpose of these talks – the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state and the negotiation of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace – the peace talks are actually designed to give international legitimacy to Israeli apartheid regime, and to prolong the day of reckoning when a Palestinian civil rights movement finally dismantles this structure from below.

But why are these new talks just happening now? Why, after six years of dormancy, has the Colonial Fascism Cabaret just come back to town? Is it because of the Hollywood writer’s strike, and there was just no one to write the lines? While this would be a solid guess for those not in the know, the six years of public silence are certainly not for lack of words. Rather, this recent round of peace talks is occurring because of a profound crisis in Israeli apartheid policies and thought, triggered by the very recent and very powerful popular struggles of the Palestinian people. To understand the current phase of official society “dialogue” in Israel/Palestine, we need to look at the recent history of democratic movements among the Palestinians themselves.

In the last two decades, there have been two major anti-colonial uprisings in historic Palestine: the First Intifada, from 1987-1993, and the Second Intifada, from 2000-2004. These movements created an immense political crisis for the Israeli state and official society (not to mention the Palestinian establishment), precisely because they challenged the very foundations of unequal social relations institutionalized in the laws and de facto practices of Israel - relations characterized by ethnic separation and subjugation in a hierarchy of citizenship.
Because as in apartheid South Africa, access to citizenship and civil rights in Israel is defined by race and ethnicity through religion, Jew versus Arab, a system in which Jews have full political rights and Palestinians have modified ones or none at all, depending on where they live.

The two-state solution is no longer a possibility for Palestinians because there cannot be an acceptance of living in bantustans which the Israeli government has created. The paradigmatic shift to an anti-apartheid analysis, signals a possible return to the original program in the PLO charter for a democratic Israel-Palestine for equal rights, for the national Palestinian movement. This is what the Zionist regime fears. The demand for equal rights and citizenship as a goal for the national movement would end, once and for all, the public relations stunts of the "peace process".

Every Israeli and American state official knows this, hence the tirelessly revisited “peace process” and its crucial “two-state solution.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it best himself during the recent Annapolis talks: ““If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” The Orwellian mirage of a two-state promise is the only way to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, to maintain the rigid ethnic segregation and separate but unequal practices that define the entire social fabric of Israeli society as a whole.

In the Israeli political establishment, there have been two approaches to dealing with these Palestinian democratic challenges to the current state of affairs. One promotes continual military subjugation and even genocide against the Palestinian population – the civilian shoot-to-kill policy during the two Intifadas, or the recent total-war military blockade and economic strangulation of the entire Gazan population, being just two examples of this. The other position advocates the “the two state solution:” a political arrangement where Palestinians are placed on a handful of disconnected and Israeli military regulated ethnic reservations and these reservations are collectively referred to as a “state” against all rational instinct.

Handala's message to apartheid

This second vision is specifically modeled after the South African apartheid regime’s “peace offerings” constructed through the 1960s and 1970s – a series of limited autonomy Bantustans, militarily surrounded and bisected by the apartheid state forces, having no political autonomy and subject to new invasion and occupation at any time. These were the terms of both the Oslo and Camp David Accords. But what unites the first and second vision is that they both share a philosophy of racial manifest destiny and separation, falsely equating the history and identity of Jewish people with the existence of an apartheid state. This philosophy is called Zionism. Zionist justification for Israeli apartheid is intimately tied to notions of superior and inferior races and cultures, often associated with the idea and practice of white supremacy.

Therefore, the context of the Annapolis has to be seen through this goal of empowering Palestinian representatives, whose base of support is the U.S. and Israeli governments, to affirm an international recognition of de facto apartheid. But this cannot be done effectively if grass roots popular democratic resistance is not crushed and at the same time the leading resistance organization, Hamas, is not destroyed. Bush promoted the idea of elections through Abbas, but Abbas lost badly to Hamas. Since the election of Hamas to the bantustan government in 2006, the Israeli government, and the U.S. and European regimes have been working to remove it.

Through their proxies in the Fatah party elite, led by Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad and Mohammed Dahlan, they were able to carry out a coup. The bantustan government was restored in the West Bank ghettoes to the Fatah elite--who got rich off of the Oslo years in the 1990s, while apartheid was further entrenched-- however they were run out of Gaza, where Hamas has historically deeper roots.

Mohammed Dahlan, close to the Israeli government and the U.S., was directed by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and flushed with more American and Israeli weapons, to attack and destroy Hamas and any resistance in Gaza and in the West Bank. Although this plan failed in Gaza, it is being carried out in the West Bank bantustans. Now the Palestinian Authority police forces are being overseen by US general Keith Dayton. The goal is to ensure that the work of apartheid goes on undisturbed while Palestinian faces imprison and murder any resistance to it.

If the original goal of the "peace process" in the 1990s was to reestablish the political legitimacy of Israeli apartheid that was quickly fading with the democratic challenges of the first intifada, this time it is more difficult to restore that legitimacy. In the 1990s, the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was allowed to enter the West Bank and be the Palestinian face of this process. It worked for awhile because despite great disillusionment, Yasser Arafat still had a lot of symbolic legitimacy as the most recognized leader of the historic national movement and leader of Fatah. There is no such illusory legitimacy today. The Palestinian Authority, and the hand-picked people like Fayyad, Abbas and Dahlan, depend completely on American and Israeli government interests.

While Abbas and the PA leadership smile during photo-ops like Annapolis, saying nothing about the structures of apartheid, Israel continues its collective punishment of the Gazan population and is quietly consolidating its apartheid structure in the West Bank as well, strengthening and expanding its infrastructure of Jewish-only towns, Jewish-only roads, IDF checkpoints and the latest "security" wall.

The democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people to be free from apartheid have sent a wave of fear through Israeli (and not to mention American) official society. The election of Hamas to municipal power in Gaza (and the subsequent total war response of the Israeli Defense Forces against the Gazan civilian population) is only one manifestation of this. The recent Annapolis peace talks come on the heels of a growing awareness amongst Israeli rulers that apartheid is losing its legitimacy, and that something must be done on the international scene to preserve the racial character and hierarchy of Israeli society as a whole.

It is important for democratic minded people in the US, and all people of good faith, to support the Palestinian struggle against apartheid and exert real pressure on the Israeli government through divestment and economic boycott here. The American student divestment movement played a critical role in the 1980s in bringing the South African apartheid regime to its knees. It is up to this generation to see that the same solidarity is offered to the Palestinian people as they continue the struggle against colonialism and apartheid in their homeland.

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NYU to Open Satellite Campus in United Arab Emirates Dictatorship

The real UAE: Workers on sit-down
strike, surrounded by stormtroopers

NYU management has rolled out another product from their new consumer line. They have announced the intention to open a campus in the United Arab Emirates. John Sexton calls the places where these campuses are opening up, like Singapore and Tel Aviv, "idea capitals". People more accustomed to the truth call them cash machines for NYU.

According to the WSN article, "NYU officials have emphasized the 'academic freedom' students will have at NYUAD: the university has been given carte blanche control of the campus' operations". Presumably with a straight face, the vice chancellor of the NYU campus at Abu Dhabi said NYU received a "special royally decreed academic freedom zone". Sexton added, "All the various prohibitions on various discriminations that we observe happily here will be observed in the campus in Abu Dhabi". In the internal campus email, Sexton droned, "there is an enormous commitment by Abu Dhabi to make itself a cultural and intellectual center in the region, amply demonstrated by the important world institutions that are establishing themselves there".

In recent months, NYU announced the opening of a satellite campus in Tel Aviv. We've been passing out a flier that addresses this hypocrisy. But it's no accident that within months of each other, management has announced glowing support for these two regimes. It says a lot about that "commitment" NYU management tells us they have over and over again in public relations articles and internal campus emails to all those catch phrases like "academic freedom", "excellence", "dialogue", "democratic ideals", and "community". The commercials just keep rolling.

So what is this "cultural and intellectual center"?

The United Arab Emirates is a federation of city states, each run by a different family. A British colonial creation and now a U.S. protectorate, it is probably the closest thing in the world that comes to a modern slave state. There are no freedoms and no democracy. Unions are illegal, sex slavery is rampant, and homosexuality outlawed.

NYU CEO Sexton

The vast majority of the population is primarily South Asian and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asian working people. They work as indentured migrant laborers who can't have citizenship, live in shanty towns and work camps under curfew, and have much of their wages stolen or, sometimes, not paid at all. A series of strikes have been organized this year. As NYU finished making its announcement, strikes were breaking out again against low pay, abuse, and theft of wages. Police stormtroopers attacked the strikers, who courageously fought back, but 4,000 have been deported in the couple of weeks or so.

The UAE ruling class have built their power on the basis of the oil economy, discovered from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The oil boom allowed them to begin to differentiate its economy and, because of its strategic location for imperialism, has become a hub for finance, IT, real estate, and transport--the most parasitic but most profitable sectors of the neo-liberal economy.

It has become the playground for the regional and international elite--their utopian society--lovingly covered in sentimental articles in the New York Times about once a month. It is a consumer paradise of the rich; a simulated experience; a society and government completely run as a giant corporation. In short, it's a NYU management fantasy.

In the United States and Europe, imperialism has held up the Gulf states as examples of good, "enlightened" Arab societies. Supporting "good" Muslims versus "bad" Muslims is important ideologically to justify imperialism for American official institutions. But this isn't just pure cynical propaganda. The Gulf states and Saudi Arabia continue to play their assigned role in helping to attack all democratic movements, not only in their own societies, but elsewhere, in Lebanon, Palestine-Israel and Iraq. Yet the glowing support for such regimes tells us more about the political and social values of western imperialism and the global elite than about the realities of the Middle East.

The UAE is a perfect example of how capitalism is a bitter enemy of democracy. Without the history of popular movements for democracy around the world we would not even enjoy the basic freedoms we see today. Without any history of such movements in the UAE, not only is there no democracy, but capitalism has developed a caste system where the vast majority of the population has little to no rights at all.

But that's of course how the UAE works. The majority of its population is literally looted, kept permanently at a bare minimum existence, and the profit from this pocketed by the elites. It is an example of the global capitalist system on steroids. This process is something that working people in America have been experiencing for thirty years, but still have residual institutions--diminishing unions for example and, ultimately, still citizenship rights--that slow down the advance of this mass looting. From its CEO-presidents, and the management bureaucracy, to the professional schools, to the Economics, Political Science and history departments,it is exactly what the American university establishment advocates--NYU among the best. From the classroom to coveted relationships with the corporate and political elite, the university advocates and justifies an ongoing class and racist offensive against working people in this country and abroad, that has resulted in falling wages, destruction of independent political organization, collapsing social infrastructure like health care and education, massive rates of imprisonment, and imperialist state terror. As one author has put it, it's socialism for the elites and capitalism for everyone else.

Those "royally decreed zones" NYU management spoke so highly of are the way this all happens. Prostitution, sex slavery, alcohol and drugs, near-naked beaches, and even "free speech" take their place in such zones that the "royals" have decreed, alongside Salafist, sharia law and capitalist indentured labor. The new NYU campus will not be the antithesis of these integrated sides of this "idea capital". Instead, it will be one more expression. The "freedoms" or the decadence of the elite are erected over the necessity of super-exploiting the majority to make this decadence profitable.

The appearance of the institutions of learning supposedly committed to a democratic culture justifies the realities that underpin the logic of this mass looting of millions of people. It exactly parallels the rhetorical appeals NYU has made to slogans of "a private institution in the public interest" as it has risen to the top of New York City's neo-liberal economy of mass displacement and police terror of working and poor people and the mass concentration of wealth into the hands of the few.

No wonder Sexton can shake the hand of Israeli apartheid with the announcement of the Tel Aviv campus and turn around and do the same with the Abu Dhabi campus. Colonial fascism and capitalist dictatorship go hand in hand. The struggles of Palestinians and the South and Southeast Asian working people in the UAE represent the democratic antithesis to the strategies of profit and political rule that the ruling classes, supported by US imperialism and NYU management values, have developed in response to these movements.

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What if it was Jewofascism or Blackfascism Week?

David Horowitz: Proto-Fascist

A couple weeks ago, an event called Islamofascism Awareness Week occurred at almost 100 college campuses across the United States. Organized by David Horowitz's Freedom Center, this speakers’ series featured such nationally prominent conservative speakers as Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, and David Horowitz, and was intended, in the organizers’ own words, to “alert Americans to the threat from Islamo-Fascism and focus attention on the violent oppression of Muslim women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and other Islamic states.”

A simple survey of modern Middle Eastern history will show that Muslim women have been bombed, shot, arrested, and tortured by colonial and imperial authorities for centuries. The number of Muslim women languishing under the Arab dictatorships propped up by the American government, under the Israeli apartheid regime that corals Palestinians into the open air prisons called Gaza and the West Bank, under the US occupation of Iraq, are in the tens of millions. In Iraq alone – a country that was for decades tyrannized by the American-backed dictatorship of former CIA agent, Saddam Hussein, and which now is utterly destroyed by the American occupation – civilian casualties as a result of the war, and the US-led sanctions that preceded it, are now over one million. Yet, white racists like Horowitz, who have no interest in the liberation of the Middle East, repeatedly whine about the veil and the lack of freedom in Muslim societies. This should give us pause. Simple math shows that the number of Muslim women dead due to American foreign policy is more than the most egregious Muslim patriarchs could ever hope to accomplish with all the stones in the Middle East. The Horowitz-led diatribe against “Islamofascism” is not a good faith attempt at solidarity with Muslim women suffering under patriarchy, but a shallow, opportunistic demonization of an entire religion and culture, all for the ultimate purpose of justifying American imperialism in the Middle East. These people do not feel anything for the women of Islam. They preach from a pulpit of bones.

This recent event by the Horowitz Freedom Center needs to be seen in the broader political context of two different yet related historical developments. The first is colonial ideology. The second is the rising tide of fascist and white supremacist forces currently gaining sway in the United States.

Horowitz’ denigration of Islam is not a new attack but actually a classic tradition of justifying colonial and racist violence, one which has a long, tired history in the annals of Western imperialism. During French colonialism in Algeria, scores of French political and cultural organizations, as well as the French government itself, justified the violence and totalitarianism of their settler society by claiming that Islamic culture was backwards and patriarchal, and that the French empire was a force of enlightenment and civilization. During the Vietnam War, American government spokesmen claimed that Buddhist culture was backwards, citing the Buddhist religious detachment from desire and earthly suffering as proof that Vietnamese Buddhists do not value human life. This ostensibly made them feel better about all that napalm and all those millions of Vietnamese dead, but rational people recognize that occupation and carpet bombing have nothing to do with democracy, cultural values, or women’s liberation. Western women’s rights groups have been trying to pierce the Muslim veil for almost a century, providing ideological cover for Western imperialism by dehumanizing the culture of their conquered subjects. The United States and the David Horowitz Freedom Center are no exception.

Islamofascism Awareness Week (and not to mention the MSA establishment) has also attempted to create a separation between “good” (moderate) Muslims and “bad” (extremist) ones. Good Muslims are Muslims who endorse the so-called war on terror, apologizing for “their people’s” terrorism, and endorse the American imperial project in the Middle East. Bad Muslims are those Muslims who use Islam to inform an anti-colonial politics and resistance to US empire in the Middle East. Thus, Horowitz conflates right-wing authoritarian political Islamic organizations such as the Wahhabists and Al Qaeda, with popular-based anti-colonial ones such as Hizbullah. The ultimate goal is the demonization of any Muslims who attempt to use Islam to forge an identity and ideology that can defend everyday Muslims against US empire in the Middle East.

Horowitz himself represents a growing and unique political tendency in the United States that needs to be put into context if it is to be understood. An ex-Stalinist and fellow-traveler of the Black Panthers, David Horowitz, like some other white radicals of the 1960s, abandoned his Marxist and Black nationalist friends when Stalinist theories did not pan out, turning instead to radical neo-conservative and white nationalist ideas. Horowitz claims to oppose fascism in his “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” but a brief survey of his political record shows that he has openly associated with fascist and white supremacist forces in the United States and abroad since the late 1980s. A supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Contra fascists in Nicaragua, apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel, and the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, David Horowitz has posted articles on his website frontpagemag.org by Jared Taylor and James Lublinskus, key leaders of the white supremacist group American Renaissance. He has also expressed critical support for David Duke, former member of the Klu Kux Klan. David Horowitz is a central organizer of a growing and insurgent right wing movement in the United States, and Islamofascism Awareness Week was designed to recruit and consolidate this movement’s campus youth forces. The threat that he poses to communities of color in this country, as well as to all Americans’ basic democratic rights, should not be underestimated or misunderstood.

In the wake of the popular opposition that Islamofascism Awareness Week met last week on many college campuses, many liberals have asserted that this resistance was somehow a violation of university principles, out of step with the spirit of civil dialogue and academic discourse. This is a grave misunderstanding of what Horowitz’s forces represent, and is emblematic of a profound political apathy that values assembly hall etiquette above human, anti-racist solidarity. Because a question arises. If universities across America were to host a “Blackofascism Awareness Week” or a “Jewofascism Awareness Week,” would this be acceptable university speech? Would we tolerate it? Would we engage it in the spirit of “civil dialogue,” treating it like so many normalized, academic discourses? Or would we confront it, choosing to take a stand against anti-Arab and Muslim bigotry, choosing to challenge what is becoming the most invisible racism of our generation? Frantz Fanon once said that it is the duty of every generation to discover its mission, and to either fulfill it or betray it. Arab and Muslim people are under daily attack in this country, and all people of good faith need to stand up and stand with the Arab and Muslim communities in this country, fighting for a truly democratic and multiracial America.

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