AnarchoBolshevik

Despite the pain and suffering we are enduring in Gaza due to the ongoing zionist terrorist war of genocide in the region, we send our heartfelt messages of solidarity and love to the friendly Spanish people, particularly in the Valencia region, following the devastating floods that have left hundreds dead and missing and caused massive destruction to homes and public properties.

We wish the brotherly people of Spain a speedy recovery and the ability to overcome this humanitarian disaster. We wish the injured a swift recovery and extend our condolences to the families of the dead and missing.

[Donald] Trump’s victory will reinforce the U.S. anti-Palestinian approach, and the Democratic Party’s loss is a natural result of its direct involvement in the zionist war of genocide.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine affirms that Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s victory in the U.S. elections does not, in any way, signify a real change in the hostile approach that successive U.S. administrations have pursued against our Palestinian people and their just cause.

There is no fundamental difference between the Republican and Democratic parties; both have contributed to supporting the zionist entity and participated in the war of genocide against our people, whether through policies or unlimited military and diplomatic support.

Our people have never placed their hopes on any candidate from either the Democratic or Republican parties, as we have never witnessed any positive change in U.S. administration policies, which have consistently aligned fully with the zionist entity, providing it with military funding and all forms of political, legal and diplomatic protection.

The Democratic Party’s loss is a logical result of its complicity with the zionist entity; it rejected calls from supporters of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian community and Arab and Muslim communities in the United States to pressure for an end to the war of genocide in Gaza, continuing its support for aggression against our people.

Today, the Democrats are paying the price for ignoring these demands at the ballot box. We in the Popular Front do not expect any positive development from a Donald Trump administration; rather, we anticipate an escalation in hostile policies against our people, fully biased in favor of the zionist entity.

We call on supporters of the Palestinian people, as well as movements, organizations and groups that stand with our cause in the United States, to intensify pressure on the new U.S. administration to end its support for the zionist entity.

We see in the popular and student movements that stand in solidarity with Gaza, along with the emergence of small, free voices and parties, a glimmer of hope that could contribute to even a slight change in the U.S. stance on our cause.

Do not expect the world to be fair to you, for I have lived and witnessed how the world remained silent in the face of our pain. Do not wait for fairness, but be the fairness. Carry the dream of Palestine in your heart and make every wound a weapon and every tear a source of hope.

This is my will: do not lay down your weapons; do not throw away stones; do not forget your martyrs; and do not compromise on a dream that is rightfully yours.

We are here to stay in our land, in our hearts and in the future of our children.

I entrust you with Palestine, the land I loved until death and the dream I carried on my shoulders like a mountain that never bends.

If I fall, do not fall with me, but carry the banner that never falls, and make my blood a bridge for a generation that rises from our ashes stronger.

Do not forget that the homeland is not just a story to be told but a reality to be lived, and with every martyr born from this land a thousand more resistance fighters are born.

If the flood returns and I am not among you, know that I was the first drop in the waves of freedom, and I lived to see you continue the journey.

Be a thorn in their throat, a flood that knows no retreat, and do not rest until the world acknowledges that we are the rightful owners and that we are not just numbers in the news.

Yahya Sinwar, born October 29, 1962.

U.S. sanctions, totaling more than 8,000 measures, impact one-third of humanity in more than 40 countries. They are a crime against humanity used, like military intervention, to topple popular governments and movements and provide economic and military support to pro-U.S., right-wing forces.

The U.S. economic dominance and its 800+ military bases worldwide demand all other countries participate in acts of economic strangulation. They must end all normal trade relations, otherwise they risk having Wall Street’s guns pointed at them.

The banks and financial institutions, who are responsible for the devastation of our communities at home, drive the plunder of countries abroad.

As our book is titled, “Sanctions are a Wrecking Ball in a Global Economy.”

The intention is to smash all normal economic life.

Venezuela is the fifth most sanctioned country in the world, and it has cost the country dearly: 946 sanctions! Some 40,000 to 100,000 people in Venezuela are estimated to have died from lack of food, medicines, clean drinking water and other basic necessities as of 2019, imposed since the Barack Obama administration. (Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 25, 2019) The Joe Biden administration has now imposed new, harsher sanctions on Venezuela for the crime of carrying out free and fair elections.

The sanctions on Gaza, since the population dared to overwhelmingly elect the Hamas slate, the Movement of Islamic Resistance, in 2006, operate consciously with Israel to strangle the whole population. This is collective punishment.

Sanctions, combined with a torrent of U.S. provided weapons, have reached a level of genocidal violence against civilians in Gaza that outrages the whole world. U.S. sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen brutally impact all the economies of West Asia. They stretch to Afghanistan, blocking all development after decades of U.S. wars.

Sanctions stretch to Myanmar, Laos and the country with the oldest sanctions: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, since 1950.

Cuba, in this hemisphere, has been strangled for over 60 years. Now Nicaragua is in the crosshairs. Impoverished Haiti remains under sanctions.

The largest number of sanctioned countries is in Africa, countries although resource rich, are already strangled by centuries of colonial looting. From Libya, the Central African Republic, Congo – DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Sudan and South Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe, sanctions block the Right to Develop.

They harm the most vulnerable citizens: children, the sick, the elderly and the poor.

The U.S. economy is not officially in recession. Even with the low number of jobs created in October, the unemployment rate remains at 4.1%. And there’s no recession in the auto industry such as the one that began in 2008.

Yet many autoworkers are facing mass layoffs, because the capitalist class always seeks to extract the greatest amount of production with the lowest labor costs in order to maximize profits. This often means cutting jobs. If these job cuts are happening now, what can autoworkers expect when there’s an economic downturn?

Winning anything from the auto company bosses is hard, especially in this stage of capitalist decline. Saving jobs is even harder than winning a pay increase. But history, including the UAW’s own history, shows that nothing is ever won without a struggle. Autoworkers in Brazil have gotten GM to back off from layoff threats after they struck the company.

The 2023 strike at Stellantis, GM and Ford won commitments to retain jobs. Now Stellantis is, according to the UAW, violating the contract by slashing jobs — a “strikeable grievance” under the agreement. But the company called thousands of workers — in violation of U.S. labor law —urging them to vote “no” in strike authorization votes at the various plants.

There have been many UAW strikes over the decades when contracts expire, but few in the middle of a contract. Workers are fearful. At a Stellantis plant in Kokomo, Indiana, the strike authorization only received 61% of the vote — a majority but not the two-thirds needed to approve a strike under the UAW Constitution. Shortly thereafter, the UAW’s strike vote plans for other plants were put on hold.

The UAW is in a difficult position. If the union opts not to strike, that will embolden Stellantis. But if it strikes without rank-and-file support, that will also embolden the company.

Ahmad Kawash, co-leader of the Palestinian House of New England, noted that Nov. 2 is the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, an imperialist hangman who had previously orchestrated a campaign of colonial repression in Ireland, approved Zionist schemes to colonize Palestine.

Kawash said: “The massacres began from that time until these days. And what we see in Gaza is a continuation of this criminal project against our people, who are still fighting and offering martyr after martyr in order to live with dignity on their land. Long live the unity of Palestine and Lebanon! Long live the struggle!”

As speakers at Saturday’s rally emphasized, it is only the Palestinian liberation struggle and the worldwide solidarity movement that can end the Zionist terror campaign. Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidential elections, the speakers said, the U.S. settler empire will continue to enable the genocide being carried out by its Zionist crony.

As Saleh, a Palestine Youth Movement (PYM) organizer put it: “It doesn’t matter who sits in that office in that heart of empire. The results, as we’ve seen, are always the same.” Saleh went on to stress that the wealth and resources that could have gone toward Land Back for Indigenous nations, and health care, housing and living wages for workers, instead go to support settler-colonial genocide and imperialist aggression. This is an indictment of the depraved priorities that structure nation-states in the world capitalist system.

Aya, the action’s emcee and a PYM leader declared: “There will be no business as usual and no election cycle as usual while genocide continues! … We will not be bullied or fearmongered into voting for any candidate who will continue to turn a blind eye to peoples’ suffering.”

As Aya and other speakers rejected the obscene false dichotomy offered by bourgeois electoral politics, protesters unfurled a banner emblazoned with the words: “No Votes for Genocide.”

Marchers chanted: ‘Viva, viva Palestina!’

From Faneuil Hall, protesters took over the streets of downtown Boston, shutting down traffic and defying the phalanx of cop cars that menaced the crowd. Many of them waved Palestinian, Lebanese and Congolese flags. As they marched to raucous drumming, demonstrators chanted: “From the South to Beirut, all our martyrs we salute!; Viva, viva Palestina!; There is only one solution: Intifada revolution!”

The march ended in front of South Station, where activists projected footage of the genocidal destruction of Gaza, along with montages of the global protests against it. Speakers vowed to continue organizing in the U.S imperial core to support the Palestinian struggle for liberation by any means necessary.

Mohamed, a Yemeni recent graduate of the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid, evoked the resilience of Palestinians in North Gaza, who continue to resist Zionist death squads: “They will remain on their land even if it means death. So it teaches us something in this moment in the movement when we sometimes feel there might be an ebb. It teaches us that as long as we remain persistent, as long as we remain steadfast and principled to the people in Gaza, we are heading in the right direction, despite whatever the electors say, despite whoever gets elected.”

He continued: “When people tell us that we should vote for this candidate or that candidate and it is the ‘lesser of two evils,’ we will respond back that we will not take this evil! We all know the phrase that ‘the arc of history bends towards justice,’ but that only means something if millions of us remain at a single pressure point at the forefront of that arc and make sure we bend it toward justice! And even when it feels like there’s not enough of us on this steel beam of history that seems unmovable, it is our duty to remain there, to recruit people, to bring them into the movement, because one day there will be enough of us. And there is!”

Closing the rally, Fawaz Abusharkh, co-leader of the Palestinian House of New England, urged demonstrators to keep turning out in support of Palestinian resistance: “We need to say: we are not going to be silent, and we refuse to be silenced! If they kill all the flowers and roses, they’re not going to stop the spring from coming. Israel will guarantee that a free world will start with a free Palestine.”

The protest was organized by the Boston Coalition for Palestine; its member organizations include the Palestinian House of New England, Palestine Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston South Asian Coalition, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Workers Party of Massachusetts, Workers World Party Boston, Mass. Peace Action and over 40 more.

(Emphasis original.)

With Gallant out of the picture, and Netanyahu now surrounded by his people, the imperative for major international pressure is even more intense. Gallant, who has no problem slaughtering innocent Palestinians by the tens of thousands, still saw matters through a security lens, albeit a vicious and brutal one.

Netanyahu has other concerns. He wants to prolong the fighting to continue to delay his corruption trial, but he is also moving forward with his so-called “judicial coup,” an effort Gallant also opposed. That is more reason to avoid any diminishment of violence. His right-wing coalition partners want to see Israel move toward a regional military victory, eventually defeating Iran and establishing Israel as the undisputed regional hegemon, in their vision.

We have already seen Israel taking steps to advance the genocide in Gaza, to exponentially increase the violence in the West Bank, to devastate Lebanon, and to try to establish dominance over Iran. Gallant was raising questions of long term strategy, which held some hope for at least minor restraint. There will be no such voice now.

That may not necessarily mean escalation, but it does make de-escalation less likely. Netanyahu sees time as being on his side and is more threatened by the end of the fighting—even if it were to end in what most Israelis would call victory in Gaza and Lebanon—than by its continuation. Men like Katz and Zamir are not going to talk him down from that, so as long as Sa’ar is bought off, Netanyahu will have successfully removed a “renegade” in Gallant and will face even less restraint than he did before, hard as that it is to imagine.

The 54-year-old Black roadside assistance operator was killed by multiple shots at 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 3 as he approached off-duty homicide detective Christopher Sweeney’s personal vehicle, which was stopped on the side of the road in Northeast Philadelphia. Wearing a reflective vest and unarmed, Jones was acting as a good samaritan, offering help to a stranded driver in need.

“He had nothing in his hands — not a clipboard, pen, not even his phone,” Shaka Johnson, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney now representing Jones’ family, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Oct. 7)

Jones worked for Aramark for 21 years, as a groundskeeper for the Philadelphia Eagles, as a supervisor at a Northeast Philly metal manufacturer, and worked roadside assistance gigs to make ends meet.

Initial media reports repeated totally unfounded police claims Jones was killed during an attempted carjacking of an off-duty officer.

At the Nov 2 rally, organized by the Philadelphia Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, people chanted, held signs and heard family members and community activists speak for over an hour. Jones’ aunt Marcia complained the family wasn’t even notified about the police murder until 14 hours after it happened.

Participants chanted “Cell blocks for killer cops!” a number of times, representing the main demand being made of city officials.

Sweeney, a 14-year police veteran, is on administrative leave and has not yet been charged with a crime. The murder of Jones was at least the 12th police-involved shooting this year in Philadelphia.

Police terror resulting in death of civilians continues to increase year-by-year in the U.S., disproportionately affecting communities of color. Following 1,020 police killings in 2020, when the police murder of George Floyd led to massive widespread protests, the number has increased to 1,163 people killed by cops in 2023. (statista.com)

The protesters marched to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Another demonstration, organized by Within Our Lifetime, will be held on Election Day, Nov. 5, at 7 p.m. in front of the News Corp. building at 1211 6th Ave.

In the West there will be some people who turn up their noses at this point: development, growth, industrialization, urbanization, an economic miracle of unprecedented magnitude and duration unprecedented in history. How vulgar!

This snobbery from the privileged seems to deem irrelevant the fact that hundreds of millions of people have escaped a fate that condemned them to malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. Those who might think that the development of productive forces is only a matter of economic prosperity and consumerism would do well to reread (or read) the pages of the Communist Manifesto that highlight the idiocy of rural life in misery — not only material but cultural, with narrow and impassable boundaries.

We showed up to the rally with Palestinian flags, literature, keffiyehs and signs. Reactions from attendees, who seemed to primarily be campaign volunteers, were mostly negative.

Some attendees hurled insults at us, calling us “antisemites,” “terrorists” and “gang rapists,” telling one of us to “go back to where you came from,” and saying we would be “thrown off a roof” in Palestine. One of us was physically assaulted by a rally participant.

We exposed the cynical attempt from elected officials and [neo]imperialist “feminists” of the Democratic party to co-opt reproductive justice while enforcing a racial hierarchy of human life with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim women at the bottom of that hierarchy. Goldman and Nadler, both invited to speak at the rally, have supported sending “aid” to Israel to continue its expansionist, genocidal war.

Electeds at this event have repeated the debunked, false propaganda about Palestinians committing mass sexual violence. Every allegation is a confession, as there are countless documented instances and even video evidence of sexual torture and abuse of Palestinians by the lOF (Israel Occupation Forces). This past year has only fortified the incompatibility between Zionism and feminism.

Zionist settler colonialism is predicated on the racialized logic of elimination by controlling the reproduction and sexuality of Palestinian women. Anyone who enables reproductive genocide in Palestine is no ally to women or reproductive freedom anywhere.

Yuri Yep, a restaurant server at Omni Parker House said: “I’m on strike, because I work two jobs in order to provide for my family. I’m always rushing, and I don’t even have time to see my kids. I’m missing out on my own life. It’s ridiculous that I’m living this way when the hotel companies make record profits. They can afford what we’re asking for, and we’ll be out on strike until we win for all of our families.” (unitehere.org, Oct. 14)

At both the massive Oct. 6 Boston Coalition for Palestine march and Oct. 12 Indigenous Peoples Day action, demonstrators joined the Local 26 picket lines at the Hilton Park Plaza Hotel. These were tremendous shows of solidarity between hotel workers and Indigenous activists fighting against centuries of capitalist genocide and exploitation. (workers.org/2024/10/81456/); (workers.org/2024/10/81220/)

On Oct. 25, 500 UNITE HERE! members and their allies rallied at the Park Plaza. Addressing the crowd, Brian Doherty, General Agent for the Greater Boston Building Trades Unions, made clear the irreconcilable conflict between shareholders and the workers they exploit. At issue, Doherty stressed, was a fight over whether Hilton’s profits should go towards extra dividends for billionaire investors or towards living wages for employees.

Kevin Hanes, a leader of the strike, added: “We need to pay our rent and have just one job to take care of our families. In our union we fight for one standard in this city and we will fight till we get it.”

Carlos Arâmyo, president of UNITE HERE Local 26, declared, “We will fight for what we are worth, and we know how to win.”

Although the hotel industry recently reported $100 billion in profits, many hotel employees report working two or more jobs to offset rising costs of living. Pandemic staffing cuts have forced workers to take on extra tasks during their working hours with no additional compensation.

Following the speeches by union leaders, dozens of workers and demonstrators joined the picket line outside the Park Plaza entrance. Drumming, blaring horns and chants of “Make them pay!” kept crowd energy surging. The noise shook the air and carried to the Boston Common, several blocks away.