blog

Dec 16

2023

1

Imperialist Wars/Occupations

anti-semitism anti-Zionism Censorship Framing Israel Language Occupation Palestine

WATCH: Why Anti-Zionism is Not Anti-Semitism

WATCH: Why Anti-Zionism is Not Anti-Semitism

The Electronic Intifada

Oct 6, 2021

 

In this 2021 mini-documentary from The Electronic Intifada, Nora Barrows-Friedman explains the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

“A clear and simple way to define anti-Semitism is bigotry or discrimination against Jews just for being Jews. Palestinians have always clearly spoken out against anti-Jewish bigotry.

But I break down how supporters of Zionism are trying to contort and redefine what anti-Semitism is in order to shield Israel from accountability for its crimes against Palestinians.”

 

Dec 10

2023

0

Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Anti-Imperialism Hamas Palestine Political Prisoners Resistance zionism

Globalize the Intifada: Regional Resistance, International Struggle & Palestinian Liberation on the 36th Anniversary of the Great Intifada

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

December 10, 2023

 

Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza carried out by the Zionist regime and the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people, December 7-9 2023 marks the 36th anniversary of the launch of the great popular Palestinian Intifada of 1987, one of the longest sustained grassroots uprisings in history and an example, like today’s battle, of the leadership of the Palestinian working class and popular masses in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine against Zionism, imperialism and their reactionary partners in the region. As Palestinians fight, mourn, love and struggle in the face of an all-out U.S./Israeli assault on their lives, existence and future, they not only defend their land and people but stand with their allies in the regional resistance and around the world on the frontlines of a truly globalized Intifada.

The Great Intifada launched from Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, often called Mukhayyam al-Thawra, the camp of revolution. Today, the people of Jabaliya camp, themselves refugees of the 1947-48 Nakba, once again resist displacement and the Israeli attempts to push them to the south of Gaza and then to Sinai in Egypt. They remain firmly rooted in the North of Gaza, living through starvation, torture, massive aerial bombing, siege and invasion in order to resist the genocide of their entire people.

On 8 December 1987, the murder of four Palestinian workers, mowed down by an Israeli occupation army truck in Jabaliya camp, led Palestinians to take the streets in massive numbers, building their movement, collectives and institutions, uniting around the messages of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, boycotting Israel and practicing all elements of popular struggle and collective resistance. Today, as we take to the streets once again, 36 years of Intifada stretch forward to the current Palestinian revolution against a barbaric Israeli genocide.

The prisoners’ movement and the Intifada

As we commemorate this 36th anniversary of years of struggle, of the imprisonment of over 600,000 Palestinians, of Yitzhak Rabin’s “breaking bones” strategy reenacted in mass slaughter in Gaza, we are also facing attempts to render the Palestinian struggle unspeakable, even as it is clear that the Palestinian people and their resistance, along with their allies, are not defeated but are instead exacting a significant cost on the occupier, defending their land toward victory, return and liberation despite the genocide. 

Today, there are nearly 8,000 Palestinian prisoners locked behind Israeli bars. The prisoners liberated during the one-week “humanitarian pause” by the Palestinian resistance through an exchange agreement relayed the severe situation of the captives today, subject to torture, abuse, malnutrition and mistreatment. Six Palestinian prisoners have been assassinated so far behind bars. Every day, the Zionist regime publishes new propaganda photos of Palestinian civilians being stripped and abused, in an attempt to break the will of the people and their resistance.

In 1987, the Intifada was preceded by the self-liberation of Palestinian prisoners; and in 2023, the prisoners’ movement, its strikes, uprisings and ongoing liberation struggles, has clearly pointed the compass toward return and liberation. In fact, the great Intifada was in many places led by Palestinian prisoners who had been liberated by the Resistance in the great 1985 prisoner exchange; today’s resistance is also led by freed Palestinian prisoners who honed their commitment to the struggle in the “revolutionary schools” established by the prisoners themselves, particularly during the Intifada. There is a direct throughline from 1987 to today, through the prisoners’ movement and its leading role in the collective liberation struggle.

The liberation of the prisoners is so precious to the Palestinian people everywhere that the resistance is unwilling to exchange its prisoners of war for anything other than the liberation of the imprisoned heroes of the Palestinian people in Zionist jails, on the terms of the resistance, despite the genocidal bombardment.

The liberation of the prisoners – including those held in international imperialist jails, like Georges Abdallah in France; the Holy Land Foundation prisoners Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi and Mufid Abdulqader in the United States; and Amin Abu Rashed in the Netherlands – is once again central to today’s global intifada.

The globalized Intifada

“From New York to Gaza…From Vancouver to Gaza….From Berlin to Gaza…From London to Gaza…From Cape Town to Gaza…From Sao Paulo to Gaza….From Paris to Gaza, Globalize the Intifada!”

The call rings out around the world, as hundreds of thousands – indeed, millions – march against the ongoing Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This phrase is not only an expression of sympathy with the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance fighting by all means for the liberation of Palestine, but also a reflection of the international, Arab and Palestinian nature of the Palestinian cause.

Today, the regional resistance is on the front lines of this globalized Intifada that presents a meaningful potential for sweeping the Arab region free of U.S.-led imperialism, including its European and British partners. It is worth recalling that, prior to the 1987 launch of the Intifada, the Palestinian cause seemed at a desperate point, at risk of liquidation, after the Palestinian resistance had been forced from Lebanon under Zionist invasion, while the camps were under siege. The Intifada came to reorient the compass and set the liberation struggle once again on a clear path forward.

Once again, today, prior to 7 October, the drive toward normalization with the Zionist regime seemed inevitable to many, while others bemoaned the disunity of the Palestinian movement; the struggle today has, once more, clarified the role of all forces in the region and the world, uniting the Palestinian people and their Arab and international allies toward liberation and return.

Palestine to Yemen to Lebanon and Beyond: Regional Resistance, Regional Revolution

In Yemen, the mobilized Yemeni people and their armed forces have shut down the Red Sea to Zionist naval traffic after seizing the “Galaxy Leader” ship owned by an Israeli businessman. They have consistently taken action to directly intervene in support of Palestine, imposing a truly material economic cost on the Zionist regime. The Yemeni people and their armed forces have brilliantly illustrated their own triumph over years of siege imposed by reactionary Arab regimes at the behest of Zionism and imperialism through this substantive form of boycott, divestment and sanctions: isolating the Zionist regime and advancing real Arab sovereignty over land, water and resources.

The people of Yemen are, of course, joined in this Intifada by the Lebanese Resistance, who through their participation in the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood, in the resistance to the genocide, have imposed significant military, economic and social costs on the Israeli regime. Over 20 years after the liberation of the South of Lebanon in May 2000 – one of the major factors in sparking the Al-Aqsa Intifada that began in 2000, often called the “Second Intifada”, the Lebanese Resistance is a full partner of the Palestinian Resistance on the field of battle and on the strategic level, enacting the unity of all fronts in order to confront the alliance between “Israel” and the imperialist forces, led by the United States alongside Germany, France, Britain, Canada and their partners. This regional alliance of resistance stretches from Palestine, Yemen and Lebanon, to Iraq, where the U.S. bases remain under ongoing fire and resistance to finally bring that occupation to an end, to Syria, Iran and beyond.

The international popular cradle of the Resistance

Everywhere around the world, the broad masses of the people, from the heart of the Global South to the center of the imperial core, are expressing a clear and thorough rejection of the ongoing genocide that has quickly accelerated to a firm revulsion to the Zionist ideology and Zionist project as a whole and to solidarity with and inspiration by the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance in all forms, particularly the armed resistance. The “red triangle” over targets featured in the resistance videos of Al-Qassam Brigades, Saraya al-Quds and other resistance forces has become an online shorthand for the triumph of the people, their determination, their love for their land and their community over the automated, technologized forces of death and destruction represented by the Merkava tanks and military bases of the US/Israeli war machine.

The “Dahiyeh doctrine” of mass destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure failed in Lebanon in 2006 because the people were a popular cradle, a source of nourishment, growth and sustenance, of the resistance, because the resistance was of, by and for the masses; today, it is failing once again in its full genocidal furor in Gaza for the same reason. This Resistance emerges from the very camps of refugees, denied their right to return home for the past 75 years, that the Zionists seek to destroy and drive into a new displacement today. Globalizing the intifada today means developing the international popular cradle of the resistance – the growing recognition that the Resistance of the Palestinian people, joined by their comrades, brothers and sisters in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond, today represent the hope of humanity on our collective front lines.

Like the great popular Intifada of 1987, today’s Palestinian, Arab and international globalized intifada is an anti-imperialist cause. It is a movement against colonialism, imperialism, racism and oppression everywhere. The Palestinian flag is not only a symbol of Palestinian national liberation, but of a commitment to anti-colonial principles, to Indigenous sovereignty, to the fight against exploitation, to the fight to end the extraction of wealth, labour and resources by the United States and its imperialist cohort in Europe.

The anti-imperialist nature of the Palestinian cause has perhaps never been more clear than in the present day, where every imperialist power has clearly aligned itself with the Zionist regime with unparalleled fervor, sending billions of dollars in weaponry for genocidal aerial bombing of the Palestinian people in Gaza; banning demonstrations and Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organizations, including Samidoun in Germany; arresting and prosecuting demonstrators and organizers in France, the United States, Canada and elsewhere; setting up new parliamentary and congressional bodies meant to silence and suppress the growing movement and releasing a torrent of deceptive propaganda; and unleashing a wave of social terror in the academy. It is clear that the imperialist powers are doing this because they see the events of October 7 and the rising regional and global resistance as a threat to their continued domination and extraction of wealth from the region and view the Zionist regime as their mechanism to hold on to such power through genocidal violence.

The imperialist powers, led by the United States, have always viewed Zionism as a mechanism to extract wealth from the people of the region while denying the Arab nation sovereignty over its land, wealth and resources. From the Zionist colonization of Palestine, directed by Britain, through the Nakba, the 1967 occupation, the Intifada to the Zionist genocide today, the imperialist powers have always been the central enemy of the Palestinian people, and every rock, every bullet and every strike that confronts “Israel” also confronts imperialism.

Today’s international popular cradle of the resistance, this globalized intifada, stretches from Gaza, Sanaa, Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus to the streets of Havana, Caracas, Sao Paulo and Johannesburg to the heart of the imperial core, raising a collective voice and developing an international struggle against imperialism and its murderous wars, sanctions and siege, with Palestine at the center.

The working class and the masses lead the struggle

Also like the great Intifada of 1987, we are in a clear era of unity of the Palestinian cause despite the lingering near-afterlife of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. The Palestinian people throughout occupied Palestine and everywhere in exile and diaspora are united to bring an end to the genocide, unified behind the Resistance, forming a global resistance front that also embraces popular mobilization, arts, culture, political engagement and grassroots organizing as central to the liberation struggle. On this 36th anniversary, we recall that the siege of the camps in Lebanon was finally broken by the eruption of the Intifada inside occupied Palestine in 1987. Today, we look forward to breaking the siege on Gaza, not only through the strength and resilience of the Palestinian people in Gaza, but through the uprising elsewhere and everywhere.

The popular leadership of the working class, based in the unions and organizations of Palestinian workers, farmers, peasants, women, students, fishers, teachers and other social sectors, was central to the development of the Intifada of 1987, a highly organized movement that governed its activities through committees, strong political representation, and central statements that nonetheless provided for widespread popular participation and meaningful engagement in the revolutionary cause.

The Palestinian masses have risen up time and again in revolutionary struggle; even between 1987 and today, we see the second Intifada and upsurge after upsurge, confronting the ongoing home demolitions, land confiscations, mass imprisonment, colonial settlement, killings, denial of the right to return, uniting Palestinians inside and outside occupied Palestine.

Today’s Resistance is a highly organized movement, today led by the Islamic resistance movements in direct alliance with the revolutionary left and Palestinian national forces. It involves the participation of not only the Palestinian people in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine, but everywhere in exile and diaspora, fighting, organizing, speaking and revolting for liberation and return. Its base is once again deeply rooted in the working class and popular masses of Palestine, as it always has been, from the 1936 revolution to the post-October 7 Palestinian revolutionary struggle. It has always been the workers, peasants and refugees of Palestine who have led the movement, who have given thousands upon thousands of martyrs, who have spent years upon years in prison, and who have raised young strugglers to fight generation after generation until total liberation.

The war on the Intifada

From members of U.S. Congress, to university officials, to German security services, to British police, to the French interior ministry, imperialist forces are attempting to criminalize, suppress and silence clear speech for Palestine. They seek to turn reality inside out, whereby “intifada” – the term reflecting resistance to genocide and oppression – is redefined as itself “genocidal.” These propaganda campaigns aim to empty the term “genocide” of meaning and legal weight and to attempt to reclaim control over the discussion of the Palestinian cause, a control that has been swept away by decades of struggle, and has been rendered unrecoverable after October 7. They also seek to target the growing role and organization of Palestinians in exile and diaspora, reclaiming their role in their national liberation movement stripped from them through the years of the Oslo liquidation process.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Long live the Intifada. Victory to the Palestinian Resistance. Stand with the Palestinian armed struggle. Zionism is racism. Imperialism will be defeated. These slogans are ringing out everywhere around the world, and now is the time to declare them, more loudly and clearly than ever. There are no slogans or statements that will satisfy Zionism and imperialism – on the contrary, they wish to strip our movement of our most effective advocacy and our most unifying vision, the vision and promise that enables people to continue to fight, to resist, and to move toward victory in the most extreme conditions of genocide and deprivation.

The great popular Intifada that began in 1987, the great sacrifices and accomplishments of the Palestinian people, were confiscated by U.S. imperialism and Arab reactionary regimes in alliance with a sector of the Palestinian ruling class. This came first through the Madrid conference of 1991 and then by the notorious Oslo accords signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993, a liquidationist attempt to transform the revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian people into a mere self-rule project adjacent to Zionist colonialism. It developed amid dangerous international conditions – from the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc states, the threat of US imperialism dominating a unipolar world, and the first Iraq War and the attack on Arab self-determination.

Today, as the U.S. casts its veto in the United Nations against a ceasefire in Gaza, voting for ongoing genocide, it declared that the bombing must continue because Hamas, and thus the Palestinian Resistance, “does not accept a two-state solution.” Indeed, the strugglers of today have learned the bitter lessons of the past diversion of their cause and reliance on the primacy of imperialism, with the U.S. as a “broker.”

Today’s Intifada, on all levels, the Arab, regional, and international Intifada, against a genocidal enemy fully revealed in its atrocities before the world, has only one path forward: no cooptation, no normalization and no concessions, but the defeat of Zionism and the liberation of all of Palestine, the central key for the liberation of the entire Arab nation and the broader region from U.S.-led imperialism and its agents.

On the 36th anniversary of the continuing Intifada, amid today’s global Intifada against genocide, Zionism and imperialism, in honour of all those who sacrificed and fought for freedom, in salute to the over 17,000 martyrs of Gaza, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network pledges to continue the struggle – until return, until liberation, from the river to the sea.

 

 

 

Dec 10

2023

1

Uncategorized

"Net Zero" Forests Green Energy Queensland Turbines

WATCH: Impacts of Industrial Renewables in Queensland

December 4, 2023

 

Image Source: The Transition to Extinction

Steven Nowakowski from Rainforest Reserves Australia demonstrates here how Queensland is destroying its last remnant forests to meet Net Zero. Steven also explains why Net Zero can never be achieved with just wind and solar.

 

Nov 27

2023

1

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Colonialism Israel Media Studies Palestine Propaganda

WATCH: The Occupation of the American Mind

The Occupation of the American Mind

Film released December, 2016

“Not only land, but also minds can be colonized. The brilliance of this documentary is that it manages to tell the story of both forms of colonization simultaneously. The first story reveals how Palestinian land was colonized and how the Palestinian people have been struggling for self-determination ever since. The second story uncovers how the American media has colonized the minds of its audiences and inverted the concrete relations of subjugation by transforming Israelis into victims and Palestinians into oppressors. The Occupation of the American Mind is a must see for anyone who is against colonization.”

–Neve Gordon, Professor of Politics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

“I wish every American would watch this powerful documentary. Not only every person of conscience, but every taxpayer, must see it — and then ask themselves if the status quo is acceptable and can continue deep into the 21st century.”

— Gideon Levy, columnist for Haaretz newspaper of Israel

“One of the most compelling and important documentaries in recent years because it helps us make sense of the lies, mayhem, and injustice in the heart of the Middle East: Palestine. Never has propaganda, or ‘public relations,’ been such a lethal weapon as it is in the hands of Israel, its apologists, and manipulators. To reach behind the facade that is ‘news,’ watch this film.”

— John Pilger, Journalist and Filmmaker

“Compelling, revealing, and chilling. Not only demonstrates how hasbara — Israeli propaganda — became American common sense, but it offers one of the best accounts of Israel’s violent dispossession and occupation of Palestinian lands. For over half a century, Americans drank the Kool-Aid concocted by the Israel lobby, the U.S. media, and virtually all elected officials because there were no alternatives. This film — like the movements that inspired it — is the antidote.”

–Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Over the past few years, Israel’s ongoing military occupation of Palestinian territory and repeated invasions of the Gaza strip have triggered a fierce backlash against Israeli policies virtually everywhere in the world — except the United States. The Occupation of the American Mind takes an eye-opening look at this critical exception, zeroing in on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the U.S.

Narrated by Roger Waters and featuring leading observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. media culture, the film explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel’s favor. From the U.S.-based public relations campaigns that emerged in the 1980s to today, the film provides a sweeping analysis of Israel’s decades-long battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American people in the face of widening international condemnation of its increasingly right-wing policies.

 

 

Nov 19

2023

1

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Genocide Israel zionism

Israel Is A Terrorist State: All Lost, Total Failure Achieved

Dialogue Works

November 18, 2023

 

“Support the Steadfastness of Gaza” (1970). “Coloring the Gaza Strip in red on a black map, the artist, Ghassan Kanafani, not only refers to the sun – the symbol of liberty at the top of the poster – but symbolically refers to the sacrifice needed for victory.”

 

“It’s time for everybody to get angry. This is not about anti-Semitism. The Netanyahu regime is a war criminal regime. This is not a Jewish problem. This is about political Zionism. Eretz Israel is finished. It’s time for Israel to be terminated as a political Zionist state because until it is, these crimes will continue. The lives of Palestinians mean nothing to them. Nothing happens in Gaza unless the Israelis deem it fit to happen. That is the definition of occupation. How is Palestine going to get their independence? Who is going to give it to them? No one. The Palestinian people had been forgotten. Only Hamas was speaking up for them. The Likud Party invented “from the river to the sea.” If Israel is politically controlled by people who say that Palestine can’t exist then the only solution is that Israel can’t exist and Israel must be eliminated. One way or another, the political Zionists will either learn how to peacefully live with their Palestinian neighbors or be driven into the sea.”  — Scott Ritter

 

Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union, implementing arms control agreements, and on the staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, where he played a critical role in the hunt for Iraqi SCUD missiles. From 1991 until 1998, Mr. Ritter served as a Chief Inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, leading the search for Iraq’s proscribed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ritter was a vocal critic of the American decision to go to war with Iraq. His new book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union, is his ninth. [Full bio]

 

Nov 16

2023

1

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Al-Aqsa Mosque Ben-Gvir Kach Kahanist Movement Operation Al-Aqsa Flood Palestine

The Importance of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the War on Palestine

The existence and importance of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is largely unknown to the West. Thus, the significance of the name chosen for the Oct 7, 2023 “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, is also largely lost on a Western populace. Yet, the background here is vitally important.

Israel’s Minister of National Security Ben Gvir and his depraved Kahanist followers are pushing toward an all-out bloodbath, holy war. Since Oct 7th, over 190,000 Israelis have filed for weapons licenses, with Gvir’s goal of arming Israel civilians en masse. “Ben Gvir then called ‘on everyone who is eligible’ to ‘go arm yourself’ with a ‘life-saving weapon.’ The month before Benjamin Netanyahu’s government came to power, Ben Gvir was filmed on the streets of occupied Jerusalem waving a pistol and calling on settlers to shoot unarmed Palestinians.” [Source: The Cradle] Prior to October 7, 2023, Ben Gvir, with his ultranationalist allies and Kahanist disciples, have been deliberately and increasingly antagonizing Palestinians and Muslims who consider the mosque to be Islam’s third holiest place after Mecca and Medina. The latest provocation occurred on October 4, 2023, when Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa Mosque complex on fifth day of Sukkot.

The following is an excerpt from the article What Does Israel’s New Government Mean for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? published January 5, 2023:

Swiftly on the heels of the government’s swearing in, and in the face of warnings from the United States, the international community, and Israel’s own security establishment, Ben Gvir chose to message his long-stated position that “Israel is the owner of the Temple Mount” by paying a heavily secured visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.

Parsing technicalities surrounding provocations in a conflict cauldron is a dangerous game, particularly at a site as storied a flashpoint as the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. For Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, Al Aqsa mosque is considered their most powerful national symbol, making visits expressly intended to display Israeli sovereignty a potent provocation. It is in this vein that Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted on maintaining the status quo, as recently as 2020 noting that ‘Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount, though it sounds like a reasonable thing, I know it would have ignited the Middle East … There’s a limit. There are things that I’m not willing to do to win an election.’…

March 14, 2021: “Israel police stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem on Monday morning as hardline Israelis prepared to parade through Old City in an annual flag-waving march.” More than 100 Palestinians were killed. (Image: GETTY)

Within hours of Ben Gvir’s visit and a UAE condemnation, Netanyahu’s planned upcoming official visit to the UAE was postponed. Subsequently, the UAE has joined with China in calling for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss concerns over these latest Jerusalem developments. Meanwhile, Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Israel’s ambassador to the Hashemite Kingdom to explain the provocation, Egypt and Turkey have both registered objection, and Saudi Arabia, the normalization “prize” Netanyahu most seeks, joined the chorus of condemnation in characterizing Ben Gvir’s visit as a “storming” of the Al-Aqsa.

The extent to which this vocal condemnation from Arab partners can serve to rein in the more extreme impulses of the Israeli government remains to be seen. Normalization with the Arab world is deeply popular among Israelis, but Netanyahu’s most extreme coalition partners on whom he relies are driven more by their annexationist and Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif sovereignty goals than by the lure of regional normalization or fear of the international community’s condemnation.

+++

Jan 3, 2023: ‘Unprecedented provocation’: Israeli ultranationalist minister visits Al-Aqsa mosque’

Nov 15

2023

1

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Pacifism as Pathology, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Colonialism Pacifism as Patholgy Palestine Racism Resistance Struggle zionism

WATCH: ‘They Call Us Terrorists’: Inside the Palestinian Resistance Forces of Jenin, West Bank

The Real News Network

Nov 13, 2023

 

“Why are so many Westerners reluctant to support armed resistance to defeat Zionism?
Answers on a postcard.“ —

–November 13, 2023, NoDealForNature, Twitter/X, ? #StopGreenColonialism #StopGenocide ? [Int’l campaign opposing a genocidal land grab (#NewDealforNature / #NaturePositive / #30×30) marketed as a $olution to “protecting and restoring nature”]

“The resistance will never be crushed… Any people under occupation have the right to resist. This is the case for all colonized people.”

“People in the West think we have no ambition. It’s not true. I was studying computer engineering and I had an invention. All Palestinians have been subjected to the injustice of occupation. We grew up with ambition. We grew up playing in the street. Children around the world may play ordinary games, like PlayStation. Here we are forced to play with stones. There are no conditions for life here. No life… We had ambitions to become scientists, doctors, and engineers, but the occupation opted for violence.”

+++

Israel continues to unleash hell upon the 22-by-5-mile concentrated area of Gaza, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with relentless airstrikes and indiscriminate bombings of hospitals, residential buildings, schools, and other civilian sites. As besieged Palestinians shelter and flee and die within the walls of their cage in Gaza, Resistance forces are mobilizing to rise up against an Occupation that has presided over lives for 75 years.

Where there is occupation, there is resistance, and numerous Palestinian resistance groups exist across the Occupied Territories. These groups consist of occupied subjects turned freedom fighters—those who have been directly targeted by Israel, who have witnessed their friends and families die at the hands of occupying forces, and who have been labeled “terrorists” for resisting their slow extermination. In Jenin, a 1km square ghetto-like refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, and the target of numerous Israeli incursions, there are many who have chosen the path of armed resistance, and many who felt they had no other choice.

For those who suffer under the direct oppression and daily practices of apartheid—including the suspension of human and civil rights, military-imposed blockades and checkpoints restricting people’s movements, the demolition of homes and killing of family members—there comes a breaking point. Generations of Palestinians, born into Occupation and violence, do not live a life of dignity. As they describe, under these conditions, they have nothing to live for and nothing to lose, and they have everything to fight for.

In July of this year, before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks and Israel’s genocidal retaliatory offensive in Gaza, The Real News Network spoke to members of the community in Jenin refugee camp about their lives under Occupation, the role of the Resistance there, and the fight for freedom.

Produced and edited by Ross Domoney. Filming by Ahmad Al Bazz . Writing, narration, and research by Nadia Péridot.

 

Nov 13

2023

1

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Ben-Gvir Ethnic Cleansing Genocide Israel Kach Kahane Chai Kahanist Movement Kahanists Levhava Meir Kahane Otzma Yehudit Palestine Racism

Watch: Understanding the Depraved & Growing Kahanist Ideology Within the Netanyahu Govt

Jun 3, 2022 BUSBOYS AND POETS

WATCH: “KAHANISTAN: How the Jewish far-right remade the mainstream”

 

The coalition government of Israel consists of seven parties—Likud, United Torah Judaism, Shas, Religious Zionist Party, Otzma Yehudit, Noam and National Unity— it is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has taken office as the Prime Minister of Israel for the sixth time.

The Otzma Yehudit party is led by Itamar Ben Gvir. Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister of Israel, is an influential Kach activist whose media popularity and following is growing. He is a lawyer who has been convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. Prior to the Israel elections held on November 1, 2022, the possibility that the extreme far-right Otzma Yehudit party could become part of the coalition government set off alarm bells and dire warnings from many Israeli citizens, Jewish citizens abroad, and international leaders with knowledge of the Otzma Yehudit, its leader Ben-Gvir, and it’s depraved Kahanist ideology. It is expected that Ben-Gvir will become a senior partner in Israel’s next government.

Above, October 20, 2022, Jewish News: Where is the Outrage? 

The Otzmah Yehudit party is derived from Kach. It is extraordinary to note that Kach is designated as a terrorist organization by Canada, EU, Japan, the US – and Israel. On May 20, 2022, the United States removed Kach from its list of foreign terror organizations.

The Kach political party in Israel is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, Canada, Japan, the European Union, and, until May, 2022, the United States. Kach and Kahane Chai were officially banned as fringe political parties in 1994 in accordance with Israel’s 1948 anti-terrorism laws, after leading figures expressed support for Baruch Goldstein, a right-wing extremist who massacred 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in February 1994. Meir Kahane, the founder of the Kahanist movement, was assassinated in Manhattan in 1990. [Source] 

“Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee member Hussein al-Sheikh has addressed a letter of protest to President Joe Biden after the US State Department revoked the designation of the inactive, far-right Israeli Kach, or Kahane Chai, group as a foreign terrorist organization.” May 26, 2022: Zionists Protest Against Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accords (Photo by Lee Corkran/Sygma via Getty Images). 

 

On Nov 10, 2022, spokesperson for the US State Department, Ned Price, was asked during a briefing for a comment on Ben-Gvir’s participation in a ceremony honouring late Kach leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Price stated: “Celebrating the legacy of a terrorist organization is abhorrent. There is no other word for it. It is abhorrent.” 

Above video (September 20, 2022) and photo: Popular satire show “Eretz Nehederet” (A Wonderful Land) aired a musical skit that implicitly compared far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben Gvir with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The song-and-dance number was based on the iconic “Springtime for Hitler” number from Mel Brooks’s 1967 film “The Producers,” which features actors in a staged musical, led by a flamboyant Hitler, singing joyfully about the impending Nazi occupation of Europe. [Source] 

The Times of Israel summarized some of prominent policy positions of the party: “encouraging Arab citizens of Israel to emigrate; annexing the West Bank without affording Palestinians the right to vote or other civil rights; imposing the death penalty for terrorists; using live fire against Palestinian rioters; immunity from prosecution for IDF soldiers for military actions they carry out; overhauling the legal system, crimping the High Court’s ability to strike down legislation and giving the government the ability to pack the bench with ideological compatriots.”

A number of Kach disciples including Ben-Gvir became founding members and spokespeople for the  Levhava movement, a far-right, Jewish supremacist organization that strictly opposes “Jewish assimilation” via Jewish-Arab intermarriage. [May 30, 2022: “Lehava is an anti-miscegenation and anti-homosexual organization that regularly employs violence mostly against Arab men.”] Lehava’s CEO is Bentzi Gopstein, another disciple of Meir Kahane. Lehava is closely associated with Otzma Yehudit, sharing the same headquarters. In 2014 police raided their offices. The following year it was reported that Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon was considering an attempt to categorize Lehava as a terrorist organization. In 2022, Israel Defense Minister Benny Gantz echoed that the “time has come” to consider Lehava be designated a terrorist organization. [Source]

Today, the grotesque Kahanist ideology serves as both the heartbeat and guiding light for the third largest political force in Israel. 

Today, we bear witness the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with every horrific act streamed across social media platforms, for the entire world in watch in real time. We bear witness to genocide. “Never again” is an empty phrase. Dead-eyed, colonized subjects yawn. Empire ticks another box. It instructs its media apparatus to move the collective gaze to Taylor Swift and other insignificant headlines and “news” stories that compete within the vast spectacle of trivial prattle.

The following is a must watch critical lecture at Busboys and Poets in Arlington, Virginia, USA, on 11.5.2022 given by investigative journalist David Sheen. The event was sponsored by Al-Awda, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation and American Muslims for Palestine.

 

Nov 01

2023

1

United Nations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Genocide international human rights law OHCHR Palestine United Nations

NY Office Director of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Resigns – This Is His Resignation Letter

October 31, 2023

“This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”

 

Director in the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Craig Mokhiber. (Photo courtesy. unwatch.org/)

Craig Mokhiber is a Director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). A lawyer and specialist in international human rights law, policy and methodology, he has served the UN since 1992. As chief of the Human Rights and Development Team in the 1990s, he led the development of OHCHR’s original work on human rights-based approaches to development and human rights-sensitive definitions of poverty. He has also served as the UN’s Senior Human Rights Advisor in both Palestine and in Afghanistan, led the team of human rights specialists attached to the High Level Mission on Darfur, headed the Rule of Law and Democracy Unit, and served as Chief of the Economic and Social Issues Section, and Chief of the Development and Economic and Social Issues Branch at OHCHR Headquarters. [Source: United Nations]

The following is his resignation letter:

Oct 30

2023

0

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Canada France Haiti Imperialism Jean Chrétien Kenya Occupation The Core Group United Nations United States

Haiti as Empire’s Laboratory

As the United States and its allies push renewed foreign intervention, the uses and abuses of the first Black republic as a testing ground of imperialism offer stark warnings. Haiti still struggles to be free.

NACLA 

August 30, 2023

By Jemima Pierre

 

 

In December 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law H.R.2116, also known as the Global Fragility Act (GFA). Although this act was developed by the conservative United States Institute of Peace, it was introduced to Congress by Democratic Representative Eliot L. Engel, then chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and cosponsored by a bipartisan group of representatives, including, significantly, Democrat Karen Bass. The GFA presents new strategies for deploying U.S. hard and soft power in a changing world. It focuses U.S. foreign policy on the idea that there are so-called “fragile states,” countries prone to instability, extremism, conflict, and extreme poverty, which are presumably threats to U.S. security.

Though not explicitly stated, analysts argue that the GFA is intended to prevent unnecessary and increasingly ineffective U.S. military interventions abroad. The stated goal is for the United States to invest in “its ability to prevent and mitigate violent conflict” by funding projects that mandate “an interagency approach among the key players, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Departments of State, Defense, and the Treasury” amid collaboration with “international allies and partners.”

In April 2022, the Biden-Harris administration affirmed its commitment to the GFA by outlining a strategy for its implementation. As detailed in the strategy’s prologue, the U.S. government’s new foreign policy approach depends on “willing partners to address common challenges, [and] share costs.” “Ultimately,” the document continues, “no U.S. or international intervention will be successful without the buy-in and mutual ownership of trusted regional, national and local partners.” The Biden administration has also stressed that the GFA will use the United Nations and “other multilateral organizations” to carry out its missions. The prologue outlines a 10-year plan for the GFA that, according to the U.S. Institute of Peace, will “allow for the integration and sequencing of U.S. diplomatic, development, and military-related efforts.” Among five trial countries for GFA implementation, Haiti is the first target.

Hailed by development experts as “landmark” legislation and, as Foreign Policy reported, a “potential game-changer in the world of U.S. foreign aid,” the act seems to offer a reset of U.S. foreign policy in ways that shift tactics while maintaining the objectives and strategies of U.S. global domination. The act and its prologue clearly articulate that the main goals are to advance “U.S. national security and interests” and to “manage rival powers,” presumably Russia and China. In this sense, especially for governments and societies in the Western Hemisphere, the GFA can be seen as a revamping of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 U.S. foreign policy position that established the entire region as its recognized sphere of influence, shaping U.S. imperialism. The GFA deploys cunning language—tackling the “drivers” of violence, promoting stability in “conflict-prone regions,” supporting “locally-driven political solutions”—that hides the legislation’s real intent: to rebrand U.S. imperialism.

In their deliberations on the Global Fragilities Act, U.S. officials labeled Haiti as one of the world’s most “fragile” states. Yet this supposed fragility has been caused by more than a century of U.S. interference and a consistent push to deny Haitian sovereignty. Throughout a long history and complex—though blatant—imperialism, Haiti has been and continues to be the main laboratory for U.S. imperial machinations in the region and throughout the world. It is no surprise, therefore, that Haiti is the first object in the United States’ latest rearticulation of a policy for maintaining global hegemony.

In fact, a review of the actions of the United States and the so-called “international community” in Haiti from 2004 to the present demonstrates how Haiti has served as the testing ground—the laboratory—for much of what is encapsulated in the Global Fragilities Act. The GFA, in other words, is not so much a new policy as it is a formal expression of de facto U.S. policy toward Haiti and Haitian people over the past two decades. Without recognizing these uses and abuses of Haiti, the site of the longest and most brutal neocolonial experiment in the modern world, we cannot fully understand the workings of U.S. (and Western) hegemony. And if we cannot understand U.S. hegemony, then we cannot defeat it. And Haiti will never be free.

Sovereignty Again Denied

Since 2004, Haiti has been under renewed foreign occupation and lacks sovereignty. This is not hyperbole. Take, for example, a series of events and actions following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s arguably illegitimate but still sitting president, Jovenel Moïse. The day after the assassination, Helen La Lime, head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), declared that interim prime minister Claude Joseph would lead the Haitian government until elections were scheduled. Because of Joseph’s interim status, however, the line of succession was unclear. Days before his killing, Moïse had named neurosurgeon and political ally Ariel Henry as prime minister to replace Joseph, but he had not yet been sworn in.

A few days after Moïse’s assassination, the Biden administration sent a delegation to Haiti to meet with both Joseph and Henry, as well as with Joseph Lambert, who had been chosen by Haiti’s 10 remaining senators—the only elected officials in the country at the time—to stand in as president pending new elections. Despite these competing claims to power, Washington chose a side. The U.S. delegation sidelined Lambert, convinced Joseph and Henry to come to an agreement over Haiti’s governance, and urged Joseph to stand down.

A week later, on July 17, BINUH and the Core Group—an organization of mostly Western foreign powers dictating politics in Haiti—issued a statement. They called for the formation of a “consensual and inclusive government,” directing Henry, as the designated prime minister named by Moïse, “to continue the mission entrusted to him.” Two days later, on July 19, Joseph announced he would step aside, allowing Henry to assume the mantle of prime minister on July 20. The “new”—and completely unelected—government and cabinet was composed mostly of members of the Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK), the neo-Duvalierist political party of Moïse and his predecessor Michel Martelly. In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, the PHTK, with Martelly at the helm, was put in place by the United States and other Western powers without the support of the Haitian masses.

After the U.S. Embassy, the Core Group, and the Organization of American States (OAS) released similar statements applauding the formation of a new “consensus” government, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed support for the unelected leaders. “The United States welcomes efforts by Haiti’s political leadership to come together in choosing an interim prime minister and a unity cabinet,” he said in a statement. In effect, Haiti’s true power brokers—or what I have called the “white rulers of Haiti”—determined the Haitian government’s replacement through a press release.

Meanwhile, the international community ’s decision-making process completely left out Haiti’s civil society organizations, which had been meeting since early 2021 to find a way to resolve the country’s political crisis as Moïse, already ruling by decree, was poised to overstay his constitutional mandate. These groups adamantly rejected the foreign-imposed interim government and have criticized the international community’s actions as blatantly colonial.

Who and what are the entities making decisions for Haiti and the Haitian people, and how did they claim such prominent roles in controlling Haitian politics? Haitians are not members of the BINUH, OAS, or Core Group. But also central is the question of the country’s sovereignty—or lack thereof. Haiti has been under foreign military and political control for almost 20 years. But this is not the first time, of course, that Haiti has been under occupation.

Legacies of Foreign Control and Occupation

In the summer of 1915, U.S. Marines landed in Port-au-Prince and initiated a 19-year period of military rule that sought to snuff the sovereignty of the modern world’s first Black republic. During this first occupation, as I have written elsewhere with Peter James Hudson, “the US rewrote the Haitian constitution and installed a puppet president [who signed treaties that turned over control of the Haitian state’s finances to the U.S. government], imposed press censorship and martial law, and brought Jim Crow policies and forced labor to the island.” In line with its racist view that Black people do not have the capacity for civilization or self-government, Washington rationalized that it was necessary to teach Haitians the arts of self-government—a view that continues today.

But the most pronounced labor of the U.S. Marines was counterinsurgency. They waged a “pacification” campaign throughout the countryside to suppress a peasant uprising against the occupation, using aerial bombardment techniques for the first time. Dropping bombs from planes onto Haitian villages, the pacification campaigns left more than 15,000 dead and countless others maimed. Those who survived and continued to resist were tortured and forced into labor camps.

The United States finally left the country in 1934 after massive grassroots protests by the Haitian people. But one of the most consequential results was the establishment and training during the occupation of a local police force, the Gendarmerie d’Haïti. For years, this police force and its successors were used to terrorize the Haitian people, a legacy that continues today.

In the years after the 1915-1934 occupation, the United States continued to intervene politically and economically in Haitian affairs. The most notorious of these engagements was the U.S. support for the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. In the first democratic elections after the fall of the Duvalier regime, the United States unsuccessfully tried to prevent the ascension of the popular candidate, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. However, nine months after his January 1991 election, Aristide was deposed in a CIA-bankrolled coup d’état. The coup was not consolidated, though, because of continuous resistance from the Haitian people. By 1994, U.S. president Bill Clinton’s administration was forced to bring Aristide back to Haiti after three years in exile—with more than 20,000 U.S. troops in tow. Aristide was now a hostage to U.S. neoliberal policy. The troops remained until 2000.

Haiti officially lost its nominal sovereignty again in late February 2004. The Western governments, as well as the powerful Haitian elite, never supported the Aristide government, presumably because of its “populist and anti-market economy” positions, as former U.S. ambassador Janet Sanderson later alluded in a leaked 2008 diplomatic cable calling for continued foreign intervention. Thus, when Aristide won a second term in the 2000 elections, just months after his Fanmi Lavalas party gained control of a majority of seats in the parliament, the U.S. and its Western partners worked to discredit the administration. The French ambassador to Haiti at the time, Thierry Burkhard, later admitted that France was concerned about Aristide demanding financial restitution for the immoral indemnity—or what The New York Times has called “The Ransome”—that Haiti was forced to pay for its independence.

The plans for the 2004 intervention and occupation were hatched the previous year at a meeting in Canada dubbed the “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti.” Aristide had been back in power for two years. Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and his Liberal Party government organized a two-day conference from January 31 to February 1, 2003 at Meech Lake, a government resort near Ottawa, that brought together top officials from the United States, European Union, and OAS to decide the future of Haiti’s governance. There were no representatives from Haiti in attendance. Canadian journalist Michel Vastel, who got wind of this secret meeting, reported that the discussion in Ottawa included the possible removal of Aristide with a potential Western-led trusteeship over Haiti.

On February 29, 2004, President Aristide was deposed, bundled onto a flight by U.S. Marines, and flown to the Central African Republic. Almost immediately, U.S. President George W. Bush sent 200 U.S. troops to Port-au-Prince to “help stabilize the country.” By the evening of Aristide’s expulsion, 2,000 U.S., French, and Canadian soldiers were on the ground.

In the meantime, at the behest of permanent members the United States and France, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimously passed a resolution that authorized “the immediate deployment of a Multinational Interim Force for a period of three months to help to secure and stabilize the capital, Port-au-Prince, and elsewhere in the country.” In other words, the UN voted to send a “peacekeeping” mission to Haiti. Significantly, Resolution 1529 was passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which, unlike a Chapter VI resolution, authorizes UN forces to take military action through land, air, and sea without requiring the consent of the parties in conflict. That is, the resolution empowered the multinational force to “take all necessary measures to fulfill its mandate.”

The UN mission to Haiti raises four important points. First, Haiti was the only country not engulfed in civil war to receive a Chapter VII UN military deployment. There were certainly local protests during the passage of the resolution, but these were of Haitians demonstrating against the removal of their democratically elected president. The situation in Haiti, in other words, could not be considered a civil war, in the normal sense of the word, that merited a Chapter VII deployment (if such deployment can ever be merited). Rather, through the deployment, the same characters who initiated and consolidated the coup suppressed a people’s protest.

Second, key players in backing and aiding Aristide’s removal were also permanent members of the UNSC, the only body with the power to deploy a multinational “peacekeeping” mission. From the Ottawa Initiative, it was clear that the United States, France, and Canada had conspired to remove Aristide and destroy the Haitian state. Third, and relatedly, to justify the foreign intervention and subsequent occupation, the United States and France concocted a narrative that Aristide had abdicated the presidency. Indeed, UN security documents and resolutions about Haiti during this time, as well as Western media reports, pointed to Aristide’s presumed “resignation” as the reason for the deployment of UN military forces.

On March 1, 2004, the morning after Aristide’s ouster, Democracy Now! broadcasted a remarkable live program during which U.S. congresswoman and chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus, Maxine Waters, called in to say that she had spoken to President Aristide. “He said that he was kidnapped,” Waters reported. “He said that he was forced to leave Haiti?…?that the American Embassy sent the diplomats?…?and they ordered him to leave.” In the weeks following, Aristide spoke to Democracy Now! about the kidnapping. “When you have militaries coming from abroad surrounding your house, taking control of the airport, surrounding the national palace, being in the streets, and [they] take you from your house to put you in the plane,” he said, “?…?it was using force to take an elected president out of his country.”

Fourth, and perhaps most egregiously, the UNSC claimed that the so-called interim government set up in the wake of Aristide’s ouster had asked for the stabilization force. But that government was illegitimate. In his 2012 book Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Jeb Sprague recounts that in the early morning after the Aristides were escorted to the airport, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, James Foley, picked up Haitian Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre and took him to the “prime minister’s office for consultations in preparation for his ascension to power.” Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, later reported that he did not have a say—nor did he participate, as dictated by Haitian law—in the swearing-in of Haiti’s U.S.-installed interim president. Alexandre’s first act as interim president was, on the order of the U.S. ambassador, to submit an official request to the UNSC for multinational military forces to restore law and order. The UNSC immediately authorized the deployment.

Taken together, these realities demonstrate how the entire UN deployment and occupation—based on a coup d’état sponsored by two permanent members of the UNSC, claims that the president had resigned, and the illegal swearing-in of an illegitimate head of state—were fraudulent. At the same time, protests from the Haitian people were dismissed by Western governments and media as “gang violence” and the action of “bandits.” Such characterizations not only tapped into age-old racist stereotypes of Haitians as always already violent, but also gave more pretext for the Chapter VII deployment. To add insult to injury, most of the UN resolutions referred to securing Haiti’s “sovereignty,” as if this sovereignty could coexist with foreign political control and military occupation.

The illegal 2004 coup d’état was both perpetrated and cleaned up with UN sanction. On June 1, 2004, the UN officially took over from U.S. forces and set up the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) under the guise of establishing peace and security. A multibillion-dollar operation, MINUSTAH had, at any given time, between 6,000 and 13,000 troops and police stationed in Haiti alongside thousands of bureaucrats, technical staff, and civilian personnel. In a horrific parallel to the first U.S. occupation of Haiti, MINUSTAH soldiers committed numerous acts of violence against the Haitian people, including shootings and rapes. MINUSTAH soldiers were also responsible for bringing cholera into the country, a disease that officially killed as many as 30,000 and infected almost a million people.

A protest commenorates the 100th anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the launch of the people’s tribunal, Port-au-Prince, July 2015. (MARK SCHULLER)

But what most solidified this occupation was the creation and operationalization of the Core Group. An international coalition of self-proclaimed and non-Black “friends” of Haiti, the Core Group was established as part of the 2004 UN resolution that brought foreign soldiers and technocrats to the country. While the group’s membership has fluctuated since its initial formation, it currently has nine members: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United States, European Union, OAS, and United Nations Organization. Significantly, the group has never had a Haitian representative. The Core Group’s stated goal is to oversee Haiti’s governance through the coordination of the various branches and elements of the United Nations mission in Haiti. But in practice, the Core Group represents an insidious example of (neo) colonialism driven by white supremacy.

Imperial Punishment

While there was a formal drawdown of the MINUSTAH mission in 2017, the UN has remained in Haiti through a set of new offices, culminating in the establishment of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) in 2019. Despite protests in Haiti against ongoing UN presence, the UNSC continues to renew BINUH’s mandate each year. The latest renewal was on July 14, 2023. BINUH has had an outsized, public role in Haitian internal political affairs and is often the mouthpiece of the Core Group.

The overwhelming power of the Core Group is blatantly public. At a special session on Haiti at the UNSC on April 26, 2023, the newly appointed head of BINUH, María Isabel Salvador of Ecuador, took the lead in presenting Haiti in typical racist terms— as a basket case of unthinking and violent gangs. Unelected and unaccountable to the Haitian people, the Core Group is the arbiter of colonial direct rule of Haiti.

Western imperialism in Haiti is a hierarchical structure established through the power of the United States, which then outsources colonial control of Haiti to others. In a confidential 2008 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, then U.S. ambassador Sanderson called MINUSTAH “a remarkable product and symbol of hemispheric cooperation in a country with little going for it.” She continued: “There is no feasible substitute for this UN presence. It is a financial and regional security bargain for the [U.S. government]?…?We must work to preserve MINUSTAH by continuing to partner with it at all levels?…?That partnering will also help counter perceptions in Latin contributing countries that Haitians see their presence in Haiti as unwanted.”

Brazil, for example, home to the largest Black population outside of Africa, oversaw the military wing of the occupation since its inception. The nominally leftist administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spent more than $750 million to fund this operation. As I have written elsewhere, Haiti was Brazil’s “imperial ground zero.” But there was also buy-in from other marginalized governments from the Caribbean and Latin America. At one point, MINUSTAH’s leadership included a representative from Trinidad and Tobago and an African American attorney and diplomat. And this leadership was accompanied by a multinational military force made up of troops from several South American, Caribbean, and African countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Grenada, Bolivia, Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Cameroon, Niger, and Mali.

In addition to Brazil, other neighboring countries’ neocolonial governments have been similarly recruited by the United States to aid in its undermining of Haitian sovereignty. The Dominican Republic, for instance, funded and housed the ragtag paramilitary troops that terrorized Haiti from 2000 to 2004. More recently, in the fall of 2022, Mexico joined the United States last year in advocating before the UNSC for renewed foreign military intervention in Haiti. Washington has urged Canada to take the lead, and in June 2023, Ottawa announced plans to coordinate international security assistance to Haiti, including police training, from the Dominican Republic.

Since Moïse’s 2021 assassination, Haitians have protested foreign support for the illegitimate and corrupt de facto government, rising inflation and fuel prices, illegal weapons dumping, and a dizzying rise in violence. In response, the United States and its allies have continued to push for foreign military intervention in the country. In January 2023, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) supported the call for a foreign force. In July, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries convinced the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to reverse its initial course affirming Haitian sovereignty to now call for intervention. At the time of writing, the United States was poised to introduce a UNSC resolution after Kenya expressed willingness to lead a multinational armed mission. It must be noted that it is Haiti’s Core Group-installed Prime Minister Henry who, along with the UN office in Haiti, is insisting on this violent solution to the crisis in the country—a crisis they themselves helped to create.

The Haitian community’s continued protests against foreign troops and Western meddling are a testament to their unwavering courage.

The denial of Haitian sovereignty seems to be, as Sprague has described, “a synchronized effort by cooperating states and institutions bolstered by a global elite’s consensus against popular democracy.” The Global Fragilities Act, then, not only lays out a plan that has already been implemented in Haiti over the last 20 years, but also directly emerges out of U.S. experiences in the Haitian (neo)colonial laboratory. We need to recognize Haiti’s critical place as a testing ground for U.S. and Western imperialism.

But Haiti is also the site of one of the longest struggles in the world for both Black liberation and anticolonial independence. This explains the U.S. empire’s constant reactionary onslaught against the people of Haiti, punishing their repeated attempts at sovereignty with decades of instability designed to secure and expand U.S. hegemony. For two centuries, imperial counterinsurgency against Haiti has aimed to terminate the most ambitious revolutionary experiment in the modern world. The tactics deployed to attack Haitian sovereignty have been consistent and persistent. We ignore how these tactics may be used on the rest of the region at our peril.

 

[Jemima Pierre is Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at UCLA and a research associate at the Center for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race and numerous academic and public articles about Haiti.]