Solidarity for Khalil 

I live in the Morningside Heights/Harlem neighborhood of NYC. This morning while returning from a paper pickup I came across a faculty and staff silent protest (many participants were wearing black) against a judge’s decision this morning to allow for the deportation of Khalil Mahmoud, a Columbia student very active as the liaison between last spring’s student encampment on campus and the Administration.

You’ll remember that Khalil was arrested by ICE  while entering  his apartment building lobby with his then pregnant wife. He was bundled off to an ICE prison where he spent months awaiting a court hearing. When it was held he was released. It now appears he is likely to be deported after this morning’s hearing.

The mood of Columbia is tense and intimidating. Last week a comrade and I distributed a CHALLENGE and a leaflet inviting students to start a Progressive Labor Club. Many students averted their eyes and would not take either. It was as if they were under surveillance. This morning at the Faculty demonstration I was told they are. We did distribute 50 leaflets and about thirty CHALLENGES and are trying to set up a regular CHALLENGE distribution here and close by City College of New York.

There were pictures at the demonstration of other ICE victims, including a NYC high school student named Dylan Lopez Contreras,  one known as Mouctar, and another student originally from Guinea named Mamadou Diallo.

I spoke to a few faculty members who pointed out they have been demonstrating since last Spring, and that they invited members of the community to join with them Mondays at noon. I told them about our small group of retirees from my where each Wednesday a group of us, some in wheelchairs, meet at 6 pm with signs and fliers attacking rising fascism and ICE.
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Set an antifascist tone for the year

After a hectic week marked by the United Nations General Assembly, which was attended by numerous delegations from member countries around the world, but without the Palestinian Authority, whose president was denied a visa by the U.S. government that supports and backs the genocide in Gaza, and on the day that Zionist President Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak, there was a call for a protest against him and against the extermination of the Palestinian people. During this war more than 70,000 innocent people, including more than 20,000 children, have been killed with shrapnel and bombs from the monstrous and criminal Zionist government of Israel. I was part of that protest, in which I walked the entire route, but I didn’t have a single flyer to distribute, nor did I see anyone else doing so, something that our leaders need to analyze, because these are opportunities we have to spread our ideas and make contacts, a criticism that, as a member, I have to make. In any case, it was a great march, massive, enthusiastic, multiracial, where militant slogans were shouted, led by numerous left-wing groups, condemning the genocide of the Zionist and terrorist state of Israel against the Palestinian people and its nazi leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

On the other hand, in the Community Organization where our club does its work, we had two important activities in which friends from our study group and I, representing the PLP club, participated:

The first was in the morning, when various community organizations that form a coalition and some unions held a press conference in front of 100 Gold Street, followed by a small march to City Hall, calling for the passage of a law that would raise the minimum wage for construction workers to $40 an hour. We did this in persistent rain. Then in the afternoon, we held a protest in Foley Square, in which about 3,000 people participated, followed by a march around Federal Plaza, the fascist immigration building where our immigrant brothers and sisters go for their routine appointments and are detained, mistreated, and humiliated by ICE officials sent by the fascist dictator and terrorist Donald Trump. This happened to the Ecuadorian immigrant and her husband, who, in front of their two young children, was mistreated and thrown to the floor by one of those racists when she defended her husband, who was being detained, and her children, an image that went around the world and demonstrates the terror and fear that the fascist commander-in-chief of the US government wants to sow among the population.  We circled the building twice, shouting slogans against ICE and its gendarmes. The first time, we stopped for a minute of silence for the immigrants killed at the hands of the ICE terrorists. I didn’t have any CHALLENGES either.

Finally, our study group, in which twelve people participated, conducted an in-depth analysis of the international situation, the genocide and war in Gaza, and after a homemade meal shared by all, we took to the streets to distribute a flyer with a greeting from our working class to the community, prepared by a very prominent and experienced member of our party club, who is a great example to all of us. The flyers were very well received, and there was even a young man playing volleyball who called a group of his friends and read it aloud to them, which was surprising for the group of us who went out to distribute the flyers.
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UFT retirees adopting left ideas

Dear CHALLENGE: 

At the recent NYC Labor Day parade, the fight against rising fascism was realized by our work in the United Federation of Teachers- retired teachers chapter, making it an issue for the parade.

A resolution passed in the chapter’s final meeting in June ended in a vote of 85% in favor of adopting an anti fascist position. This led to both a union printed poster for members to carry “teachers make fascists tremble”, and, two nights before the parade, a room full of union members drawing up posters by hand and printing posters up using A.I. software which were carried on the labor day event. Over 1000 flyers written by a working group of 15 retired teachers describing the growing impact of fascism and blaming it not just on Trump but the current international crisis of capitalism were distributed along with CHALLENGESs.

This did not occur as a fluke but as the work of a small group of retired members of PLP building a base for many aspects of the party’s line, including the struggle against ICE and deportations, against racism and sexism, and against fascism in our society at large and in the misleadership of the trade unions.

It is time for comrades and friends to bring the revolutionary ideas of the communist Progressive Labor Party into the labor movement forthrightly.
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Bold against Facism

As fascism intensifies, so does the suppression of teacher and student voices. Last year, my boss sent the whole staff an email stating not to discuss politics with students or even with coworkers. We can’t let their attempts stop us from fighting for our class. Two things occurred in my first week back to school that made me realize I need to be more bold. One coworker told me that his family member works for Border Patrol, as if I wouldn’t physically recoil at the very mention. The next day I wore an “Abolish ICE” shirt to work. A couple days later, a different coworker let me know that he is a communist. Since then, I’ve gone out of my way to have more conversations with him and another coworker, including about improving the union culture at our school. Since the start of the school year, I’ve given the paper to four coworkers in total and invited all four to an upcoming anti-ICE protest. I’ve also had political conversations with at least four others. Several students have brought up current events and started conversations about Charlie Kirk, Palestine, and the Supreme Court ruling about racial profiling. One mentioned feeling like the school feels like a jail in part because of the more stringent electronics ban. We need to do much more than just conversations, but these discussions build the groundwork for greater unity and future fightback down the line. 
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Drop everything and RED

CHALLENGE newspapers are incredibly important for sharing communist ideas and stories of fightback around the world. Self-critically, sometimes I don’t read it as often as I would like and should. To help with this issue in our club, a few comrades and I have been doing CHALLENGE D.E.A.R. time together from time to time, and we plan to do so weekly going forward. We D.E.A.R. (drop everything and read) CHALLENGE for 10 minutes and then discuss what we read for 10 minutes. It helps us understand the articles better, make connections to our work on jobs and mass orgs, and brainstorm who in our base would take interest in certain articles. Last time, we invited a base member to join and we hope he will be back for future D.E.A.R sessions.
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Workers’ lives are not expendable

Today I read a statement by the Palestinian Communist Party (https://mltoday.com/statement-of-the-palestinian-communist-party/) which clearly states the point of the October 7 attack by Hamas and others was to bring the “question [of Zionist oppression] to the forefront... through sacrifices, no matter how high the cost.”  I submitted this comment: 

“As a communist member of the Progressive Labor Party, I find a major aspect of this statement to be very disquieting. I agree that the imperialist interests of the U.S. in the fossil fuels and trade routes are behind its backing of Zionists, and that neither the U.S. nor Israel haves any compunction about committing genocide. However, the point of revolutionary struggle is for the working class to seize power from the capitalist/imperialist oppressors. If there is no possibility of winning that struggle at a point in time, and the predictable outcome is the slaughter of those workers, then the uprising has been ill timed and against the interests of the oppressed. More is needed than returning the “question to the forefront... through sacrifices, no matter how high the cost.”  It seems that there was no plan guaranteeing uprisings in the West Bank or among workers in other nations, that there wasn’t even a plan to involve the majority of workers of Gaza or to safeguard them. In fact the dire consequences to 2 million Gazans of death, disease, deformity, displacement and severe emotional trauma will only leave the entire population decimated and less able to fight back. The overthrow of capitalism and imperialism requires a winning strategy, the building of a mass and international class conscious movement, not the conscious sacrifice of workers.”
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