How do you spell fascists? IDF
How do you spell murderers? IDF
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Hey, hey, ho, ho!
The occupation has got to go!
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Joe Biden, you can’t hide!
We charge you with genocide
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They are killing kids overseas...
Shut it down!
They’re killing kids in our streets...
Shut it down!
They’re getting killed by bombs...
Shut it down!
They’re getting killed by police...
Shut it down!
If they keep bombing...
Shut it down!
This racist system
Shut it down!
This genocidal system
Shut it down!
This capitalist system
Shut it down!
Shut this racist system down! 
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U.S., Israel hand in hand 
racist murder is the bosses’ plan,
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From Palestine to Mexico
The bosses borders, got to go!

Harlem
This past November, we resumed monthly political meetings in Harlem. We are organizing against Mayor Eric Adams' police harassment and fighting for adequate low-income housing for ALL residents and immigrants. We are also joining the Episcopal Peace Fellowship to fight against genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and to fight to end the Occupation, end military funding for Israel, and for a permanent cease-fire. We are organizing to send church and community people to all pro-Palestinian actions in NYC.

In our town, we are joining all demonstrations in support of Palestinians and demanding a cease-fire, ending the occupation, and ending all military funding for Israel. We organize to support a Jewish and Muslim dialogue. and work to involve high school students in it. Also, my grandson just went with his high school group to tour the Holocaust museum in D.C. and I am encouraging him to organize his friends who went (and other students) into a study group about the roots of fascism and how to fight it!

I am leading an online book group discussing "The 1619 Project" and examining what kinds of activism its analysis can suggest for our congregation's Social Action Committee.

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Don’t use ‘ethnic cleansing’
A recent CHALLENGE editorial spoke about horrific mass murder and ethnic cleansing being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli ruling class. It was an excellent editorial - like the rest of the paper too - offering a breath of fresh air, in contrast to all the deadly nationalism underlying the mass murder in Gaza, and also mistakenly upheld by some people participating in the current, widespread protests against that killing.

However, I think we should always refrain from using the expression: ethnic cleansing. The word cleansing, as we know, means to clean. But there’s absolutely nothing clean or positive about genocide. The expression - ethnic cleansing - embodies the intolerable ideology of racists who commit genocide. Let’s not give them an inch, not politically, not militarily, and not linguistically.

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Struggling against nationalist ideas in the movement
Some of us from the Progressive Labor Party went to a Boston Teachers Union teach-in, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism.” Since the teach-in, I’ve been thinking about the complexities of raising our line within a movement that’s strongly impacted by nationalism and liberalism.

The movement takes aim at Israel as a settler colonial state rather than as a capitalist (fascist) state, capitalism being at the root of all types of colonialism and imperialism. Settler colonialism is when a colonial power claims the land, not just the resources and labor of an exploited people. This form of colonialism leads to racism and genocide, like what the British and then the U.S. did to Native Americans. But is this worse than “plain old colonialism,” which morphed into imperialism in the 20th century? Both continue to oppress, displace, and murder workers all over the world, for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central America, Haiti, and Sudan. Workers in these places all suffer the brutality of imperialism.  
When the concept of globalization became popular in the 1990’s, it seemed to reflect new realities in the world making the Leninist concept of imperialism irrelevant. Playing with words in this way is what liberals do when they don’t want to embrace a Marxist analysis. But Marxism-Leninism is necessary for understanding the world today and all its interconnections and necessary because it leads us to a revolutionary solution.

Because of its nationalism, the revisionist left plays up ethnic identity and plays down class. It refuses to condemn capitalism for fear of sounding like Marxists. Their fixation on settler colonialism reinforces the obsession with land that seems to be at the heart of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They also embrace self-determination for Palestinians (and everyone else) which is also the justification for a Jewish state (self determination for Jews). This places the conflict within the capitalist framework of nationhood and avoids the all-important question of what class the state serves. For the working class, winning your own state (i.e.nationalism)  means changing the color/ethnicity of your oppressors, not liberation.

Self determination (embodied in the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) assumes that one’s “self” is primarily one’s ethnicity, religion, or gender rather than one’s class. It’s another expression of identity politics. These things are real and important to many people, but when you think of what mainly determines our condition of life, it is our class. The capitalist propaganda machine pulls the wool over our eyes in order to keep the working class divided. Self determination didn’t solve the problems of workers in South Africa, Algeria, Vietnam or scores of other countries in the world when they fought off the colonial oppressors any more than it will solve the problem of workers in Palestine. 

Despite our ethnicity or religion or gender, workers suffer from the same capitalist economy that seeks short-term profits above all else and results in high prices, low wages, the marketing of products that harm our lives (for example processed food and pharmaceuticals), racism and sexism. During Covid-19, we were all subject to the same dysfunctional, self-serving capitalist class that put profits over people’s lives. 

Capitalist brainwashing causes most people to perceive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash of cultures, rather than a conflict engineered by the imperialist powers to secure their oil interests in the Middle East. With the capitalists controlling the narrative, it seems as though Palestinians and Israelis hate each other because they both want to live on the same land, which fits right into the current movement’s single-minded focus on “settler colonialism.”  For those of us working within this movement, we must counter the nationalist chants with the class conscious chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite”. 

As horrible as wars are, they create opportunities to politicize the working class. They make people want to take a stand and think more deeply about society.  Why shouldn’t we build a movement that is anti-capitalist? The working class is ready for it!! Why shouldn’t workers start thinking about the road to real liberation rather than stay mired in capitalist solutions? 

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Bosses in Pakistan battle for control 
NY Times, 2/10–The party of the imprisoned former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, won the most seats in parliamentary elections this week, delivering a strong rebuke to the country’s powerful generals and throwing the political system into chaos…Never before in the country’s history has a politician seen such success in an election without the backing of the generals — much less after facing their iron fist.

The success of Mr. Khan’s party was a head-spinning upset in an election that the military thought would be an easy victory for Mr. Sharif…Pakistan’s powerful generals had jailed Mr. Khan, arrested candidates allied with him and intimidated his supporters to clear his party from the playing field — or so they thought…the military has wielded ultimate authority, guiding its politics behind a veil of secrecy, and civilian leaders have typically risen to power only with its support…The vote also showed that Mr. Khan’s strategy of preaching reform and railing against the military has resonated deeply with Pakistanis…

FBI and ATF enter fight for fascism in Atlanta
The Guardian, 2/10–Police in Georgia, together with federal agencies, are conducting a crackdown on activists involved in a continuing campaign against a controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” that has included acts of arson and sabotage against equipment being used on the project.

This week alone saw Atlanta-area raids by law enforcement that took a woman out of her house with no shirt, left a naked photo of another woman on display after ransacking a room and dragged a man by his hair – while arresting none of them…The fight against Cop City has attracted national and global headlines, especially after police shot and killed one environmental protester at a campsite in a public park – the first such incident of its kind in US history. At least one of the search warrants for Thursday’s raid…authorized the FBI to confiscate dozens of items from the raided homes – including laptops, cellphones, “Defend the Atlanta Forest” stickers and posters, and personal journals.

Israeli bosses continue the slaughter of children in expanding empire
Al Jazeera, 2/10–The Israeli military has killed at least 28 Palestinians in strikes on Rafah immediately after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled that an invasion of the city in southern Gaza may be close…As with many previous Israeli air raids, each attack reportedly killed multiple members of three families, including a total of 10 children, the youngest of whom was only three months old. This came hours after Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to plan for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians from Rafah in preparation for a ground invasion to accompany the air attacks…Israel’s invasion of Gaza has killed at least about 28,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, with thousands more missing, likely remaining under rubble.

Battle for minerals drives instability in DRC
BBC, 2/11–Emile Bolingo is not sure how long he and other residents of Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, can hold out. This major city in the region, with about two million people, has been cut off from the farms that feed it for several days. It is the latest episode in a resurgence of fighting that has seen tens of thousands added to the nearly seven million who have been forced from their homes in the country because of multiple conflicts. Rebels from the ethnic Tutsi-led M23 movement are blocking the two main roads into Goma from the north and the west, preventing produce from getting through…Within reach of major mining towns supplying metals and minerals in high demand such as gold, tin, and coltan, Goma has become a vital economic hub. Its road and air transport links, and the fact that it has a huge UN peacekeeping base, have attracted a host of businesses, international organizations, and diplomatic consulates.

On January 27, a drone attack by an Iran-backed militia killed three U.S soldiers and wounded more than 30 at an outpost in Jordan, near the border with both Iraq and Syria. It marked the first killings of U.S. troops since Israel’s mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza began last October. “Genocide Joe” Biden promptly promised retribution. Two days earlier, the United Nations’ World Court cowardly failed to call for a ceasefire in Gaza while warning Israel to “prevent” the genocide already happening (aljazeera.com, 1/26). It’s a ruling the Israeli Zionist bosses and U.S. imperialists will simply ignore. And six days earlier,  the U.S. and UK launched the eighth missile attack on Yemen in the last two weeks, in retaliation for the Iran-backed Houthis’ attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea.

The bloodbath in Gaza is no longer a contained proxy battle between Israel and the nationalist misleaders of Hamas, with the U.S. and Iran funneling arms from the sidelines. The U.S. and British militaries are now directly involved in an expanding regional war, and the risk of more armies jumping in grows higher by the day. As inter-imperialist competition intensifies, war and more war continues to slaughter workers in the Middle East. As history has shown, only war can solve the capitalists’ contradictions. As the rulers scramble to protect their profits over workers’ dead and mangled bodies, the Progressive Labor Party calls on the international working class to join us and fight for a communist future.

Benefits and crisis for Iran’s callous bosses
So far, over 26,000 have been murdered in Gaza to date (barrons.com, 1/30). Besides Hamas, Iran’s opportunist rulers are backing Hezbollah in Lebanon. They also stand behind Yemen’s Houthis,  the small-time war criminals striving to assert control over Red Sea shipping routes. The Houthis started as an opposition group to Yemeni bosses allied with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most powerful regional enemy.  Over the last 10 years, as the Houthis won control over Yemen’s capital, more than 300,000 people have been killed and millions are suffering from starvation (CFR.com, 1/12). The Houthi leaders’ anti-Zionist cover aside, they are no friends of the working class.

All things considered, Iran is the biggest beneficiary of the current Middle East conflict. The war has stalled a pending U.S- brokered deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia to form an anti-Iran alliance–a huge victory for Iran’s bosses. Israel’s genocidal response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre has moved millions across the globe to march against the Zionists’ savagery and oppression. It may also hurt Biden’s re-election chances, as young U.S. workers–and Black workers in particular–are repulsed by the Democrats’ blank check for Israeli genocide (New York Times, 1/28). Our class gains nothing by electing candidates who represent one set of bosses or another. Only communist revolution to smash the capitalists’ state will allow workers to free themselves from wage slavery, racism, sexism, and imperialist war.

Meanwhile, imperialists on all sides are adding fuel to a fire that none of them completely controls.  The Chinese bosses are complaining to their Iranian allies that the Houthis are menacing Chinese ships (Reuters, 1/25) And like all capitalists, the bosses in Iran have pressing internal problems. Last year, hundreds of thousands of young people there, encouraged by the U.S. bosses, joined anti-government demonstrations after security forces killed a young woman for wearing her hijab improperly (Congressional Research Service Rports, 1/26).

War is coming, and U.S. bosses aren’t ready
Since the formation of Israel in 1948, the Middle East has seen almost constant war over oil and control of critical shipping routes. But today we are living in a different period. The collapse of U.S. dominance, the rise of imperialist China, and the worldwide crisis of capitalism is triggering massive instability. With the U.S. bosses now directly involved in the latest imperialist bloodbath, and China and Russia perhaps not far behind, the world is on the edge of a far broader conflict. The U.S. may soon face a three-front war it cannot win: in the Middle East, against an Iran backed by both Russia and China; in Eastern Europe, with the Ukraine-Russia war; and in the South China Sea and Taiwan, in a battle over shipping routes, naval dominance, and semiconductors.

As the world's capitalists reshuffle their alliances and prepare to redivide the globe,  internal divisions in the U.S. ruling class are undercutting a credible army. Over the last few years, the U.S. Army has tried to promote more Black and Latin officers and shut down some of the open white nationalism that mushroomed during the Donald Trump administration. As a result, the U.S. Army can’t find enough bodies. New white recruits have dropped by over 20 percent, and there aren’t enough additional Black and Latin recruits to compensate (Military.com, 1/10). In a sign of just how weak the U.S. has become, Biden has admitted the bombings of Yemen won’t stop the Houthis’ maritime attacks– but vowed to keep bombing all the same. This volatile tit for tat could be the prelude to World War Three, where the bosses will force workers to kill their class sisters and brothers on a sickening scale.

In the face of this insanity, it’s a positive development that so many workers have taken to the streets. At the same time, the weaknesses of the Palestinian national liberation struggle are many and deep. Today’s mass movement is at best soft on the brutal, anti-worker Hamas leadership. If they succeeded in winning real power, these Islamist nationalists would betray the heroic armed resistance in Palestine with a state modeled after the workers’ hell in Iran. But there is another, brighter future before us. If our class harnesses our righteous anger, we can turn the bosses’ wars into the fight for communism. Put your confidence in the international working class! Now is the time to build a revolutionary communist movement. Now is the time to choose between the rising fascist tide and a world where everything is shared to meet workers’ needs. The bosses are parasites who create nothing but misery for the international working class. Join us in the final conflict to build a new world without them!