Recent violent events in France attracted worldwide attention: the murder of twelve journalists and artists at the offices of the racist magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the murder of 4 hostages at a Kosher supermarket in Paris. Since Muslims committed these acts, the French right-wingers and their colleagues in Israel are quick to blame all Muslims everywhere for these acts. But this is a racist lie: to say that all Muslims are terrorists because a few terrorists happen to be Muslim, is like saying that all Jews are greedy because Bernard Madoff is one. Both are racist ideas, and both serve fascism well, by strengthening nationalism and fear, and pushing workers into the hands of the ruling-class in its plans for war and repression, justified as “fighting terrorism.”
Openly slandering Muslims, and openly attacking its most basic beliefs, helps the Right, such as the neo-Nazi “Front Nationale” (“National Front”) in France. Racist caricatures published in the background of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism are used by the regime to strengthen its repressive apparatus. Terrorist attacks against civilians and journalists also strengthen this regime — as now there is a “security threat” and thus the rulers can justify all sorts of repressive acts. A point often forgotten in the bosses’ media discussion of the events in Paris was that of the heroism of Lassana Bathily, a black Muslim worker who saved the lives of multiple Jewish customers when he hid them in the store’s refrigerator when the terrorists attacked. Working-class people protect each other when faced with violence and fascism; but the fascists are quick to denounce all Muslims as “terrorists.”
The war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to jump on the bandwagon and fly to France — and call the French Jews to “do Aliyah” (emigrate to Israel) because “France is not safe” for them. But to what kind of place does he invite them to come? To a state where he and his colleagues fight an endless succession of wars in service of their U.S. imperialist patrons! To a country where, like in any other capitalist country, the working-class is a milking-cow of taxes to fill the bosses’ pockets in bailouts and fill the generals store-houses with means of destruction? To a state which will send them and their children to die and kill in wars serving only the big bosses and their politician friends? Will they really be safer in Israel than in France? This ruling-class mouthpiece was very quick to spend 700,000 ILS ($200,000) of taxpayer money on his trip to France for propaganda purposes, despite being a somewhat unwelcome guest there.
Capitalism is the real terrorist organization, murdering more people worldwide on a daily basis by starvation, lack of medical care and clean water and endless wars for profit than even ISIS could kill in a year. Don’t let Netanyahu and the neo-Nazi National Front use this kind of attack to win you to their plans of endless imperialist war and their bottomless pit of repression. Turn the tables on them. Jewish, Muslim and Christian workers in France and Israel-Palestine must unite to kick out the real terrorists — the big bosses!

Selma opens with Martin Luther King, Jr. accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The film, and the portrayal of MLK, is consistent in depicting his pacifism. The march from Selma to Montgomery concludes peacefully. Lyndon Johnson said, “This is why I have chosen you, and not Malcolm X, who advocates violence, to lead the movement.” The film footage from the beginning to the end, however, proves that peaceful movements unprepared-for-violence beget violence.
The film advocates nonviolence and using the legal system. King and other mainstream civil rights leaders argued that working inside the system — by allying with “lesser-evil” bosses and going through the courts and laws — would win the fight against racism. King and others take on collaborationist positions, in which they exploit workers’ anti-racist fights to spread reformist illusions about elections, pacifism, and a seat at the bosses’ table.
Nonviolence is the belief that workers should accept all violence committed against them by the capitalist state and not fight back. The belief is that the rulers’ conscience will prevail and they will stop the violence against workers. This is what the bosses love about nonviolence: it disarms the working class from fighting back. History has proven many times the rulers have no conscience, i.e., slavery, racist police murder, and imperialist wars.
Pacifism vs. Mass Class Violence
“Negotiation, demonstration, and passive resistance” is King’s mantra in pressing for the right to vote. The barriers to vote are clearly part of a much bigger legal system. The film bears out the truth of the statement, “The cops, the courts the ku klux klan, all a part of the bosses’ plan.” Five hours after King’s speech, Viola Liuzzo drives a few marchers back to Selma, the subtitle states that she is murdered by the KKK.
Following the brutal beating by the cops of restaurant patrons (some were marching as King was away at a meeting) and the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, King visits Jimmie’s grandfather. He says, “God was the first to cry.” This statement contrasts sharply with a Black worker’s reaction to the beating of hundreds on the first crossing, known as of the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Southern KKK leader and U.S. senator) out of Selma and the subsequent murder of Malcolm X: “We need guns” (see page 7).
King responded that they couldn’t win if he kills two racists and the racist government kills ten. King’s limited vision couldn’t see the power of an armed, organized working class, let alone a strategy to defeat the whole capitalist system, and so he silenced other militant voices.
Failure to Defy the Bosses
The second march on the bridge showed clearly King’s inability to confront U.S. ruling class and state. The troops were ordered to pull back. But King’s “instinct,” as James Reed, a Unitarian minister put it, told him there might be an ambush leading to more bloodshed of this multiracial march. King turned about after a brief prayer and led the march — this time with one-third white protesters from across the country — to retreat. That night, James Reed was beaten to death by Selma racists.
Only when the 50-mile march was approved — after a hearing with those victims of previous assaults as witnesses — did King make serious plans to march all the way. There is an imagined conversation between outright racist Alabama governor George Wallace and liberal racist U.S. president Lyndon Johnson before the march. The two politicians deny to each other who has the greater watch over voting rights, the President, the Governor, or, indeed, the racist registrars. Johnson declares that he doesn’t want to go down in history with the same identity as Wallace and was forced to sign the Voting Rights Act, which removed the most overt barriers to Black workers voting.
The film’s climax conveys that Johnson’s signature on the Voting Rights Act, not militant struggle, will improve the lot of Black workers. Fifty years later, Black workers still suffer from the vicious racism by the kkkops, courts, and bosses. King’s statements “we don’t fight” and Johnson’s backing (“he’s non-violent”) remain the theme of Selma. Two men close to King, Andrew Young and John Lewis, both believers in nonviolence, were highlighted after the film’s conclusion as achieving prominent government positions. They went on to fool many workers into revamping the very system that oppresses them.
Yet, actions speak louder than words. King was killed five months later when he acted to support the demands of the Memphis sanitation strikers. Two of the men had been crushed to death by faulty trucks. Mayor Loeb refused to make repairs or to raise the poverty-level wages that kept many of the workers on welfare. For King’s leadership of striking workers, criticism of the Vietnam War, and demanding the rights of white and Black workers, he shall be remembered throughout history.
After King’s assassination the front page of Challenge said, “Nonviolence is Dead, Organize!” What is never reported now in the media is that mass rebellions in scores of cities against tanks and troops deployed in the streets forced the U.S. ruling class to enact reforms such as voting access and antipoverty programs.
Ultimately, the bosses evoke King as a hero because he represents tactics that do not pose a vital threat to the root of racism: capitalism. The rulers would rather have nonviolent marches and negotiation with politicians than rebellions like Ferguson. Workers need revolutionary violence organized by a mass communist Party. Workers need not one but millions of heroes who lead by serving our class for a communist world.

Just ten weeks after the historic civil rights march in August of 1963, Malcolm X gave an important speech — “Message to the Grassroots” — in which he attacked the civil rights misleaders who had collaborated with the ruling class and sold out the antiracist struggle of the day.
When reading Malcolm’s insightful analysis, quoted below, it’s helpful to keep in mind that back then Malcolm still viewed nearly all white folks as enemies and advocated black capitalism. But within a year, after two trips to Africa, he would make profound changes in his thinking. He came to recognize that all oppressed people, including white workers, are part of a common, international struggle against a common oppressor. When Malcolm uses the word “white” in this speech, we can substitute “capitalist” to better reflect where he was heading.
He concluded that the real enemy is capitalism. As Malcolm X put it, “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist. You show me a capitalist, I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”

Leading up to the summer of 1963, there was growing anger against racism, with lots of working-class struggle. As Malcolm explains, the March on Washington was spurred by militant grass-roots leaders:

It was the grass roots out there in the street. . .  [It] scared the white power structure in Washington, DC to death; I was there. When they found out that this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital….they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.”
Kennedy said, “Look, you all letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t stop it, ‘cause I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said, “These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us.” And that old shrewd fox [Kennedy], he said, “Well If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it. I’ll help it. I’ll join it.”
Malcolm went on to describe how liberal capitalists bought off the “Big Six” civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, and Whitney Young, with $1.5 million for their new coalition, the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership:
Soon as they got the set-up organized, the white man made available to them top public relations experts; opened the news media across the country at their disposal; and then they begin to project these Big Six as the leaders of the march….They became the march. They took it over...
And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. They ceased to be angry. They ceased to be hot. They ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all...I know you don’t like what I’m saying, but I’m going to tell you anyway ‘cause I can prove what I’m saying….[I]t was a sellout. It was a takeover

Guardian Weekly (from the Washington Post) 23 January, Gennevilliers, France:

Rather than fall quiet as requested during a national minute of silence after the Charlie Hebdo killings, three boys in Hamid Abdelaali’s high school class in this heavily Muslim suburb of Paris staged an informal protest, speaking loudly through all 60 seconds.
Across France they were not alone. In one school in Normandy, some Muslim students yelled…during that same moment. In a Paris middle school another group of young Muslims politely asked not to respect the minute, arguing to their teacher: “You reap what you sow.”
Abdelaali, a 17-year-old high school senior…said he feels disgusted by a magazine whose provocative cartoons had used the image of Muhammad for satire….Within France’s Muslim community of some 5 million — the largest in Europe — many are viewing the tragedy in starkly different terms from their non-Muslim compatriots. They…[are] arguing that, no, they are not Charlie at all.
Many of France’s Muslims…abhor the violence that struck…earlier this month. But they are also revolted by the notion that they should defend the magazine. By putting the publication on a pedestal, they insist, the French are once again sidelining the Muslim community, feeding into a general sense of discrimination that, they argue, helped create the conditions for radicalization in the first place.
Unemployment and poverty remain far higher among France’s Muslims than in the nation overall. Joblessness and poverty are particularly high in the heavily Muslim Paris suburbs such as Gennevilliers, an area of sprawling, dense apartment blocks….
On the streets here, Charlie Hebdol remains something different, a symbol of what some, such as Mohamed Binakdan, 32, describe as everyday humiliation of Muslims in France.
“You go to a nightclub, and they don’t let you in,” said Binakdan, a transit worker in Paris. “You go to a party, they look at your beard and say, ‘Oh, when are you going to Syria to join the jihad?’ Charlie Hebdo is part of that, too. Those who are stronger than us are mocking us. We have high unemployment, high poverty. Religion is all we have left….And, yes, we have a hard time laughing about it.”
Some insisted there is a double standard in freedom of speech and expression that is biased against Islam. They cite the 2010 so-called burqa ban in France that forbade “concealment of the face” in public, and that Muslim critics say was clearly aimed at devout Muslim women.