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.
As the world’s capitalist powers rally around the racist French cartoonists (dead and alive) of Charlie Hebdo, they are seizing upon the killings to celebrate the myth of “free speech” [see box] and to intensify racism against Muslims and Arabs. French bosses are using the incidents to push through their version of the USA Patriot Act “to authorize more intrusive surveillance” (New York Times, 1/13/15) — code for a fascist crackdown against protesters and dissenters. As they target small-time Islamic terrorists, the biggest terrorists — the U.S., the European Union, China, and Russia — are maneuvering to gain an edge in their escalating inter-imperialist rivalry. They will exploit the victims in Paris in the cause of nationalism and fascism — and for the bigger wars to come.
The U.S. and European bosses need to win millions of working-class youth to think they are fighting racism by joining the military to fight the Islamic State (ISIS). Their greatest fear is that youth and workers will follow the lead of the rebels in Ferguson, Missouri. That’s the real fight against racism: to confront the bosses’ brutal use of state power and the apparatus (cops, courts, jails) that props them up. 
Individual terrorists can never defeat the rulers’ racism. It was the working-class masses in the Soviet Union and China and the Resistance movements that smashed the Nazis and their Japanese fascist allies in World War II. Racism can only be obliterated by mass working-class revolutionary violence. We need to organize tens of millions of workers, under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, to smash capitalism and build a worker-run society: communism.
In the aftermath of al Qaeda’s latest atrocities, U.S. rulers worked overtime to obscure the main source of violence: capitalist competition over oil and gas. In reality, the assaults in France stemmed from two related factors. Al Qaeda (along with rival ISIS) aims to seize Middle East energy riches from U.S. and allied control by force, including terror attacks in the West. Meanwhile, the long, vicious history of French imperialism’s anti-Arab/Muslim racism spurs on the terrorists, helping al Qaeda and ISIS recruitment efforts. But you wouldn’t know any of this by reading Foreign Affairs (1/7/15), the journal of U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR):
The death toll makes this week’s attack the most significant on French soil since the Nazi occupation — a huge milestone in al Qaeda’s campaign against the West. It is part of a long line of plots to kill media figures for their symbolic value in the West as paragons of free speech and to some Muslims as examples of the evil of secularism.
French Rulers Murder 600 Muslims
The CFR, like virtually all the rulers’ media outlets, are ignoring the far deadlier government-led massacre of Arab workers in Paris on October 17, 1961. Only Robert Fisk of the (London) Independent (1/9/15) made the obvious connection:
Algerians had long provided the majority of France’s Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris — in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week’s slaughter — which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.
Terrorists, as bloody as they are, can never match the lethal power of a threatened capitalist state. In 1961, cutthroat French rulers were trying desperately to hang on to an African empire that generated super-profits from super-exploitation of Black, Arab and Muslim workers. The French imperialists engaged in mass savagery in Algeria, their former colony, killing tens of thousands who were fighting exploitation.
Today’s embattled U.S. imperialists kill millions — 3 million in Iraq alone — in their Middle East energy wars as they ramp up for broader conflicts with China and Russia. U.S.-led forces more than doubled the Charlie Hebdo body count one week earlier, when their rockets wiped out 25 Afghan civilians (New York Times, 1/1/15). The victims were celebrating a wedding in Helmand province, along the route of a proposed but much-delayed, U.S.-dominated TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline.
The media’s big lie is their focus on Islam as a source of terrorist violence. While oppressed rank-and-filers may in fact be won to jihad as a form of rebellion against the West, profits matter more than the Prophet (Mohammed) to the chiefs of al Qaeda and ISIS. Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden came from a billionaire, non-royal Saudi family shut out of the state-owned Aramco’s multi-trillion-dollar oil holdings. His 1996 declaration of holy war on the U.S. was keyed to a demand to dethrone the reigning Saud family and expel “American occupiers” from the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. A 2004 bin Laden message to believers targeted ExxonMobil and Anglo-Dutch Shell, Aramco’s biggest partners:
One of the main causes for our enemies’ gaining hegemony over our country is their stealing our oil; therefore, you should make every effort in your power to stop the greatest theft in history, which is being carried out through collaboration between foreigners and [native] agents… Focus your operations on it [oil production] (Quoted by Middle East Media Research Institute, 12/30/04).
As for ISIS, which has ties to the Paris kosher market attack, its oil profit motive couldn’t be more blatant. Like al Qaeda, the top tier of ISIS unites Islamic energy barons in search of state power. ISIS operates on oil revenues from fields and refineries grabbed in Iraq, resources that the U.S. war machine was supposed to secure for Exxon.
Anti-Immigrant Racism Riding High in France
France is fast becoming an ever more virulent bastion of racism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Muslim scarves and other religious garments are banned in public schools. Marine Le Pen’s National Front led the voting in recent elections, with an ultra-racist platform directed against Black and Arab/Muslim immigrants from North Africa.
The French fascists tie immigration to rising unemployment, the highest in decades. They hide the true source of joblessness, which is built into the cyclical boom and bust of capitalism. Many immigrant workers are segregated into ghettoes surrounding Paris and other big cities, victims of joblessness and slum housing. Their living conditions are similar to those facing Black and Latin workers in the U.S.
Anti-immigrant attacks are spreading throughout the European Union. In Dresden, Germany, pro-Nazis organized an anti-immigrant demonstration of 18,000. The 40 capitalist state leaders, the ruling-class servants who turned out for a photo-op at the mass demonstration in Paris, all represent countries that routinely torture innocents. Charlie Hebdo serves the liberal rulers’ purposes by dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims. The magazine’s disgusting cartoons evoke Nazi caricatures of Jews in the 1930s, a classic tool for a ruling class bent on war. Charlie and Charlie-inspired cartoons now appear in “respectable” U.S. publications. As mosques are attacked in France, major U.S. corporations are donating funds to this rampantly racist magazine.
Only Communist Revolution Can Eliminate Racism
Racism can be fought and crushed only by smashing capitalism, which depends on racism for super-profits and uses it to divide the working class. The goal of PLP is to destroy the profit system and its bosses, and to rid the world of unemployment, poverty, racism, sexism and imperialist war.
Building such a movement means spreading communist ideas in every organization: shops, unions, community groups, churches and especially the military. Rank-and-file soldiers, Marines, and sailors must be won to turn their guns around and direct their fire at their generals, who lead the rulers’ wars for profit. These workers must be won to unite with their sisters and brothers throughout the world.
Join and build a mass PLP!
Brooklyn, January 14 — Car wash workers here have been on strike for the past month shutting down the Vegas Auto Spa. The bosses re-opened with scabs recently. But the strikers are undeterred, especially since most motorists are respecting the picket line. This group of young Latin men took a decisive stand after they had enough of the conditions imposed by their racist boss, Marat Leshinsky. For years, they have labored under hazardous working conditions, receiving sub-minimum wages and expected to work long and often unpaid hours (sometimes 90 hours/week!).
These workers have organized themselves and joined a union, which this boss refuses to bargain with or recognize. The perseverance of these workers has inspired many in the surrounding community. Recently, with much support from residents and a community organization, the Washeros staged a march through the neighborhood all the way to Bay Ridge, to deliver their demands at the doorstep of the home of their greedy boss.
The strikers are well aware that this kind of exploitation of Latin immigrant workers reaps super-profits for the capitalist system. It is clearly racist, and all workers need to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters who are taking the lead in fighting back.
In addition to joining their picket line, bringing hot coffee and making donations, some workers have asked that we help write and tell their story in CHALLENGE, which has been well received by the strikers. Those of us in PLP are hopeful that all workers will join the fight to ‘Smash ALL Borders’ along with this capitalist system, which utilizes racism to exploit us all.
This has been a long strike, made even more difficult for these workers and their families by the cold weather and the arrival of the holidays. They receive very modest financial support from the union. The strikers have asked us to reach out to our friends, as well as the unions and other organizations that we work in, to help build solidarity in support of the bold spirit demonstrated by these strikers.
CHALLENGE readers are encouraged to show solidarity with the striking workers. The car wash is located at 557 Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn.
Texas — The day after the non-indictment for Michael Brown’s racist killer Darren Wilson, we carried out a planned protest on our school campus. Students and friends joined us in passing out flyers and chanting “Racist cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and “Racist killer cops mean, we’ve got to fight back!” The campus police were on the watch and quickly told us that we couldn’t pass out flyers, but we continued anyway in different parts of the campus.
We marched through campus and ended up across the adjacent main street. Many people supported the protest, including a father and his daughter who joined briefly. Another worker approached a comrade and gave thanks. One racist student had made a sign that said “I support Darren Wilson.” Two of us took away his sign and tore it up. We don’t believe in free speech for racists!
An hour after our action on campus we went to the east side of town to distribute literature and talk to the people on the streets — a sharp contrast to other groups that want to protest in the middle of touristy downtown. With our banner, chants and flyers in hand we stood on the street corner. A few passed out flyers, knocking on car doors and giving leaflets at stop lights. The response was great, with people putting their fists in the air, honking and expressing their agreement with our ideas.
One woman told us she had never heard anyone call for multiracial unity. She also said she had been blinded by the idea of “black nationalism.” We agreed with her that only multiracial unity can smash racism, and we must all unite to fight. We made a contact with one worker who just lost his job and was excited about our presence.
The last event was a rally of about 200 in front of the city courthouse. Many speakers supported voting or body cameras as solutions and being more involved in the bosses’ “democratic” system. One man spoke about how there are really good cops. He even raised the rotten apple metaphor which says one bad apple will spoil the whole bunch, as if that explains why the racist police are so commonplace.
One comrade told the group that this was about fighting capitalism and taking the fight to our schools and in the workplace where we can really shut the profit system down and hurt the bosses. Our chants were the most popular throughout the rally. We were the only ones to pass out literature and have a banner ready, as well as antiracist buttons. We distributed several hundred flyers and dozens of buttons.
The capitalist state will continue to provide opportunities to expose this racist system as death and exploitation of the working class continue. When our class brothers and sisters are being murdered, we are ready to grow stronger and more organized. Only fighting for communism can end racist police murders and establish an egalitarian world where police don’t exist.
Brooklyn, NY, December 21 —Supporters and friends filled the lobby of an apartment building here in Brooklyn to mark the monthly anniversary of Kyam Livingston’s murder caused by the racist denial of treatment by the NYPD cops at the Central Booking holding cell. The Support Committee had planned an indoor event to mark the date with both talk and a meal to share together during the holiday season. The crowd included friends and family of Kyam, unionists, church members, family members of other police murder victims as well as many members of Progressive Labor Party.
We carried out those plans but added a march through the neighborhood as our response to Mayor de Blasio’s call for a suspension of anti-racist demonstrations until cops Liu and Ramos were buried. The Mayor’s call for respect for the mourning period stands in sharp contrast to how racist cops treat the working class every day.
Kyam’s mother explained at an impromptu rally how her daughter was left dying for seven hours in the Central Bookings cell. She pointed out that cops Liu and Ramos were buried with full honors while Kyam was denied last rites. Kyam’s sister had been frustrated from seeing Kyam’s body for hours after her death.
This is not a unique example of disrespect. Mike Brown’s body lay in the street for four and a half hours after he was shot. Eric Garner received no medical attention as he lay dying unable to breathe. Shantel Davis bled out after being shot with no medical care. Akai Gurley, shot by “accident,” lay dying while the NYPD killer called his “union rep” to ask what to do. Tamir Rice lay dead in a park while his sister, trying to help him, was tackled, handcuffed, and thrown into the back of the killer kkkops’ patrol car.
As we marched along Church Avenue we chanted “Eric Garner, Mike Brown — Shut this racist system down!” changing the names to remember Kyam, Shantel, Akai and others who have died at the hands of the police. Hundreds came out of their homes or stopped their shopping to watch us march by. Many enthusiastically joined in our chants like “how do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D, how do you spell murderer? N-Y-P-D!” Many copies of CHALLENGE were distributed along the march.
After returning to our starting point, a speaker from Ferguson moved the crowd with his recounting of how the murder of Mike Brown had changed his life. He brought the fight-like-Ferguson spirit to the crowd with his call to shut this racist system down. Finally, a PL’er who has lived in the area for 40 years recounted a list of racist police murders and explained that we fight with families for justice in each of these cases but to end this police terror we need to win communist revolution.
