Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Seventieth Birthday, In Defense of Gaza, On the Eve of the Columbia Student Encampment

The following is a lightly edited transcript of Johanna Fernández’s remarks delivered on the occasion of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s seventieth birthday, on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in Philadelphia, PA. You can watch Johanna’s speech here.

In 1968, 56 years ago, at the height of an era of wars, revolutions, and social movements against colonial rule, against white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation the world over, the American ruling class and its junior partners around the world began to wage an unrelenting war of repression against those who had taken back their communities, workplaces, and colonized countries. 

They waged war against the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, against the American Indian Movement, and against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They waged a war against the union movement in the United States, the IRA in Ireland, against Umkhonto we Sizwe in South Africa, against the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and against many other movements and revolutions that were dreaming up a world without war, and a world organized around human need, equality, and radical love.

As part of that war, the ruling class orchestrated the assassination of our leaders—Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Che Guevara; and the imprisonment of our freedom fighters Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Jamil Al Amin, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, the MOVE 9, Sekou Odinga, Assata Shakur, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange—among many others.

The rulers turned the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal into a show trial and put him on death row to send a message to future generations of radicals about the consequences of dissent. They destroyed our unions, decimated our wages, obliterated healthcare and mental health services, raided an already anemic social safety net, gentrified affordable housing, and without a care in the world for the environmental apocalypse that awaits us, they eviscerated OSHA.

Fearing uprisings of the downtrodden, they built and filled an unprecedented number of prisons with black and brown and working people, they expanded their Darth Vader police forces, built cop cities, and continue to grow and deploy their monstrous war chest.

In the last fifty years, the US has relied on Israel to contain rebellion the world over: to train and arm the most brutal militias and governments around the globe that are critical to maintaining the violent chaos that facilitates western mineral extraction and capitalist control of entire regions of the world.

Israel armed the South African Apartheid Regime. Israel armed and trained the militias in Uganda and Rawanda responsible for the past and present genocides in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Israel protected the killers of Patrice Lumumba. Israel armed the brutal Shah of Iran, trained and armed the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in Central America that were putting down poor people's uprising across the region in the 1980s. Israeli military and police training led to the killing of two hundred thousand Indigenous people in Guatemala in a ten-year period. And we know that for two decades the Israeli Defense Forces have trained US police forces in racial profiling and violent suppression of protests. This is why the US has provided aid worth more than $124 billion to Israel.

The World is on the side of Palestinians

Because Israel’s attempt to pulverize Gaza is a microcosm of the terror the world ruling class has inflicted on the globe for the last 50 years, the World is on the side of Palestinians. It is the battle of David and Goliath. The battle of the displaced against the settlers who must dehumanize the displaced in order to justify their annihilation and permanent dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. 

As Malcolm X observed almost sixty years ago, “the Palestinian’s struggle is a Moral battle, a universal fight, a resonating echo of the battles waged by oppressed people across the globe” 

And now Columbia students have created a prairie fire, and university administrators have now considered calling the National Guard to quash at the root an epic student uprising against a genocide that’s being livestreamed on social media, but that is being denied by every major American institution and by the US press.

The images we’ve been seeing of student uprisings spreading across the country and around the world is the moment we’ve been waiting for.

 It’s the moment of radicalization when a whole generation sees that the United States cannot solve the crisis of homelessness, nor fund education or healthcare, or fix our bridges or the NYC subway, but the US Congress can bankroll a war bill to the tune of $95 billion dollars—as it did on Tuesday, April 23, 2024—to finance Israel’s genocide against the poorest population on earth, one that Israel is also, already starving.

It’s the moment we see that all our struggles connect, when we see that the liberation of Palestinians is tied up with the freedom of Mumia and Peltier and the emancipation of the human race. This is the moment when we determine to take back society from the predation of our rulers because we understand that the outcome of the struggle in Gaza will determine the kind of world our children will inherit.

There is no better way to celebrate Mumia’s birthday than to stand in the tradition he committed his life to a long time ago—that of Revolutionary  liberation. 

Free Mumia and Leonard Peltier and All Political Prisoners, Liberation to Palestine and the human race.

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Johanna Fernández is associate professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), “Structures of settler colonial domination in Israel and in the United States” (Journal of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 6, 2017), and “On the Historical Roots of US Fascism,” published in For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis (Common Notions Press, 2022). She is also the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights Press, 2015). Visit linktr.ee/johanna.fernandez for more information.

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TITLES FOR A liberated FUTURE FROM COMMON NOTIONS PRESS:

We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (New Edition) by Mumia Abu-Jamal with an introduction by Kathleen Cleaver

New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University by Conor Tomás Reed

Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amílcar Cabral edited by Firoze Manji & Bill Fletcher, Jr.

On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for its Remedy by Members of The Situationist International and Students from Strasbourg, edited by Mehdi El Hajoui and Anna O’Meara

The Weapon of Organization: Mario Tronti’s Political Revolution in Marxism by Mario Tronti, edited and translated by Andrew Anastasi

Organizing for Autonomy: History, Theory, and Strategy for Collective Liberation by CounterPower

Beyond the State of the Union: Confronting the State of the Genocide

Last week, as President Biden delivered his State of the Union address in Washington DC, a broad coalition of antiwar and Palestine solidarity groups in Chicago, including Jewish Voice for Peace, CORE (the Caucus of Rank-and-file Educators), IfNotNow, American Muslims for Palestine and many others, came together for a 24-hour vigil where the names of Palestinians killed since October 7 were read.

During the demonstration, an alternate State of the Union, “The State of the Genocide,” was delivered. A lightly edited and adapted version of that address was subsequently published at Truthout.org the following day. As the authors make clear, the usual operations of the US empire endorse and fuel the genocide in Gaza. Until we, the majority of Americans who support a ceasefire but go unheard by the government, can change the status quo, their words remain evergreen. We are publishing the address  here with permission from Truthout and the authors.

Ari Bloomekatz and Eman Abdelhadi offer their alternative "State of the Genocide" address on March 7 in Chicago at a 24-hour vigil and protest that occurred during President Biden's State of the Union address. (Photograph by Sarah-Ji)

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The State of the Genocide: An Alternate Address

By Eman Abdelhadi & Ari Bloomekatz , TRUTHOUT

Mr. Speaker — Mike Johnson — you tried to overturn the 2020 election. You do not believe even in the feeble version of democracy that rules this country. You attack the most vulnerable members of our society at every turn. You represent hate and speak only for haters.

Madam Vice President — Kamala Harris — we see through your opportunistic calls for a ceasefire that lasts only six weeks. There can be no sunset to peace, no expiration on justice.

Our Second Gentleman — Douglas Emhoff — do you really think impassioned college students are a larger threat to Jews than an Israeli government that, in the name of Jews, kills children for sport?

Members of Congress and the Cabinet — your pressed suits and performative respectability cannot hide your vicious cruelty. When a small fraction of your colleagues — mostly women of color — cried out against the atrocities (their pain rooted in a deep belief in shared humanity) and demanded we see humans as humans, you responded by marginalizing them.

Leaders of our military — you are our masters of war and, indeed, you have fastened all the triggers for the Israeli military to fire.

Our fellow Americans, our comrades, our people — our message is for you: We have work to do.

Our elected officials have abdicated their responsibilities. They do not care that we want peace, that we want justice, that we abhor murder, that we will not stand for genocide.

Our fellow Americans, we are facing an election in which millions of people are declaring themselves “uncommitted” — an apparition conjured into the primaries by voters who do not know where else to turn.

President Biden, did you feel the spirit of the “uncommitted” with you in the U.S. Capitol as you gave your own State of the Union address? One hundred thousand voters in Michigan, 88,000 exasperated voters in North Carolina, 46,000 Minnesota voters are showing they are desperate for an end to this path of death stacked on top of death.

Our fellow Americans, the current State of the Union is the State of the Genocide.

For over 150 long days and nights, the United States of America has enacted a genocide.

Dollar after dollar, we have funded a genocide.

Bomb after bomb, we have armed a genocide.

Veto after veto, we have protected a genocide.

Make no mistake. The genocide in Gaza is not a faraway foreign policy issue. Not with nearly $4 billion a year going to the Israeli military. Not with President Biden trying to give over $14 billion more. Not with Biden sneaking around oversight to send gigantic bombs for the Israeli military to drop on crowds of civilians. Not with three Palestinian students shot in Burlington, Vermont. Not with 6-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume brutally murdered by a white supremacist in a Chicago suburb.

No, the genocide in Gaza is an American project.

The genocide in Gaza would not be happening without the active support of our elected officials. Most U.S. senators support and enable this genocide. President Biden actively supports this genocide.

They have supported the slaughter, in cold blood, of more than 30,000 Palestinians. The slaughter in cold blood of 13,500 children. Of 12,000 women. They have actively helped wound 70,000 more people. They have aided and abetted the destruction of nearly every home in Gaza. The systematic and deliberate destruction of libraries, universities, archives, mosques, hospitals, schools, and so much more.

They are currently overseeing the starvation of Gaza. The 17-year siege on Gaza that the United States enabled and protected has made this moment possible: a moment where every entry point of food, water and fuel is controlled by Israel. The same Israeli officials who have openly declared their intent to ethnically cleanse Gaza — that dehumanize Palestinians as “human animals” — now reap the rewards of the U.S.’s unconditional support.

They can stop food, medicine, water and fuel from entering the Strip — and that’s exactly what they are doing. Meanwhile, President Biden’s milquetoast gestures at humanitarian aid do not absolve him from enabling the genocide that makes that aid so necessary.

Just a few days ago, in what is now known as the Flour Massacre, Israeli soldiers opened fire on hundreds of besieged and hungry Gazans, killing 118 for the crime of simply trying to survive.

And make no mistake. The genocide in Gaza is not a problem without a solution. It is not a problem too complicated or too intractable to solve. It would have ended months ago if our elected officials had been doing their jobs — if they had listened to us.

Our politicians have supported this genocide against the will of the American people.

Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans want a permanent ceasefire. We have risen up in one of the largest social and antiwar movements in American history to say that this is not who we are, that our values align with celebrating life, not cheerleading death.

We have flooded the streets, jammed the phone lines and inboxes of our leaders. We have issued condemnations from every corner of civil society, using every platform we can possibly conceive.

We have marched, we have occupied, we have cried and screamed. We have tried to reason and educate. And yet, the people who are supposed to represent our interests ignore us.

And instead of listening to us, our leaders have followed a familiar playbook — investing in power, money and bloodshed at the expense of humanity.

As of January, half of Americans could not afford their rent and a record number of Americans are now unhoused.

We are drowning — drowning in medical debt, in credit card debt, in student debt.

Yet our elected officials send the money earned from our labor to fuel a genocide rather than solve any of these problems. No one in Washington, we are told, can agree on anything — until it’s time to send 2,000-ton bombs to Israel.

The ruling class has chosen death over life. And when that happens, the State of the Union is the State of the Genocide. Our fellow Americans, there can be no confusion, this genocide is ours. It is U.S.-made through and through.

We recognize it because it harkens to the ongoing genocide on which this country was founded, to the slavery on which it was built, to the continued exploitation of immigrants and the working class to keep it running — on the principle of profit over people that continues to rule these lands.

Our elected leaders represent not our interests, but the interests of the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the developers, the weapons manufacturers and the war profiteers. We are here to draw a curtain on the theater of blood they have constructed for us.

This genocide is ours — but it is also ours to stop.

Today, we say no more. We are done.

We demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

We demand the end of military aid to Israel.

We demand our government wield its power to stop the killing and immediately secure the free passage of food, water and medical supplies to Gaza.

We demand the restoration of free movement for Gazans on their own land.

We demand a free Palestine.

We will not stop marching, protesting, blockading, screaming until we get these demands.

We are done listening to presidential rhetoric that only serves to obfuscate what is a very simple solution to the genocide: that the Israeli military stop killing Palestinians, that not one more Palestinian is murdered, that not one more parent will have to bury their child — that the genocide must stop, immediately.

Our fellow Americans, join us in resistance. As state militaries, defense contractors, governments and morally bankrupt corporations prioritize profits over liberation and death over life, join us in building a better world, a world where Palestinians and all oppressed peoples are free.

And to this bloodthirsty ruling class, we remain — and will always remain — uncommitted.

Originally published March 8, 2024 at truthout.org. Published here with permission from Truthout and the authors.

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EMAN ABDELHADI is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072 (Common Notions).

ARI BLOOMEKATZ is executive editor at In These Times. He was previously the managing editor of Rethinking Schools and spent several years as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. He organizes against the occupation and for collective liberation with IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, Center for Jewish Nonviolence, Never Again Action and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Follow him @bloomekatz.