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.
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.
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