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THE
ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT BY
FADIA RAFEEDIE
Reflecting on the post-9/11 world, Arab Americans such as myself have an eerie sense that everything has changed for our communities, but hasn’t. In the mid-1980s, I remember protesting what one judge called a “Kafkaesque” trial in which the attorney general sought to deport seven Palestinian men and a Kenyan woman (the so-called Los Angeles 8) on the basis of secret evidence. Today, hundreds of our kin are approaching the one-year anniversary of their incarceration—in unknown American jails, without legal representation—solely on the basis of the language they speak, or the way they worship. More than 15 years ago, the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist organization, booby trapped an office door of Arab America’s largest grassroots civil rights organization, murdering the West Coast regional director of the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee. Capitalizing on the atrocities of 9/11, JDL members were recently arrested for plotting to blow up one of Southern California’s most prominent and well-attended mosques. For more than a decade Arab and non-Arab activists have fought to lift the criminal embargo on Iraq. But the U.S. government, unfazed by the deaths of over 5,000 children every month, still pursues its mission to cripple the Arab world’s second largest country, topple its leadership and replace it with a regime more friendly to U.S. oil interests. Washington is still clamoring for intense bombing, and soon CNN may callously describe yet again how U.S. missiles “light up the sky like fireworks” above a densely populated Arab city. RESISTING THE SIEGE My uncle in Occupied Palestine, whom I met through his prison letters in the early 1990s, is again holed up in an Israeli concentration camp, scribbling his thoughts on empty cigarette packs as he awaits a third or fourth indefinite “renewal” of his arbitrary detention. Meanwhile, our “president” is tripping over himself to please a Zionist constituency whose interests are entwined with the U.S. foreign policy goal of subduing yet another popular Palestinian revolt for liberation. The result is that hundreds of my people are either under siege or being killed —for being Arab, for being indigenous to the land, for not being white or European or Jewish. Some say, “Every day is 9/11 in Palestine.” Every day the U.S. government sends $15 million of our tax dollars to finance Israel’s war against a civilian population. Meanwhile, the misplaced priorities of U.S. policymakers contribute to more poverty within this country, more prisons to house people of color, and more spies on the FBI’s payroll whose job is to pierce through our homes and communities and disrupt our ties with one another. As U.S. troops—drawn mostly from poor neighborhoods—engage in and prepare for another series of wars for oil, tens of thousands of American workers are being laid off to make up for the misdeeds of the same greedy financial elite that profits from this relationship between foreign wars, domestic oppression and money. Defiantly, an unprecedented number of Arabs and Muslims are registering their dissent loudly and clearly, alongside natural allies in a grassroots war that targets racism, ethnic profiling and unchecked hyper-militarism. Palestinians now are reminded of the words of a popular political cartoonist who gave to the Arab world (and beyond) the caricature of a young, barefoot boy named Handallah—whose disgust with reactionary Arab regimes and disdain for Western imperialist intervention kept him standing with his back to his audience: “My thinking is internationalist, and my concerns are humanitarian. I am not a tribal artist or someone who only belongs to a grouping of people called the Palestinians and only directs his drawings exclusively toward them. My goal is to reach all sectors of society.” Let it be
in this sense that everything has changed, but hasn’t. |
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