Defend Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib!
A Statement by the Steering Committee of Solidarity
February 14, 2019
THE VICIOUS, DIRTY – and bipartisan – smear campaign against the first two Muslim women in the U.S. Congress, Ilhan Omar (MN) and Rashida Tlaib (MI), is just beginning. No one should imagine that Rep. Omar’s dignified apology for her tweets about the Israel lobby, which have been willfully twisted to accuse her of “anti-Semitic tropes,” will put an end to the attacks on her – or that Rep. Tlaib’s calling Donald Trump a “motherf****r” is what anyone is really upset about.
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are under attack for who they are – as Muslim Arab-American women, and as progressive critics of U.S. foreign policy not only in Palestine but throughout the Middle East and in Latin America as well. They represent exactly what white nationalists and Islamophobes don’t think belongs in Congress, or for that matter in the United States. They also represent what the leadership of the Democratic Party doesn’t want either – outspoken opponents of the bipartisan blank check that Congress gives to the Israeli military, and the whitewashing of Israel’s brutal Occupation policies that veterans of the South African freedom struggle have called “worse than apartheid.”
Because the attacks on Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are certain to continue and escalate, it is essential that anyone who wants to be considered “progressive” come to their defense now. That includes telling the Congressional Democratic leadership that it’s absolutely unacceptable to censure or threaten to strip them of committee assignments. Otherwise, the racist hyenas aiming to destroy them will come back for more.
It’s “beyond...
Recently, the New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper...
Gonzalo Gómez is a Venezuelan revolutionary, member of the socialist organization Marea Socialista and co-founder of the independent left-wing website aporrea.org. He was interviewed by Eva María, and the interview was translated by Alejandro Q. This interview was first published by International Viewpoint on February 6, 2019.
Note from the interviewer...
At the beginning the year a series of attacks, some slanderous, were unleashed against the EZLN following its New Year statements, especially those by Commander Moises, concerning the projects of the new Mexican government, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
In a conversation on...
NAFTA had been in effect for just a few months
when Ruben Ruiz got a job at the Itapsa factory in Mexico City in the
summer of 1994. Itapsa made auto brakes for Echlin, a U.S. manufacturer
later bought out by the huge Dana Aftermarket Group. In the factory,
asbestos dust from brake parts coated machines and people alike. Ruiz
had hardly begun his first shift when a machine malfunctioned, cutting
four fingers from the hand of the man operating...
The following review essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of Against the Current. In view of the unfolding massive crisis and imperialist intervention in Venezuela, we are posting it here as it offers highly relevant information on the background and development of the situation in Venezuela and the region. As a review, of course it represents the views of the author. Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and is the author of many books and articles dealing with that country. His...
Challenging United States hegemony is never an easy course. A county need not be socialist — it is enough to either voice aspirations toward socialism, or merely demonstrate a pattern of not doing as Washington dictates.
So here we go again, this time with Venezuela. Ironically for a country that the corporate media insistently claims has been ruled by two “dictators” (remember that Hugo Chávez was routinely denounced in the same...
Prime Minister Theresa May has, unsurprisingly, survived the vote of no confidence moved by Labour with the solid support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the European Research Group after suffering the biggest Parliamentary defeat in British political history on her exit agreement from the EU. The defeat saw both those fighting to stop Brexit altogether and those who don’t believe May’s deal delivers ‘enough Brexit’ celebrating together inside and outside parliament.
Labour was...
What do we do about Brexit? May’s deal is toast, so what now?
This is obviously not the Left’s baby. We didn’t bring it about: rather, Brexit occurred as a result of a struggle between factions of the Conservative Party in which the worst side won. It won, in no small part, because there was barely a left-wing argument heard in the referendum campaign, so that even the substratum of legitimate social anger that drove some of the Brexit vote was articulated with right-wing anti-immigration...
The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) has won a big, although limited victory. Fighting in a context of a school board controlled by corporate charter school advocates funded by Eli Broad and the Walton foundation in the second largest city in the United States in a state run by the Democratic Party they were able to dominate the discourse about education. The issues of class size and supports for students in the schools were widely accepted throughout the city and will reverberate across the...
“The Left Case against Open Borders” by Angela Nagle is an essay with a misleading title. The article doesn’t argue against “open borders”. Nagle argues against the cause of immigrant rights and for a more repressive immigration policy,...
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