45th anniversary of his murder: Remembering Ghassan Kanafani (April 8, 1936-July 8, 1972)

Ghassan Kanafani

by As’ad AbuKhalil

In the early 1970s, three Palestinian intellectuals – Ghassan Kanafani, Majed Abu Sharar and Kamal Nasser – collaborated to form the Palestine Liberation Organization’s information office.

Within a decade, Israeli terrorists managed to kill all three – Kanafani in 1972, Nasser in 1973 and Abu Sharar in 1981.

The Zionist movement has never bothered to distinguish in its killing campaigns between civilians and military targets: in fact, on many occasions the Israeli government (or even the Zionist movement before the establishment of the occupation state) targeted civilians on purpose to create terror among the population. Presumably, Israel wanted to kill Kanafani and silence his voice. Yet the plan did not work as intended.

Forty-five years this month since his assassination, Kanafani’s presence is

‘The Fire Next Time’: remembering the Detroit 1967 rebellion

Earlier this week (July 23) marked the 50th anniversary of the urban rebellion in Detroit, Michigan.  This was the era of explosions in the deprived black communities of urban America, opening with the rebellion in Harlem (New York) on the east Coast in 1964, the Watts ghetto (Los Angeles) on the west coast in 1965 and continuing in many places in between through the rest of the 1960s, with the biggest explosions coming with the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.  Below, we’re running a piece by the comrades of the US Marxist group The Spark; this was the editorial that appeared in the current round of all their fortnightly workplace bulletins. 

by The Spark

In 1965, Detroit’s then mayor declared that the revolt in Watts couldn’t happen in “his city”. In 2017, Detroit’s current mayor declared that 1967 wasn’t an uprising. But it DID happen, and it WAS an uprising, an uprising of oppressed people. Before it was over, the Detroit revolt of 1967 would become the largest of any uprising in 20th century America. It was “the fire next time” that James Baldwin had written about in 1962.

In 1967 – no matter how many marches, how many court cases, how many laws – unemployment continued. Impoverishment drained people. Cops went into neighborhoods like an occupying army. There was a vast powder keg of unmet needs and grievances.

All it took was an “ordinary” incident of

Movie review: The Young Karl Marx

by Daphna Whitmore

This movie is two hours of non-stop Marxist banter. Tossing around the ideas of Marx, Engels, Proudon, Bakunin and Weitling, with references to Hegel here and there, it should be as dry as hell, even for a hardened Marxist. It’s not. It is rivetting. At the Auckland International Film Festival the audience stayed and applauded as the credits rolled.

The opening scene has destitute folk collecting firewood in a forest, and moments later they are savagely beaten by police on horseback. Marx contemplates how gathering dry wood, fallen from the trees and destined to rot on the forest floor, can be treated as an act of property theft? 

Free Khalida Jarrar. . . again!

by Susanne Kemp

Palestinian revolutionary leader Khalida Jarrar has once again been locked up.  She is the subject of an Israeli administrative detention order, imprisoning her for six months without charge or trial.  Forces from the illegal Israeli occupation on the West Bank raided her home on July 2.  She was then imprisoned by an Israeli occupation military court.

Khalida is a central leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the largest of the secular-left currents among Palestinians and a prominent fighter for women’s rights.  She is also a member of

From the vaults: Behind NZ’s armed intervention in the Solomons (2003)

As the New Zealand ‘mission’ in the Solomons is ending, the NZ government is patting itself on the back for its achievements.  NZ, it suggests, is a benign force in the Pacific and the intervention is presented as essentially humanitarian – saving lives and helping the people of the Solomons nation-build.  The article below first appeared in the August-October 2003 of revolution magazine, one of the predecessors of this site; it explains the real reasons for NZ intervention.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff and NZ soldiers in Honiara July 31, 2003. Another NZ imperialist intervention courtesy of the Labour Party. Pic: REUTERS/Stringer DG/FA

by Will Shannon

As we go to press, a substantial Australian-New Zealand force is being prepared for intervention in the Solomon Islands.  The NZ government will contribute up to 40 police and 200 troops, while Canberra is mobilising 1200 troops and 300 police.

Both governments are presenting this as a humanitarian-style intervention.  Former Solomons prime minister Manasseh Sogavare, however, has described the planned intervention as a move to recolonise and control the nation (DominionPost, July 10).  There is also anger at Australia’s proposal to put expatriates into government management positions as part of the intervention.

What is behind the planned intervention?

The longest occupation – the US wars in the Middle East

The following was written by the editors of the US left-wing journal Against the Current, in the July-August issue of that publication, here.

DONALD TRUMP’S SPEECH to the regional potentates and dictators assembled for the occasion in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia was generally acclaimed as eminently presidential, and rightly so. That is to say, it was firmly in the tradition of U.S. presidential addresses on Middle East policy: utterly cynical, dripping with deceit, and above all, irreversibly tied to the United States’ leading role as the chief arms merchant to some of the world’s most brutal regimes.

Unlike some of his predecessors, of course, Trump paid no lip service to human rights or democracy, both of which he despises — as do his Saudi royal hosts, who understood perfectly that the way to treat him is with limitless pomp and flattery. The audience also included the rulers of Bahrain, perpetrators of brutal violence and repression against human rights and democracy protests, and certainly emboldened by Trump’s proclamation of an “anti-terror” alliance targeting Iran.

Trump isn’t particularly good at dressing up imperial power politics in flights of rhetoric about universal human values and, to his credit he doesn’t make much effort to

West Bank: new campaign of raids, arrests by Israeli occupation forces

Khalida Jarrar

Khitam Saafin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following statement was made by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on July 2:

Ihad Massoud (centre)

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine confirmed that the Zionist occupation forces launched a pre-dawn campaign of raids across the occupied West Bank of Palestine on Sunday, arresting a number of leaders and activists of the Front, led by the Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar, feminist activist Khitam Saafin and former prisoner Ihab Massoud, as well as a number of activists in al-Khalil. The Front declared that these attacks will not stop it from continuing its role in resistance to occupation and confronting the crimes and projects that attempt to liquidate the Palestinian cause.

The Front emphasized that these arrests only underline the futility of the choices of the Palestinian Authority to continue to bet on settlements, “peace process” and security coordination. It also confirms the correctness of the Front’s position and its continuing struggle to build the resistance and the primary contradiction with the occupation as a major feature of its approach and political positions.

The Front further stated that these arrests have come after the major campaign