On the joyous occasion of his 26th birthday, at a party surrounded by his family and friends, Malcolm Shabazz kisses his beloved mother, Qubilah Shabazz, on Oct. 9, 2010, a month before his Hajj to Mecca. – Photo: Minister of Information JR Valrey

The spiritual warmth could be felt flowing all through the hall in the stately Islamic Center in downtown Oakland, as over 300 people mourned, paid last respects, celebrated his life and gained inspiration during the service held Friday morning, May 17, in loving memory of Hajj Malcolm Latif El Shabazz.

The faces of grief and mourning were also the faces of strength, courage and commitment.

“Young Malcolm,” as he was often recognized, in remembrance of his grandfather, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), was a jewel in the making, just coming into his own when he was assassinated this past week under circumstances that fairly reek of COINTELPRO manipulation.

But this service celebrated his life, even as it mourned his passing.

Mourners entered the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California here. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

A beautiful plaque and candle greet visitors at the entrance to the Islamic Center. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

An obituary read to the audience spoke of Hajj Malcolm’s travels in the states and in the world, where he spoke out against global injustice, Black on Black violence and the prison industrial complex. He advocated for political prisoners and visited Mumia Abu-Jamal and Sekou Odinga. He learned from all whom he encountered, most particularly human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, whom he adored. One of her relatives was present in the audience.

A mourner is overcome as she stands beside the casket. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

His educational objectives included not only advanced studies for himself at the University of California at Berkeley’s Islamic Studies Department, but the building of masjids and educational centers in America. His goal was to emphasize the need for qualitative changes in the American educational system, such that all children would have access to a quality education. To this end, he spoke at many universities, schools and local community centers across this country.

Mourners of the many faiths and nationalities Malcolm had touched paid their respects. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

From infant to elder, he inspired confidence in all whose lives he touched with humility and grace. He worked for human rights, dedicating his life to the mission of his grandfather, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, hoping to create a world filled with the true meaning of justice and peace.

Aside from being a consummate teacher and activist, he was also a father and a son, with uncompromising love for his daughter, Saudi Shabazz, and for his mother and comrade, Qubilah Shabazz. He was also soon to be the author of two books, one of which was a memoir.

Veteran campaign manager and John Burton staffer Ronald Colthirst, Amir Hassan of the UC Berkeley African American Studies Department and Bay View publisher Dr. Willie Ratcliff were among those grieving the loss of young Malcolm. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

It was emphasized that Malcolm Shabazz was not a stagnant man, that he was constantly growing and developing, that he was a precious jewel in the making.

There was a table of fresh fruit, from which people could partake, as well as water.

Buttons were being made and sold outside the service to defray the cost of carrying Hajj Malcolm Latif El Shabazz to his final rest beside his grandparents in New York.

Representing Hajj Malcolm’s many friends and comrades from Bayview Hunters Point in San Francisco were TaLea Monet Carpenter and her daughter Nailah. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

Hajj Malcolm Shabazz’ family included the pre-deceased El Hajj Malik El Shabazz and Dr. Betty Shabazz. He is survived by his mother, Qubilah-Bahiyah Shabazz, his daughter, Saudi Shabazz, and his aunts, cousins and paternal and maternal great aunts and uncles.

Hajj Malcolm Latif El Shabazz has made a profound and an indelible mark upon the world. In the finest traditions of the Shabazz family, by his life he will continue to inspire.

The photographs, taken after the ceremony with the permission of the Imam, reflect the love of Malcolm’s global community for him, and his love for his community.

Malaika H Kambon is a freelance photojournalist and the 2011 winner of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association Luci S. Williams Houston Scholarship in Photojournalism. She can be reached at kambonrb@pacbell.net.

Tribute to Malcolm

by Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu and Gerald A. Perreira, African Revolutionary Movement

Africans all over the world mourn the death of Al Hajj Malcolm Al Shabazz, grandson of the great African revolutionary, Al Hajj Malik Al Shabazz (Malcolm X). ARM is in no doubt that this young African freedom fighter, who was using his legacy to inspire a whole new generation, was targeted for assassination.

Anyone familiar with the aims and objectives of COINTELPRO can immediately read the signs. He was under constant surveillance as a result of his activism at home and abroad and the circumstances surrounding his death reek of a setup.

The Empire is in deep crisis and knows that the final blow will come from the mounting internal resistance to its reign of terror. Young Malcolm’s assassination comes at a time when the Empire’s state terrorist apparatus is intensifying its harassment of militant African organizations and leaders and has recently placed Assata Shakur at the top of its most wanted terrorist list.

Hajj Malcolm Latif El Shabazz is depicted in the loving embrace of his grandfather, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. – Photo: Malaika Kambon

The corporate media’s shameless attempts to discredit this young warrior has fallen largely on deaf ears, since it is clear to all that these agencies of mass deception are simply in the service of Empire. There is hardly an African family in the Diaspora whose young sons have not had issues with “the law.” As many African scholars have noted, it is in fact “the law” that has issues with our youth who are targeted globally.

Truth be told, no youth on this earth has suffered more than African youth. No amount of slandering or character assassination by a discredited corporate media can detract from the stature of this young son of Africa who is mourned worldwide.

May Allah welcome him as a martyr, who died like his grandfather, in the service of his people.

African Revolutionary Movement Chairman Yahaya Ezemoo Ndu and International Secretary Gerald A. Perreira can be reached at mojadi94@gmail.com.

KPFA Evening News May 18, 2013

KPFA Evening News Anchor: The mayoral contest in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, is now widely reported to be very close as it heads for a conclusion on Tuesday, May 21. Jackson’s population is majority Black and Democratic, so Tuesday’s Democratic primary run-off, between Black Democrat Chokwe Lumumba and Black Democrat Jonathan Lee, will effectively determine who the city’s next mayor will be.

The Jackson Free Press reports, however, that donors to the Jonathon Lee campaign have also given $1.2 million to federal Republican campaigns since 2008. Lee is a businessman running for political office for the first time. Lumumba is a human rights attorney, renowned for winning Jamie and Gladys Scott’s release from prison, who has served on the Jackson City Council for the past four years.

KPFA’s Ann Garrison spoke to Bob Wing, a founding editor of Color Lines, who traveled from Durham, North Carolina, to work on the Chokwe Lumumba for Mayor campaign.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Can you explain why you thought this campaign was so important that you traveled from Durham, North Carolina, to Jackson, Mississippi, to work on it?

Bob Wing: Yeah, there’s a couple main reasons. First of all, for much of the country, when they think of the South, they think of rednecks and red states, and they forget that the majority of Black people in the United States still live in the South. And that’s why I moved to Durham and that’s why the Jackson election is so important.

Mississippi is the state that has the highest percentage of Black people and Black voters. And it’s also often off the radar screen of much of the rest of the country.

While they’re looking at Obama and the drama in Washington, in many ways the main action going on in the country is a withering, literally withering attack that the Republicans have launched in the red and purple states like Mississippi and North Carolina, where they are dramatically altering the legal, political and social landscape, or at least attempting to in a very short time.

Chokwe Lumumba is, like Barack Obama, “a Christian brother with an African name,” but his opponent, Jonathan Lee, has used his name to suggest that he is non-American, perhaps not even Christian. Lee has also suggested that Chokwe Lumumba does not support Barack Obama. Lumumba himself has said that he and his supporters voted for Obama, but that he is an MLK-Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat.

KPFA: Having lost his family name during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Chokwe Lumumba took the first name Chokwe, that of a West African tribe, and the last name Lumumba, which is of course the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated in a Western backed coup. How does this play in the state of Mississippi?

Bob Wing: Well, it’s definitely something that he knows is an issue, and really his opponent is trying to use his name to paint Chokwe as a non-American, or some kind of other, or as a Muslim. And so Chokwe, he tends to introduce himself as Chokwe Lumumba, the Christian brother with an African name.

KPFA: OK. In a controversial television attack ad launched this week, the Lee campaign charged that Chokwe Lumumba is not a Christian, because he once said that the resurrection was not his thing. And Chokwe Lumumba responded that he’s always been a Christian and that he tries to live Christlike. Is a literal interpretation of the Bible really important in this part of the country where the Old Testament narrative, “Let my people go,” was transposed during the Civil Rights movement into the story of African Americans recovering from slavery and fighting Jim Crow segregation and voter suppression?

Bob Wing: Well, I don’t know that it is. I mean I think it’s important, or let’s put it this way, it’s a big plus if you’re a Christian. But for sure, Chokwe is in fact a Christian, and in a city that is overwhelmingly a Christian city – it’s about an 80-plus percent Black city, almost all of whom are Christians – it’s been an important thing for him to assert that he is a Christian.

KPFA: Could you explain why 2nd District Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson’s endorsement of Chokwe Lumumba is being reported to be so important?

Bob Wing: Well, I think that there’s two reasons: One is that a Congressional seat – you’ve got to remember that Misssissippi is a very small state; it has only about 2.5 million people. Jackson, the City of Jackson, has just under 200,000 people, so a Congressional seat takes up virtually all of Jackson, plus more people.

A congressional seat in the United States is approximately 750,000 to 800,000 people, so when you’re a congressman in Mississippi, you’re the congressman for a huge swath of the population. In the case of Bennie Thompson, he is the congressman for a good part of Black Mississippi, which is concentrated primarily in the Mississippi Delta and Jackson.

Chokwe Lumumba with his daughter Rukia and grandson Qadir

He has quite a bit of power, and he is very well known and widely admired, so his endorsement is definitely important.

KPFA: Anything else you’d like to say about this?

Bob Wing: Well, I guess the last thing I’d like to say, and it’s part of the answer to your first question, is I think that Chokwe also represents a very important new trend in the progressive movement in the United States, and that trend is that people are, especially on the left side of the progressive movement, the social justice movement, are really starting to understand the importance of elections as part of social justice organizing.

And Chokwe has been extremely successful at it, and it’s becoming really part of the culture of the progressive movement here in Jackson and in certain other parts of the country as well – Virginia, North Carolina and other places. And I think that’s a very important trend, which is another reason why I’m here.

KPFA: Bob Wing, thank you very much.

Bob Wing: Thank you.

KPFA: And that was Bob Wing, founding editor of Color Lines and Chokwe Lumumba campaign volunteer, speaking from Jackson, Mississippi.

For Pacifica, KPFA and AfrobeatRadio, I’m Ann Garrison

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, Colored Opinions, Black Star News and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News and her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at ann@afrobeatradio.com. This story first appeared on her website. If you want to see Ann Garrison’s independent reporting continue, please contribute on her website at anngarrison.com.

The State Department of the United States recently released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, posing as the world judge of human rights again. As in previous years, the reports are full of carping and irresponsible remarks on the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China.

This photo with the following caption was used by China Daily to illustrate this report: “Kimani Gray protest on Church Avenue between East 55th Street and Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, on March 13. In response to the shooting of a 16-year-old boy by police, protesters in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn had been holding nightly vigils and marches, and there have been frequent clashes with NYPD.” – Photo: Stephanie Keith, Polaris

The human rights situation in the U.S. in 2012 has deeply impressed people in the following aspects:

– Firearms-related crimes posed serious threat to the lives and personal security of citizens in the U.S. Some shootings left astonishing casualties, such as the school shooting in Oakland, the Century 16 theater shooting in Colorado and the school shooting in Connecticut.

– In the U.S., elections could not fully embody the real will of its citizens. Political contributions have, to a great extent, influenced the electoral procedures and policy direction. During the 2012 presidential election, the voter turnout was only 57.5 percent.

– In the U.S., citizens’ civil and political rights were further restricted by the government. The government expanded the scope of eavesdropping and censoring on personal telecommunications. The police often abused their power, resulting in increasing complaints and charges for infringement upon civil rights. The proportion of women in the U.S. who fell victim to domestic violence and sexual assault kept increasing.

– The U.S. has become one of the developed countries with the greatest income gaps. In 2011, the Gini index was 0.477 in the U.S. and about 9 million people were registered as unemployed, about 16.4 million children lived in poverty and, for the first time in history, public schools reported more than 1 million homeless children and youth.

Facts show that there are serious human rights problems in the U.S. which incur extensive criticism in the world.

 
 – There was serious sex, racial and religious discrimination in the U.S. Indigenous people suffered serious racial discrimination and their poverty rate doubled the national average. A movie produced by a U.S. director and aired online was deemed insulting to the Prophet Mohammed, sparking protests by Muslims worldwide.

– The U.S. seriously infringed upon human rights of other nations. In 2012, U.S. military operations in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan caused massive civilian casualties. U.S. soldiers had also severely blasphemed against local residents’ religion by burning copies of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, and insulting bodies of the dead. There has been a huge rise in birth defects in Iraq since the war against Iraq with military actions in which American forces used metal contaminant-releasing white phosphorus shells and depleted uranium bombs.

– The U.S. was not able to effectively participate in international cooperation on human rights. To date, the U.S. remains a country which has not participated in or ratified a series of core U.N. conventions on human rights, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

U.S.-led military operations bring forth ecological disasters to other countries

 
Military operations led by the United States have brought forth ecological disasters to other nations such as a huge rise in birth defects, says the report on the U.S. human rights record.

An article posted on the website of the Independent cited a study that reported a “staggering rise” in birth defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war, says the report, titled “the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012,” which was released by China’s State Council Information Office.

The study found that in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which saw two of the heaviest battles during the Iraq war, more than half of all babies surveyed were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010.

Before the war, the figure was more like one in 10. More than 45 percent of all pregnancies surveyed ended in miscarriage in the two years after 2004, up from the previous 10 percent, according to figures of the study cited by the report.

Military operations led by the United States have brought forth ecological disasters to other nations such as a huge rise in birth defects.

 
The report also quotes Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, as saying that the Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. “The war emits more than 60 percent of all countries,” Kretzmann said.

U.S.-led wars cause massive civilian casualties

 
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both started by the United States, have caused massive civilian casualties, says the report.

From 2001 to 2011, the U.S.-led “war on terror” killed between 14,000 and 110,000 per year, the report cites an article on the website of Stop the War Coalition as saying.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) tallied at least 10,292 non-combatants killed from 2007 to July 2011.

The Iraq Body Count project records approximately 115,000 civilians killed in the cross-fire from 2003 to August 2011, according to the report.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both started by the United States, have caused massive civilian casualties.

 
Beyond the two states under occupation, the “War on Terror” has spilled into a number of neighboring countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, killing a great many civilians there, it says.

In addition, a news report posted on BBC’s website pointed at recurrent U.S. drone attacks in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the report. “Just one in 50 victims of America’s deadly drone strikes in Pakistan are terrorists – while the rest are innocent civilians,” the report quotes an article on the website of the Daily Mail as saying.

U.S. women victims of discrimination, poverty, sexual violence

 
Women in the United States are facing discrimination in employment and more vulnerable to poverty and violence, with some falling victim to sexual assault, says the report.

The U.S. remains one of a few countries in the world that have not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, says the report.

Women made up about two-thirds of all workers in the U.S. who were paid minimum wage or less in 2011 and 61 percent of full-time minimum wage workers, the report says, citing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On average, women have to work as far as April 17 into 2012 to catch up with what men earned in 2011, it says.

Pregnant women and new mothers face the danger of being forced out of the workplace, according to the report.

A Houston mother was reportedly fired from her job at a collection agency after asking to bring a breast pump into the office so she’d have plenty of fresh breast milk for her newborn. A new Connecticut mom said her new employer asked her to resign after she told them she was pregnant.

The poverty rate for women in 2011 was 14.6 percent, compared to men’s 10.9 percent. Women are more likely to live in poverty and about 40 percent of women who head families live in poverty, the report cites the U.S. National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) as saying.

The U.S. remains one of a few countries in the world that have not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

 
Women are the victims of violence and sexual assaults. A national census of domestic violence agencies in September 2011 found that more than 67,000 victims were served in a single day, the report says.

According to the Report on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, submitted by the Special Rapporteur to the U.N. General Assembly in 2012, most prison staff in the U.S. are not adequately trained to prevent or respond to inmate sexual assaults, and prison rape often goes unreported and untreated, says the report.

Women in the U.S. armed forces are the victims of widespread sexual abuse. Around 79 percent of women serving in the military reported experiences of sexual harassment. Military sexual trauma often leads to debilitating conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression, according to the report.

The report also warns of the health of women of color. A media report in June 2012 says the rate of HIV infection in heterosexual African American women in the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., nearly doubled the 6.3 percent infection rate of two years before.

Minority women in the U.S. are more likely to die during or soon after childbirth than white women, according to a report posted on the website of the Chicago Tribune on Aug. 3, 2012.

U.S. scores low on children’s rights protection

 
Children in the U.S. are not blessed with enough protection for their safety, freedom and right to education, says the report.

Citing the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the report says at least 100,000 children across the country are trafficked each year.

Child sexual abuse is a widespread public health problem. Research indicates that 20 percent of adult females and 5 to 15 percent of adult males experienced sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence, the report says.

In 2012, several religious figures were found to have sexually assaulted children. In July 2012, Roman Catholic monsignor William Lynn was sentenced to six years in prison for allowing a priest suspected of sexual misconduct with a minor to have continued contact with children. In September, a Roman Catholic bishop in Kansas City was found guilty of failing to tell authorities about child pornography that was produced by a priest under his supervision, according to the report.

Children in the U.S. are not blessed with enough protection for their safety, freedom and right to education.

 
The number of homeless children increased sharply in the U.S., and many children are stricken by poverty, the report says.

For the first time in history, public schools reported more than 1 million homeless children and youth. Only 52 percent of identified homeless students who took standardized tests were proficient in reading, and only 51 percent passed the math portion, the report cites the data released by the U.S. Department of Education on June 27, 2012, as saying.

Forty-four states reported school year-to-year increases in the number of homeless students, with 15 states reporting increases of 20 percent or more. The number of homeless children enrolled in public schools has increased 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year, according to the report.

Racial discrimination remains rampant in U.S.: report

 
Racial discrimination in the United States sees no improvement, and non-whites do not enjoy equal political, economic and social rights, says the report.

Ethnic Americans’ rights to vote are limited; even some Asian-American voters were obstructed at voting stations during the presidential election in November 2012, according to the report.

As of 2010, more than 2 million African-Americans were stripped of their right to vote, says the report, citing media reports.

Racial discrimination is rampant in the field of law enforcement and justice, as police were reported to tend to be more lenient with whites, it says, adding that ethnic Americans are discriminated against in the job market, and their economic well-being worsens as a result.

Racial discrimination is rampant in the field of law enforcement and justice.

 
Religious discrimination is also rapidly on the rise, with an increase in insults and attacks against Muslims. In one case, a U.S. film director last year made a film that was insulting to the Prophet Muhammad and posted it online, which triggered waves of protests in the Muslim world.

Citing a recent poll released by American media, the report says 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-African-American attitudes, three percentage points higher than in 2008.

Besides, the rights of illegal immigrants are violated. Deaths often occur in immigration detention centers.

Some United Nation human rights experts and South Florida Haitian rights advocates call for the U.S. to suspend all deportations to Haiti, as it may constitute a human rights violation and may threaten the lives of Haitians, according to the report.

Ethnic Americans in poverty due to discrimination

 
Ethnic Americans’ economic well-being has worsened as a result of being discriminated against in the job market, said the report.

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012 was released by China’s State Council Information Office in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012 issued by the U.S. State Department.

The median household income for African-Americans was $32,229 in 2011, less than 60 percent of that of non-Hispanic whites, the report says, citing U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

The poverty rate for African-Americans stood at 27.6 percent in 2011, almost three times that of non-Hispanic whites.

Employment discrimination is the main reason behind income disparity and poverty, reads the report, an annual move of the Chinese government to counter the U.S. assessment belittling China’s human rights condition.

Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show the unemployment rate of whites was 7.0 percent in October 2012, while the rate for African-Americans and Hispanics was 14.3 percent and 10 percent, respectively, in that month, according to the report.

The average period of unemployment for ethnic minorities is also notably longer than that for whites, it says.

Employment discrimination is the main reason behind income disparity and poverty.

 
According to data from the Labor Department, over half of African-Americans and non-Hispanic Blacks in New York City who were old enough to work had no jobs in 2012, and it takes them almost a full year on average to find another job, the report says.

Wealth gap growing in U.S.

 
The gap between the rich and poor has been growing in the U.S. over the years, says the report.

America’s Gini index was 0.477 in 2011 and income inequality increased by 1.6 percent between 2010 and 2011, indicating a widened rich-poor gap, the report says.

Between 2010 and 2011, the share of aggregate income increased 1.6 percent for the quintile with the highest household income, and increased 4.9 percent for the top five percent households, it said, citing U.S. official figures.

During the same period, the aggregate share of income declined for the middle quintile, and the changes in the shares of aggregate income for the lowest two quintiles were not statistically significant, it added.

America’s poverty rate in 2011 was 15 percent, with 46.2 million people in poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released in September 2012.

Furthermore, the report says there were 21 homeless people per 10,000 people in the general population, and nearly four in 10 homeless people were unsheltered.

U.S. election marked by political donations

 
Elections in the United States are like “money wars,” with trends of the country’s policies deeply influenced by political donations, says the report.

In the 2012 election, the Obama campaign and the Democratic camp raised $1.06 billion, and the Romney campaign and the Republican camp raised a total of $954 million, the report says. Both groups receive funding from business giants.

An opinion poll showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe the 2012 election was marked by too many political donations from business circles, which will mean the increased influence of the rich over the country’s policy-making, the report says.

“America’s political system is sinking into serious crisis as it is under manipulation of interest groups and their sponsors,” the report says, citing a Harvard professor.

“American politics are corroding the people, making them increasingly dependent on interest groups,” the professor is quoted as saying.

Abuse of suspects, jail inmates common in U.S.

 
Abuse of suspects and jail inmates is a common occurrence in the United States, says the report.

A litany of lawsuits was brought against the New York City Police Department, with police officers charged with violating civil rights in law enforcement, the report says.

Citing a May 2012 report by CNN, the document adds that some 9.6 percent of the prisoners in American state prisons are sexually victimized during confinement, more than double the rate cited in a report on the subject in 2008.

U.S. government steps up surveillance of citizens

 
The U.S. government continues to step up surveillance of ordinary Americans, seriously violating the freedom of citizens, says the report.

The U.S. Congress approved a bill in 2012 that authorizes warrantless wiretapping and electronic communications monitoring by the government, a move that violates people’s rights to privacy, the report says.

Documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union in September 2012, reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring American’s electronic communications.

The U.S. government continues to step up surveillance of ordinary Americans, seriously violating the freedom of citizens.

 
Between 2009 and 2011, the U.S. Justice Department’s combined number of original orders for “pen registers” and “trap and trace devices” used to spy on phones increased by 60 percent, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011, the report says.

The National Security Agency collects purely domestic communications of Americans in a “significant and systematic” way, intercepting and storing 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications, it adds.

Firearms-related crimes pose serious threat to U.S. citizens

 
The United States was haunted by serious violent crimes in 2012 with frequent occurrence of firearms-related criminal cases and with some shootings leaving astonishing casualties, says China’s report on the U.S. human rights record.

According to statistics released by the FBI in September 2012, an estimated 1,203,564 violent crimes occurred in the U.S. in 2011, about 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants, says the report.

Aggravated assaults accounted for 62.4 percent of violent crimes reported to law enforcement. And firearms were used in 67.7 percent of the nation’s murders, 41.3 percent of robberies, and 21.2 percent in all crimes in the U.S., the report quotes FBI figures as saying.

Figures from USA Today’s website showed that the violent crime rate went up 17 percent in 2011, the report says.

Statistics from the website of the Congressional Research Service showed that an estimated 14,612 people fell victim to murder in 2011 and 9,903 of them were firearms-related murder victims, according to the report.

U.S. people’s lives, personal security not duly protected

 
The lives and personal security of United States citizens, who were haunted by serious violent crimes, were not duly protected, says the report.

The U.S. government has done little on gun control. Americans are the most heavily armed people in the world per capita, according to the report.

It quotes CNN as saying that there were an estimated 270 million guns in the hands of civilians in the U.S. and more than 100,000 people are shot by guns each year.

The lives and personal security of United States citizens, who were haunted by serious violent crimes, were not duly protected.

 
In 2008 and 2010, landmark Supreme Court rulings on two firearms-related cases dramatically diminished the authority of state and local governments to limit gun ownership, according to the report.

Roughly half of the 50 U.S. states have adopted laws allowing gun owners to carry their guns openly in most public places. And many states have “stand your ground” laws that allow people to kill if they come under threat, even, in some cases, if they can escape the threat without violence, the report says.

The foregoing are the report’s foreword and highlights, which appear in Global Times, where the full text is also available.

The inclusion of Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Terrorists list last month – marking 29 years since her liberation from a New Jersey maximum security prison in 1979 by members of the Black Liberation Army – while aimed at Cuba’s leadership should also be interpreted as a shot across the bow of any internal revolutionary movement or revolutionary activists in the United States who dare challenge empire’s march across the planet.

“I am a 20th century escaped slave,” wrote Assata Shakur. “Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color. I was convicted by – I don’t even want to call it a trial; it was lynching, by an all-white jury. I had nothing but contempt for the system of justice under which I was tried.”

As a young woman she joined the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and participated in its community service programs such as the free breakfast program for poor Black youth as well as other programs aimed at ending drug addiction amongst women. She embraced the Panther’s 10 Point Program that demanded Black people have complete control over their/our communities, free from a corrupt government’s interference and free from police forces that occupy Black communities as if they were enemy territory.

She watched in horror and then rage as the FBI, in concert with local law enforcement agencies, responded to the Panthers’ revolutionary program with state sponsored terrorism by framing, falsely arresting, imprisoning, wiretapping and even murdering Black Panther members across the country in a state sponsored counter intelligence program that specifically targeted the Panthers community activism.

This counter intelligence program was called COINTELPRO and we know it existed and we know that it targeted the Panthers’ community activism because we have the FBI’s own documents targeting the Panthers’ community work. In one memo, J. Edgar Hoover, the late director of the FBI, chastises a FBI agent who questioned why the FBI should be disrupting and harassing Panther members involved in legal community work that is widely supported by the Black community. In a scathing response, Hoover states to the FBI special agent in charge in San Francisco May 27,1969:

“You state that the Bureau under the Counter Intelligence Program should not attack programs of community interest such as the Black Panther Party Breakfast for Children. You state this is because many prominent humanitarians, both white and Black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it.

“You have obviously missed the point … You must recognize that one of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther] Party is to keep this group isolated from the moderate Black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uniformed white and moderate blacks.”

This is the environment of state repression Assata Shakur existed in as a young woman who joined the Panthers to address the needs of her community that the government wasn’t addressing. Within the two-year period of Assata Shakur’s membership in the Panthers, over 28 Panthers were killed around the country in suspicious confrontations with police and hundreds if not thousands were arrested on false charges.

Assata Shakur is no terrorist; she is a freedom fighter and dedicated activist who emerged from the Black community.

 
Faced with this repression, Assata Shakur did what any sane person would do when faced with death or false imprisonment by a government bent on destroying, by any means necessary, the movement she belonged to. She was forced to go underground and helped build the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an armed revolutionary movement committed to defending itself and the Black community against an all out war declared on militant Black revolutionary activists and movements. The creation of the BLA was the logical and natural response by activists who faced a government onslaught of repression and assassination. In Assata Shakur’s own words:

“The Black Liberation Army is not an organization: It goes beyond that. It is a concept, a people’s movement, an idea. The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care and inferior education.

“The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because 90 percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black and Third World. Because 10-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children.

“The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance,” writes Assata Shakur in “Assata Shakur: An Autobiography.”

So, we can dispense with the nonsense of Assata Shakur being a terrorist! If anyone is a terrorist, it is the agents who were responsible for a campaign of assassinations, false imprisonment, illegal wiretaps and a host of other illegal acts that emerged from COINTELPRO. Assata Shakur is a freedom fighter!

Next, let’s make it clear that Assata Shakur is no fugitive from the law or justice, because in order to be a fugitive one has to be in flight or violation of a government and criminal justice system that possesses legitimacy. The charges, conviction and sentence Assata Shakur was subjected to were the results of the illegal COINTELPRO campaign the FBI launched against members of the Black Panther Party and other militant revolutionary Black movements.

“And where there is oppression, there will be resistance.”

 
So excessive were the illegal violations of COINTELPRO, the United States Senate was forced to convene a Senate hearing (Church Commission) in 1975 to rein in and expose the FBI’s illegal conduct and secret campaign against the Black Liberation Movement. If it is a fact that Assata Shakur was the victim of the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO tactics based on her membership and activism in the Black Panther Party, the United States government possesses absolutely no legitimacy to declare Assata Shakur a fugitive nor attempt to apprehend her!

The real reason the government wants Assata Shakur has nothing to do with her unjustified conviction for allegedly murdering a New Jersey state trooper and everything to do with the government not letting go of the fact that after Assata Shakur was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison in 1975, in 1979 her comrades in the Black Liberation Army broke into the prison, liberated her and successfully spirited her off to Cuba where she was granted political asylum by the Cuban government.

Assata Shakur represents a symbol of militant Black resistance that challenged and humiliated the United States government for its repressive and indifferent policies towards the Black community. Assata Shakur is uncompromising in her beliefs and continues to represent and carry the legacy of the Black Liberation Movement.

We can dispense with the nonsense of Assata Shakur being a terrorist! Assata Shakur is a freedom fighter!

 
Her freedom keeps alive the memory of her imprisoned and martyred comrades from the Black Liberation Army. It must drive the FBI and New Jersey law enforcement crazy that she is beyond the grasp of Imperial America, yet only 90 miles from its borders in revolutionary Cuba.

For those of us who embrace the legacy of the Black Liberation Movement, this latest move against our sister Assata Shakur is a potent reminder that, because there is no longer a militant Black underground that can inflict consequences, the FBI can add Assata to the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Terrorists List and the state of New Jersey can double its “bounty” on Assata’s head to $2 million without repercussions. This is something for us to ponder.

And lest someone should think the BLA is passé or a relic from another era, just read over Assata’s above statement on the conditions that gave birth to the BLA and you’ll see that we are confronted with the same conditions today – even with a Black president. It should also be hoped that Assata’s inclusion on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Terrorist List draws attention back to Assata Shakur’s case and galvanizes opposition to the government’s attempt to capture her.

Robert Saleem Holbrook and family 2009

Assata Shakur on the other hand will be all right, Assata descends from a long line of Black women who have stood up to and confronted state repression. Her example and actions stand in the company of Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis and other Black women who have stood the storm of racism and oppression in White America.

In addition, Assata Shakur draws on the legacy and example of our enslaved ancestors who escaped the plantation and took to the mountains and swamps of the New World as maroons, dodging and fighting slave hunters and U.S. federal marshals paid by white slave owners to hunt them down and deliver them in chains back to the plantation.

Assata ain’t coming back to the plantation and we should do everything possible to ensure that she doesn’t. For if Malcolm X was, in the words of the late Ossie Davis, “our Black Prince, a shining example of Manhood,” then Assata Shakur is our “Black Queen, a shining example of Black Womanhood.”

Send our brother some love and light: Robert Saleem Holbrook, BL-5140, SCI Coal, 1 Kelley Dr., Coal Township, PA 17866, www.freesalim.net.

by JR Valrey

First I want to offer condolences to everyone who knew and loved Hajj Malcolm Shabazz. When I got the word Thursday that Hajj Malcolm Shabazz had been assassinated in Mexico City, like many, I did not want to believe it. As somebody who traveled with him extensively over the two-year period of ‘10-’12, it was hard to imagine that he was beat to death in Mexico City, including reports that said that he was thrown from a window.

Yuri Kochiyama, a renowned leader in the Asian and other communities of color in the Bay Area, had been a strong supporter of Malcolm X in Harlem. She submitted a letter from his grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, to the Bay View for publication in the mid-2000s. That letter, written from prison, sparked a correspondence between Malcolm and JR Valrey, leading eventually to this meeting of the three of them in November of 2010.

But as I was taught by my Panther mentors, “No investigation, no right to speak.” That is the reason why this article took so long for me to release. The white power system (the government) assassinated the father of Hajj Malik El Shabazz for being a Garveyite. The Little/Shabazz family have been targets of Cointelpro for over four generations, which is why I cannot accept a story like the one being told about what happened. We know the U.S. government wants to eradicate the bloodline.

What I do know about this assassination is that the enemy’s media has been working overtime to malign Malcolm as a drunk or hoe-chaser who got into a “bar fight” over the last few days. That depiction is far from anything I knew about Malcolm.

What I know about the man is that he had a passion for helping young people understand and hopefully avoid the pitfalls that the U.S. government has set up for our community. He used his troubled life as a platform to let people, in general, know that he is not just preaching – he spent years locked up and, like his grandfather, he used the time to politically and spiritually educate himself for his next stage in life, that of an ever evolving freedom fighter.

Malcolm was a very charismatic speaker, who had no problem holding a crowd’s attention. He was comfortable speaking to diverse audiences. He could speak in a Masjid to Muslims from other nations in Houston, then turn around and spend 20-30 minutes talking to young people walking down the street in East Oakland. That was another skill he seems to have inherited from his grandfather.

People have asked, “With you and Malcolm having been close, why did you not rush to say something in the media?” The answer is that when I first heard of Malcolm’s assassination, I was shocked and saddened. At no time did I have the urge to run to jot down my feelings on Facebook or to write an article or do a radio interview. Malcolm was a comrade and Brotha to me. I have feelings just like everybody else; just because I am a journalist does not mean that things don’t affect me.

While emotions are running high and people are asking for answers, there are a small number of opportunists who are playing off of the raw emotions in the situation for their own malicious intent. I have heard that someone said I was in Mexico and that I am responsible for Malcolm’s assassination. I was not in Mexico nor did I know that Malcolm was in southern Cali with intentions to go to Mexico. I was in Oakland. I am disgusted that somebody from another state, who knows nothing about what’s going on, could accuse me of something with no investigation into the real facts of the case. I did not have any prior knowledge of or responsibility in his assassination.

Somebody said that I introduced Miguel and Rumec to Malcolm. Malcolm and I met Miguel and the crew at the same time, at Malcolm’s first speaking event in Oakland, at the Black Dot Cafe, in July of 2010. Miguel talked in depth to Malcolm about building a Masjid. This can be verified by Malcolm’s Imam, Hashim Alauddeen, located in the Bay Area. I am not Muslim. I was not involved in those conversations.

Another accusation was that I was selling Malcolm’s books and DVDs. I haven’t sold any of Malcolm’s stuff. The Bay View newspaper put up an old ad, on their website, for an unpublished, unfinished book that was never used. The intent of the sfbayview posting is clearly stated in a response that the newspaper just released on their website sfbayview.com. It was to show that Malcolm was working on something constructive in contrast to the mainstream media just tying him to his prison time. This can also be cleared up by Imam Hashim Alauddeen, the Imam over the Janazah, who was working with Malcolm on his literary projects.

Somebody asked, “Why would Fred Hampton Jr. slander you?” The only thing I could say is that we organized together and went around the country and world as comrades for over seven years. After we parted ways, he started slandering me and my family, calling my grandfather and myself a government agent. My grandfather retired from the military as a special forces pilot in the U.S. army before I was born.

If you know the history, the Bay Area was populated by Blacks from the South who were seeking to work in the wartime industries in West Oakland, Hunters Point and Richmond. It’s hard to find families on the West Coast who did not play a part in World War II and the Vietnam War. That is who first employed Blacks in mass to the West Coast.

I have never worked for the U.S. government in my life. I can’t speak for anybody’s intentions but my own. I don’t know why Fred does the things that he does. I challenge you to judge me by my work record and not some rumor that somebody started to try and become the center of attention. Hit me on my Facebook page about questions that you may have and I will respond – FB: Jayshortbutfunky.

Oakland had three acting police chiefs in five days last week, and on Thursday, the police department’s controversial consultant, William Bratton, released his six-page report which criticized OPD’s top brass.

Oakland’s then Police Chief Howard Jordan and consultant William Bratton speak at a press conference March 6. – Photo: Avila Gonzalez, San Francisco Chronicle

On Friday former Deputy Chief Sean Whent became interim chief, and Toribio returned to captain’s rank. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan then announced that Oakland would spend $30,000 on a headhunter’s nationwide search for a permanent chief.

Three new deputy chiefs who share Interim Chief Whent’s experience in investigating OPD internal affairs were also named, leaving only one of the previous week’s top five commanders in place.

The Oakland Tribune reported that unnamed inside sources told them Jordan “raced for the door” because Thomas Frazier, the court appointed federal compliance officer brought in to clean up the department, planned to seek his ouster.

On Thursday, in between Jordan’s announcement and Whent’s appointment, the OPD officially released a report by its consultant, William Bratton, titled “Oakland Crime Reduction Project, Bratton Group Findings and Recommendations,” which said that the OPD must more rigorously apply his Compstat policing model to make it work and criticized top brass for not doing so.

No one seems to have reported that William Bratton, rather than federal compliance officer William Frazier, was behind this week’s sudden shakeup in the OPD chain of command. However, back on Jan. 22, the day that the Oakland City Council met and voted to contract with Bratton as an OPD consultant, Berkeley law professor Frank Zimring, who authored a book praising Bratton’s work in New York City, told KPFA Upfront Host Brian Edwards-Tiekert that Bratton would not be effective unless he was effectively in charge:

“The reason that you have an outsider coming in is that you have too many different perspectives. You’ve got a mayor, you’ve got a police chief, you are soon going to have a director of compliance with a long, ineffective consent decree. And everybody’s got to be on the same page.

“So the good news about a consultant would be if everybody wants to work with him. Then, it seems to me, Bratton’s credibility could be a real down payment towards changes in Oakland. If, on the other hand, it’s just going to be one more player with another set of perspectives, that’s the last thing Oakland needs.”

No Oakland officials have suggested that William Bratton, who is a former chief of both the New York City and Los Angeles police departments, might be recruited by Oakland’s headhunter, though popular Oakland blogger Zennie Abraham joked, on April Fool’s Day this year, that Bratton already has the top job.

Abraham was prescient at least regarding Interim Chief Howard Jordan’s imminent departure.

In 2009, Businessweek reported that Bratton had become chairman of Altegrity Risk International, a new division of Altegrity, a billion dollar company owned by the private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.

Altegrity Risk International was created to bid on highly lucrative State Department contracts to help train police forces in 14 “post-conflict” nations, including East Timor, Haiti and Afghanistan. Bratton described this turn in his career as “like the Peace Corps but better paying.”

Bratton went on to become the CEO of Kroll Associates, a similar business, which has since been acquired by Altegrity. He later stepped down as Kroll’s CEO but remained as its senior advisor. He also serves as vice chair of the Advisory Council of the Homeland Security Department.

Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, Colored Opinions, Black Star News and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News and her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at ann@afrobeatradio.com. If you want to see Ann Garrison’s independent reporting continue, please contribute on her website at anngarrison.com.

by Mary Ratcliff

During a visit to the offices of the historic Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel, Malcolm Shabazz paused to contemplate a portrait of his grandfather, Malcolm X. – Photo: LA Sentinel

Like his grandfather’s, the smile of young Malcolm Shabazz not only lit up the room but set a fire of fervent hope in your heart and soul. When he met you, he gave you his undivided attention, no matter how much or how little you had to say, and made you feel part of the legacy he bore proudly but painfully as the first male heir of the great El Hajj Malik El Shabazz.

Malcolm Shabazz, 28, died tragically in Mexico on Thursday. His funeral will be held in Oakland later this coming week. The Bay Area has much love for young Malcolm, as this is where he began to become an outstanding speaker, known as El Hajj Malcolm El Shabazz for his stirring accounts of his pilgrimage to Mecca. The Bay View was honored to sponsor him on speaking tours arranged by Bay View associate editor and the People’s Minister of Information JR, his close comrade over the past several years.

Young Malcolm not only attended the African Migrants Conference in Tripoli, Libya, in January 2011 with Minister of Information JR with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s delegation but was invited to address a plenary session. He was the only speaker besides Qaddafi who was given a standing ovation. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

That mission should not have led to his death, and I can’t help but wonder whether the fear of a “Black messiah” by the powers that be in the U.S., which put young Malcolm, like his grandfather, in their cross hairs, could have been involved. The five goals of Cointelpro issued March 4, 1968, by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, labeled “COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM: BLACK NATIONALIST – HATE GROUPS, RACIAL INTELLIGENCE,” are:

“1. Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength …

“2. Prevent the RISE OF A ‘MESSIAH’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah;’ he is the martyr of the movement today. …

“3. Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups. …

“4. Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them …

“5. A final goal should be to prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth. …”

Could young Malcolm now be a “martyr of the movement”? With Assata Shakur placed on the Most Wanted Terrorists list and the doubling to $2 million of the bounty on her head, this has been a tough week for Black revolutionaries.

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi warmly welcomed Malcolm to the conference. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

“‘I sincerely appreciate the care and concern of the People over my well-being after Press TV’s report of the most recent events which have transpired regarding the FBI’s harassment of me.’ …

“‘The agents of this division – and in collaboration with others – have visited several residences of which I was known by them to frequent.’

Malcolm, JR and Ra’shida met many African leaders at the conference, including Samia Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a member of Parliament, the first woman to chair a major political party and one of the most popular African women leaders. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

“‘These are the homes of long-time friends and very close supporters. Yet, when federal agents begin knocking on someone’s door on multiple occasions to snoop and ask questions, whether one is guilty of an offense or not, it’s enough to coerce people into distancing themselves from you.’

“‘This cheap tactic employed by the FBI is a means of agitation and harassment. They seek to neutralize my networking abilities.

“‘They have visited locations in California, Chicago, Miami and most aggressively in New York.’ …

“‘It wasn’t even until my mother informed me that they had been contacting her that I truly became agitated.’

On Hajj in Mecca, the grandson of Malcolm X was welcomed with open arms and given a tour of the city and access to official people and places. Here he is with Sheikh Faisal Ghazawi, Imam of the Mosque Haramain (center). The Holy Kabaa in Makkah (Mecca) is in the background.

“‘They expressed concern’ in his ‘international travels.’

“‘I have lived and studied in Damascus, Syria, for over a year, and now the U.S. is instigating conflict within the very same region.’

“‘I went on ex-Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney’s delegation along with Dr. Randy Short to Libya and met with Leader Muammar Qaddafi one week prior to NATO intervention, and I was most recently getting ready to travel to Tehran, Iran, to be a participant of the International Fajr Film Festival and give a lecture addressing the issues of Hollywood and violence.

Yuri Kochiyama, a renowned leader in the Asian and other communities of color in the Bay Area, had been a strong supporter of Malcolm X in Harlem. She submitted a letter from his grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, to the Bay View for publication in the mid-2000s. That letter, written from prison, sparked a correspondence between Malcolm and JR Valrey, leading eventually to this meeting of the three of them in November of 2010.

Though Cointelpro no longer officially exists, heavy investment of taxpayer resources into preventing the rise of a Black Messiah continues. Did government agents know young Malcolm was in Mexico? You decide.

It’s your decision too whether to swallow all the garbage in the mainstream media right now in a Cointelpro-style effort to discredit and demonize Malcolm. Yes, he had a lot of trouble with “the law” in his short life, but that does not define him as a man and that’s not why the FBI watched and harassed him.

“Did CIA kill Malcolm X’s grandson?“ asks Dr. Kevin Barrett today on Press TV. “Make no mistake,” he writes, “Malcolm Shabazz, like his grandfather, posed a serious, ‘actionable’ long-term threat to the powers-that-be.

M1 of the rap group dead prez, Hajj Malcolm Shabazz, film director Samm Styles, and the host, Minister of Information JR, spoke on a panel at the People’s Human Rights and Hip Hop Film Fest in San Francisco on Feb. 12, 2011. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

“I do not know whether the usual suspects – the ‘asteroids’ who assassinate the enemies of empire on behalf of the CIA, the World Bank and related entities, according to author John Perkins – killed Malcolm Shabazz. But I am 100 percent certain that they were thinking about it. …

Hajj Malcolm Shabazz, a loving father, spoke often to school children. Here he is at Masjid Al-Islam School in Washington, D.C.

“And now, Malcolm Shabazz – who was forging an updated version of the same anti-empire alliance – is murdered in Mexico. Coincidence? Maybe. …

“Whatever happened to Malcolm Shabazz, it is abundantly obvious that the intelligence agency assets infiltrating US mainstream media are conducting a scripted posthumous character assassination designed to obscure Malcolm’s role as an up-and-coming activist and long-term threat to the Empire.”

JR interviews Malcolm for the Block Report on KPFA Dec. 3, 2011.

“The imperial propagandists at the New York Times, Huffington Post and similar outlets are working overtime smearing Malcolm Shabazz. This apparently pre-orchestrated smear smells like an intelligence operation. It is strong circumstantial evidence that Malcolm Shabazz was yet another political assassination victim.

Less than a month after the police murder of 19-year-old Kenneth Harding in July 2011 a block from the Bay View office, JR and Malcolm traveled to visit and interview his mother, Denika Chatman, and brother, Ondrell Harding, in Seattle. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

The Shabazz family issued this official statement today: “We are deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved El Hajj Malcolm El Shabazz. To all who knew him, he offered kindness, encouragement and hope for a better tomorrow. Although his bright light and boundless potential are gone from this life, we are grateful that he now rests in peace in the arms of his grandparents and the safety of God. We will miss him.

On his Twitter page, Malcolm posted this photo replicating a famous picture of his grandfather. He described himself there as “Grandson, name-sake and first male heir of the greatest revolutionary leader of the 20th century.”

My own comfort comes from imagining the meeting between Malcolm and his grandfather.

Bay View editor Mary Ratcliff can be reached at editor@sfbayview.com or (415) 671-0789.

Read the words of Malcolm Shabazz

So that you may come to know him for yourself, following are a few of the stories we’ve posted at SFBayView.com by and about Hajj Malcolm El Shabazz:

This portrait of a thoughtful Malcolm Shabazz was taken at the potluck in Oakland to kick off Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney’s Bike4Peace cross-country bicycle ride, on July 23, 2010. – Photo: Kamau Amen-Ra

Live from Saudi Arabia: an interview with El Hajj Malcolm Shabazz

Mumia, the media and more: Davey D, MOI JR and Malcolm Shabazz on Hard Knock Radio

Malcolm Shabazz on the three chapters missing from ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’

The legacy of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz lives! an interview wit’ his grandson Malcolm Shabazz In this extremely revealing interview, Malcolm addresses such difficult topics as the fire that killed his grandmother, his time in prison and who killed his grandfather.

The people of Haiti stand for justice, but they are against the misuse of the justice system for political persecution. That is why they have come out by the thousands in support of former President Aristide.

Haitians’ love is boundless for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, their first democratically elected president and the only president they ever had who cares about his people. Knowing they deserve good leadership, they constantly resist the U.S./U.N. occupation and the sweatshop regime of Martelly. This banner reads “Persecuting him is persecuting us” at the top and at the bottom, “The more you persecute him, the more we love him.”

Members of Haiti’s most popular political party, Lavalas, as well as international supporters, view this “invitation” as the latest effort in what has been an ongoing assault against Haiti’s grassroots democratic movement and its principal leader. The Haiti Action Committee includes itself amongst those who denounce unequivocally these attacks.

Since his return two years ago from forced exile, President Aristide has reopened the University of the Aristide Foundation’s Medical School (UNIFA). On Sept. 26, 2011, the medical school once again opened its doors, seven years after the school’s forced closure by the U.S.-orchestrated coup in 2004. Currently over 200 future Haitian doctors are in attendance at the school. Now a nursing school has opened as well. This is just the beginning of an initiative to improve healthcare for all Haitians.

Ever since Aristide and his family returned to Haiti, he has been a particular target of Michel Martelly – who assumed the office of president in March 2011 as the result of fraudulent elections – and the occupation-installed Martelly administration. Two months ago, Aristide was summoned to court in two separate cases.

In Haiti, it is implicit that these ridiculous allegations are attempts to discredit President Aristide’s reputation and delegitimize his current work. The efforts to link him in any way to the assassination of Jean Dominique – a journalist beloved by the people for his unbending criticism of U.S. interference in Haiti – are equally outrageous.

Thousands of Haitians, undeterred by the rain, surround Aristide’s car, guarding him against any harm intended by authorities who “invited” him to court. Reportedly, he got out of the car and walked part of the way to share his love with the people he has heroically served all his life.

Yet, as ever, grassroots organizations throughout Haiti have a clear understanding of the repressive nature of the May 8 summons. This attack against Aristide represents an attack against the entire democratic grassroots movement.

Nevertheless, they accepted the “invitation” on their own terms and planned full-scale support of Aristide today, when thousands joined him at the Judicial Palace. Refusing to be intimidated, the organizations announced peaceful actions today, which they have chosen to mark the beginning of a sustained campaign for the people’s full participation in the running of their country.

The Haiti Action Committee stands in solidarity with the people of Haiti as they struggle to regain national sovereignty, rebuild their democracy and end the U.S./U.N. occupation.

Contact the Haiti Action Committee at www.haitisolidarity.net and on Facebook or by email at action.haiti@gmail.com.

Cynthia McKinney’s fundraiser tour for the SF Bay View was a huge success up and down California, hitting San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland and Santa Rosa. The tour, which was titled “Latin America, Africa, and Obama,” coincided with the release of McKinney’s second book, “Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom,” an autobiography about her years as a six-term Congress member from Georgia.

Cynthia McKinney, like Paul Robeson, has been largely silenced by the powers that be. Though she is invited to speak all over the world, here at home in the U.S., her truth telling is considered too dangerous and she is rarely quoted or heard in the mainstream media. With her California tour – and her upcoming East Coast tour – she is “breaking the blockade.” Here she is at Laney College on April 24. – Photo: Darnisha Wright

McKinney talked extensively about Obama’s domestic policies including his willingness to cut social security and his foreign policies, including the U.S. military’s use of drones and depleted uranium ammunition in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia and their effect on the population of these nations.

McKinney described the work of the late great Muammar Qaddafi, who was assassinated by U.S. and NATO backed forces in 2011, and the revolutionary government he created, called the Libyan Jamahariya. Most people listening in the audience had heard very little about the accomplishments of the bloodless Libyan revolution in 1969 that transformed Africa’s poorest occupants and by 2011 made them the richest on the continent per capita due to his nationalization of the nation’s oil wealth.

Due to Cynthia McKinney being harassed and searched at the Atlanta airport for 45 minutes, she was over an hour late to her speaking engagement at the WorldBeat Cultural Center in San Diego to kick off the tour. About 40-50 people waited to hear her talk about politics and to get both of her books. Her first book, “The Illegal War in Libya,” released last fall, sold out after only the second event. Shout out to Makeda of the WorldBeat and Mario of One Hundred Strong for helping to organize this event.

On Cynthia’s second and third stops, in Ingelwood and Los Angeles, she cordially facilitated political discussions, opening up for questions after about 20 minutes of speaking. She talked about knowing how to speak French, but acknowleged that today, Spanish is the language of the revolution, alluding to the recent revolutionary actions of Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and other countries.

A high point of Cynthia McKinney’s California tour came on April 23 at the Kaos Network on Leimert Boulevard in Los Angeles when Kathleen Cleaver came with the Freeman brothers, Ronald and Elder. They are standing on either side of Kathleen, Elder Freeman between Kathleen and Cynthia. Kathleen had come to California to raise money for Elder Freeman to travel to Cuba for cancer treatment, and her mission was accomplished. With the Panthers and KPFK broadcaster Dedan Kimathi, along with Minister of Information JR, host and organizer of the tour, it was a gathering of veterans of the struggle. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

At Chuco’s Justice Center in Inglewood, Black Panther legends the Freeman Brothers and Kathleen Cleaver were in the audience supporting the freedom fighting peace activist. At Ben Caldwell’s Kaos Network, a whole ‘nother group of activists came out to be informed. Shout out to Akua Agusi and Billion of the Ujima Council for helping to organize the LA wing of the tour.

While in Los Angeles, Cynthia was interviewed in the early morning on April 22 by Dominique DiPrima of Stevie Wonder’s KJLH radio station. She also was interviewed by Eric Mann of KPFK about her political views.

On her fourth stop, Oakland came out in numbers to Laney College to hear the words of Cynthia McKinney in an event organized by the Laney College Black Student Union. The hundred plus seat lecture hall was almost filled to capacity with people eager to listen to her presentation. Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff introduced Cynthia. Black Panthers Arthur League and Elder and Ronald Freeman were also in the house right alongside former San Quentin 6 member Johnny Spain, who participated in the discussion, adding stats about mass incarceration.

The last stop on the tour was Santa Rosa’s Arlene Francis Center, which was attended by approximately 70 people. McKinney was brought to Santa Rosa by the San Jose-based Mexican activist construction firm Rumec.

After Brianna Brooks, 20, told Cynthia McKinney prior to the event in the beautiful Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa that she is an inspiration, Cynthia invited her to take the mic and share a few words. Then Cynthia said that when she retires, Brianna should be ready to take her place. – Photo: Minister of Information JR

Ben Saari of KTWF radio was in the audience recording the audio and community TV broadcaster Elaine Holtz had a film crew there videotaping. A number of people from Sonoma helped organize this event including Carole Hyams, Peter Phillips and Morris Turner.

The “Latin America, Africa, Obama” tour was so successful that we are gearing up to bring it to the East Coast in late June or early July. Before the last event, Cynthia ran out of the 80 or so books that we brought on the tour, so we had to take the names of people who wanted to buy autographed copies to be shipped to them.

A day after the tour ended, Cynthia McKinney, our tireless voice of conscience, flew to Addis Ababa to address the treatment of Palestinians she observed on her several efforts to break the blockade by sea and land.

Cynthia McKinney is definitely a people’s champ in much the same way as El Hajj Malik Shabazz and MLK. She carries their torch in our time and is now leading an international struggle for Black and poor people’s human rights. She needs and deserves your support – just like the SF Bay View newspaper and Block Report Radio, who brought you this tour.

Block Report Radio interviews Cynthia McKinney

This interview, recorded just before the tour began, was broadcast on KPFA April 22 by Greg Bridges on his show, Transitions on Traditions.

Minister of Information JR Valrey of Block Report Radio: Our next guest is six time congresswoman and 2008 Green Party candidate and international peace activist, the one and only Honorable Cynthia McKinney. How are you?

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney: I’m doing great, JR. How are you doing?

M.O.I. JR: I’m good. I know we are only days away from your upcoming California tour, where you’ll be helping the San Francisco Bay View newspaper to raise money for its very much needed services to the community. But you will also be profiling your new book, “Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom.” Can you tell the people a little bit about what’s going on at this tour that will stop on April 24 at Laney College and will also go to the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa on April 25. Can you tell the people a little about what you’ll be talking about?

CM: Well, of course. I’ll be talking about the contents of both of the books. The Libya book came out while the bombing was still going on in Libya. I took a group of journalists there so that we could tell the truth about what was happening on the ground rather than what the propagandizing media were saying to the world about what was being done in Libya.

And then the other book, the newest book, is “Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom,” and that book basically is about my time in Congress and what I felt as I was doing certain things on certain issues. I talk a lot about the World Conference Against Racism and the difference that we were able to make because we cared enough to challenge the Bush administration’s decision to boycott the conference. And we contrasted that to what happened recently under the Obama administration, where a similar decision was made, but the members of Congress chose to go along with the Obama administration.

Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff, sponsor of Cynthia McKinney’s California tour, introduces her at Laney College. – Photo: Darnisha Wright

And I’ll be talking not only about my experiences but how I felt, because at the end of the day I have feelings just like everybody else. And so even though maybe I am a public person, I’m not supposed to have feelings? But my mother and my father’s hearts were broken by the treatment that I received. My mom still shudders at the idea of me going out in public and having to be viewed through the prism of the local news, because she knows they have a special interest and they are just not going to get it right; and I’ll end up looking like a caricature of myself.

I would like people to come out so they can experience me as a person – not as a product, not as a politician, not as a public persona – but me as an average American person just trying to make a difference.

M.O.I. JR: No doubt about that, and we support you. Can you tell the people a little about the content of your NATO book, or your book that deals with Libya?

CM: Well, we were fortunate enough to have people who contributed to the book who were there in Libya as the bombing took place, so we have that perspective. We also had the perspective of people who either lived in Libya or visited Libya prior to the bombing, and they gave that perspective. And then we had people who had an interest in Libya, had never been there but recognized the importance of this move by NATO, representing the White world supported by segments of people of color, so they had a particular view to present as well, and that was all there.

And I talk about what NATO represents. I just finished doing an interview where I was asked about apartheid in Israel, and it brings to mind the nature of global apartheid that continues to exist. I’ve had the opportunity to travel all over Europe, and I’ve seen Africans in Europe. Now the Europeans have gone into Africa and they have just completely decimated the continent to the best of their ability by stripping it of its resources, beginning with the stripping of its human resources during the transatlantic slave trade.

The numbers are staggering when you think about 100 million people being stripped out of a continent. It’s staggering to think about, to see this kind of destruction. So when Africans say, OK, you’ve made my home an intolerable place to live so I’m going to go to your home and live. Then that’s when you can see the apartheid inside the European countries. Through my travels, I have come to view this global apartheid.

Cynthia McKinney’s presentations and Q&As stimulated discussions after every event on her California tour. This is at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa. – Photo: Morris Turner

Actually, NATO is an anachronism now. It was created to thwart the drive of the Soviet Union into Western Europe, and now we see NATO all over the world. It’s in Afghanistan, it was in Libya; it’s gone from Western Europe to Africa and Asia. And why is that?

What are the policies that are being protected by this military onslaught against people of color? Clearly the interests that are being protected are not the interests of the people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and other interests. We have to look at this, and I kind of just stumbled on this as a result of my travels and the glaring inequalities – glaring apartheid-like status of people of color in European countries – and then the sort of obverse of that in the countries that are populated by people of color. So I’m just putting voice to that now.

M.O.I. JR: You recently traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, and attended the funeral of the late great freedom fighter and president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Can you tell the people a little about that experience as well as the counter-revolution that the United States has been trying to implement? You know, what’s going on on the ground in Caracas and in Venezuela?

CM: Well, first of all I have to state that I have always had a sense of solidarity with the peoples of Latin America, but that sense of solidarity was never really fully expressed. I have to say a word of thanks to my professor – I’m doing work on my Ph.D. and I am making great progress and great strides, and at the proper time I intend to invite everybody to come to my graduation – but it was one of my professors who suggested that I spread my wings and expand my territory beyond that which I knew. I do not speak Spanish; I do speak French, and so as a result of the similarities of the romance languages I am able to understand a bit of Spanish although I can’t speak it.

So I decided to get into some research on the U.S. policies, for example, with the Puerto Rican independence movement and the counter-intelligence program that operated against the Puerto Rican independentistas. From there my interest and my solidarity has grown such that I am now doing papers on Venezuela and Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela is in the midst of having elections after having lost its charismatic and transformative leader, so there is a lot of public sentiment that Nicolas Maduro will win the election. Now there’s some – I think a replay of what happened in Iran is under consideration – because of course the efforts of the United States government, which is against the values and the policies of the Bolivarian Revolution, are to thwart the victory of Nicholas Maduro and to taint the election process.

Those who stayed to talk with Cynthia after the event at Laney gathered for a group photo. – Photo: Darnisha Wright

M.O.I. JR: Right. How do you feel about what was going on in the streets? Did you see the people calling Hugo Chavez a dictator like you do on mainstream news in the United States, or did you see the people supporting the Bolivarian Revolution as I saw in a lot of the alternative press that was also covering his passing?

CM: Well, there were millions of people in the streets; in fact, there were so many people who were at the military academy where he lay in state that I couldn’t even get close. The second time I went – I just came back maybe a week and a half to two weeks ago – I was there with an international delegation and they had to close the place off. We originally were scheduled to go in the morning, and we couldn’t go because there was still a crush of people there.

I saw people wailing in the streets. People were crying, people were angry, people were defiant, people were accusatory. I saw a full range of emotions there. And the interesting thing is I really have to question a person who puts the values and interests of another country ahead of their own country. We see that happening here in the United States as well. Those of us who hold fast say that there ought to be primacy of the rule of law and the protection of the Bill of Rights ought to be extended to every U.S. citizen. Yet we have people who stake their loyalty out for other countries and then follow what’s determined to be the interests of the other countries.

That is what the case is in Venezuela: You have a very small population of people who look to the United States for leadership and guidance. If this means that their fellow Venezuelan citizen has to suffer, then so be it, because they tie their identity so closely to that of the United States that they forget about the interests of their fellow Venezuelans, and I find that peculiar and sad.

M.O.I. JR: For those who are just tuning in, you are listening to the voice of international peace activist Cynthia McKinney right here on the Block Report. Ms. Cynthia McKinney, can you compare Hugo Chavez – Venezuela under Hugo Chavez – to Qaddafi’s Libya? What exactly were the two leaders about and what were their countries about under their leadership, as well as what is the similarity in how they were attacked and removed? Some say that Hugo Chavez was assassinated; we know that Qaddafi definitely was assassinated. Can you talk a little bit about the attacks on them and their countries by the United States as well as the similarity of their accomplishments?

CM: That’s a very interesting point that you bring out. I remember it was in 2002 when the world learned about the kidnapping of Chavez because the Irish journalists just happened to be there and produced the documentary, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” What was it that Chavez was doing that was similar to what Qaddafi was doing?

Tim Killings, past president of the Laney College Black Student Union, and Niyesha, newly elected BSU president, organized the Laney College event on Cynthia McKinney’s tour. Organizer of the entire tour was Minister of Information JR, center. Job well done! – Photo: Darnisha Wright

And so Aristide began to turn the Haitian state around to invest in the Haitian people. When I was there, there was an effort to address the abysmal statistics on adult literacy, on sanitation – just the things we take for granted. I was there not too long ago where people were celebrating the fact that they had their first road coming into the town. For these kinds of investments, the administration in Haiti was derided. It accepted thousands of doctors from Cuba and petrodollars from Venezuela to build those roads and to uplift the people.

We saw what happened with President Aristide: He was kidnapped and kicked out. And the same thing happened to Hugo Chavez. Now what is it that he was doing? He was investing in the Venezuelan people for literacy. In fact, it’s so amazing: I just got back, as I said, and the people brag about reading. Can you imagine people bragging in the United States about reading? It doesn’t happen.

Hugo Chavez was investing in the Venezuelan people for literacy and the people brag about reading. Can you imagine people bragging in the United States about reading?

People brag in Venezuela about reading. They love their Constitution, they vote the Constitution, and so they love their Constitution. And they read and they read and they read because Hugo Chavez told them to read – to become a reading society. There are tens of thousands of Cuban doctors there. The petrodollars are being used to build schools and provide health care. Every neighborhood has a community garden where they have organic food. So their quality of life was being raised for the average Venezuelan in the Bolivarian Revolution.

And they read and they read and they read because Hugo Chavez told them to read – to become a reading society.

And now remember that Dick Cheney said that it was the American quality of life that justified the United States going across the world to 60 countries and declaring war on 60 countries. Dick Cheney said that this was a fight that was worth it because it was about the American quality of life. So is your quality of life better today than it was before the war on terror? For the average American citizen, it’s not.

The quality of life was measurably better for the average Venezuelan, the average Haitian, the average Libyan. The statistics from the United Nations indicate that Libya had the highest standard of living on the entire African continent. Not any longer. The subsidized education, subsidized housing, actually free education, free health care, subsidized food, free farming utensils if you wanted to start a farm.

Every so often there was a debt jubilee: People would charge up their credit cards buying Western things, and so there was a jubilee on that and people would be relieved of that debt. When was the last time that happened here?

The statistics from the United Nations indicate that Libya had the highest standard of living on the entire African continent.

You know, what we are experiencing, particularly in Latin America now, is a different vision for a different way of living and a different way of being, a different way of being human, and it’s about our humanity to each other, it’s how we treat each other, how we live with Mother Earth, how we live with each other. I met a U.S. citizen when I was there this last time in Venezuela, and she chose to leave the U.S. – a Black woman chose to leave the U.S. – and live in Venezuela. She’s been there for seven years now.

She said to me something that I still to this day reflect on and find very interesting. She said to me, “Cynthia technically I’m poor, but I have health care, I’m a teacher – I teach English and so I provide education for people – I have all the food that I need to eat, and so I question how they could call me poor.” And she went on to say that she found the materialism and the focus on consumption in the United States appalling and it just reached the point that she had to leave, so she left.

Every so often there was a debt jubilee: People would charge up their credit cards buying Western things, and so there was a jubilee on that and people would be relieved of that debt. When was the last time that happened here?

She said that there were seven other U.S. people who left with her. They were all men, and they all eventually returned to the United States. She said she recently reached out to all of them; to a person, every one of them is sorry that they returned to the U.S., because now they understand that quality of life doesn’t mean how many cars you have parked in your driveway and how big a driveway you have and how many houses you accumulate and what the square footage of your house is. That’s not an indication of your quality of life.

I think back to the King of Bhutan (a kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas), who said that the indicators for success for Bhutan were now going to be an indication of happiness: gross national happiness instead of gross national product. It’s all in the way we look at how we are supposed to relate to each other and to relate to earth. Mother Earth is not a commodity. Mother Earth is what sustains and gives us life.

M.O.I. JR: For those of you just tuning in, you are listening to the voice of the international peace activist Cynthia McKinney, who is on her way to the Bay Area. Wednesday, April 24, she will be speaking at the Laney College Forum at 6 p.m. And the next night, Thursday, April 25, she will be speaking at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa at 7 p.m. Ms. Cynthia McKinney, how can people stay in touch with you if they would like to hear more about what you’re talking about and they’re not able to make it to the tour?

CM: Well, I hope everyone will come to the tour. At least come see me, give me a hug, give me a high five, because it’s hard really to go on. There’s a friend of mine who says people don’t understand how hard it is to be Cynthia McKinney, so I’m going to unveil myself. I’m just going to be a regular ordinary person and I’d like to experience regular ordinary folks who want to talk about real things.

We can talk about politics, but let’s talk about life and love and living and happiness and wellness. Let’s talk about some other things. But if people can’t come, we can interact now, because I’m learning a little bit more about Facebook – at Cynthia McKinney official. If you go to the regular Cynthia McKinney page – there’s about three or four of them – don’t do that. Go to the one that says “official,” because that’s the one that I operate. I don’t even know who operates the other ones.

M.O.I. JR: As well as they can buy the two new books.

CM: Oh yes, of course; they can buy the books. Clarity Press makes them available online, or you can send someone to buy them in person and I’ll sign them.

Editor’s note: Both books were available on the tour until they sold out. The Bay View is special ordering more, which Cynthia will autograph. Email editor@sfbayivew.com or call (415) 671-0789 to order one or both books.

The People’s Minister of Information JR is associate editor of the Bay View, author of “Block Reportin’“ and filmmaker of “Operation Small Axe” and “Block Reportin’ 101,” available, along with many more interviews, at www.blockreportradio.com. He also hosts two weekly shows on KPFA 94.1 FM and kpfa.org: The Morning Mix every Wednesday, 8-9 a.m., and The Block Report every other Friday night-Saturday morning, midnight-2 a.m. He can be reached at blockreportradio@gmail.com.

The federal government is at it again! They have placed the legendary Black Panther leader, Assata Shakur, on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. Yes, you read correctly: terrorist. Shakur has been living in political exile in Cuba since 1984 after her escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in 1979, where she served six years.

Assata Shakur

“She provides anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message of revolution and terrorism,” said FBI special agent Aaron Ford.

The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”

From either of these definitions, I don’t see how Assata Shakur fits into this category. She has been out of the country physically for decades. The FBI uses special agent Aaron Ford in the press conference as a puppet to garner support for the extradition and capture of Shakur. In his remarks he makes no mention of violence that she has promoted against the U.S. since living in Cuba. Furthermore, she is still an American citizen who is entitled to free speech. If she wants to challenge the government’s domestic policies, so be it.

The federal government is at it again! They have placed the legendary Black Panther leader, Assata Shakur, on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. Yes, you read correctly: terrorist.

Black liberation messages promote the mental and physical liberation of Black people. In the FBI’s perspective, is anyone who promotes self-thought and the questioning of authority a terrorist? Well, perhaps just Black and Brown people!

What is the significance of this move? First, Shakur is the first woman to be placed on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list. Second, Cuba doesn’t have an extradition policy with the U.S. to remove American citizens back to America. Increasing the reward amount from $1 to $2 million, the FBI is baiting citizens and others to aid in the man-hunt.

“[The FBI] targeted anyone who supported the struggle for civil rights that they considered dangerous,” said Shakur’s long-time attorney, Lennox Hinds, in an interview on Democracy Now May 3, 2013.

The FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, was started by J. Edgar Hoover in 1956. Its sole purpose in dealing with Black Nationalist groups, which they labeled “hate groups” was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, members, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder. The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to this Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis so we will be in a position to promptly take advantage of all opportunities for counterintelligence and to inspire action in instances where circumstances warrant.”

It’s probably not coincidental that this placement on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist lists came on the 40th anniversary of the shoot-out with New Jersey State Troopers.

The FBI is claiming Shakur is anti-government. Here we are in America with Republican Party members in Congress touting on a daily basis that we need less government control and interference. What is the difference? I’ll let you be the judge.

Black liberation messages promote the mental and physical liberation of Black people. In the FBI’s perspective, is anyone who promotes self-thought and the questioning of authority a terrorist? Well, perhaps just Black and Brown people!

FBI COINTELPRO archived documents further state that “consideration should be given to techniques to preclude violence-prone or rabble-rouser leaders of hate groups from spreading their philosophy publically or through mass communication media.”

Therefore it is safe to say, the FBI purposely made up propaganda against Black movements in order to instill fear into the public about the organization and to discredit the organization to the public and within its own ranks. This wasn’t just for the Black Panther Party; SNCC and SCLC were also closely watched along with many other organizations working for liberation and civil rights.

In New Jersey, where Assata Shakur was arrested in 1973, this billboard appeared on the night of May 2, 2013, in time for the FBI’s announcement that Shakur is now one of America’s “most wanted terrorists.”

“Now, that is the forensic evidence. There is not one scintilla of evidence placing a gun in her hand. No arsenic residue was found on her clothing or on her hands. So, the allegation by the state police that she took an officer’s gun and shot him, executed him in cold blood, is not only false, but it is designed to inflame.”

Clearly the New Jersey State Police and the FBI feel that it is okay to change history and forensic evidence to fit their stories.

According to the FBI press release, “Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One officer was wounded, and his partner – Trooper Foerster – was shot and killed at point-blank range.”

“Really, it seems to me that this act incorporates or reflects the very logic of terrorism,” said Angela Davis on Democracy Now. “I can’t help but think that it’s designed to frighten people who are involved in struggles today.”

Davis couldn’t have said it more clearly. Today’s movements, domestic and worldwide, that American citizens support, such as Occupy, movements against the re-occurring police brutality against Black people, economic injustice etc., have drawn frighteningly harsh government reaction.

Davis continued, “Well, see, there’s always this slippage between what should be protected free speech – that is to say, the advocacy of revolution, the advocacy of radical change – and what the FBI represents as terrorism. You know, certainly, Assata continues to advocate radical transformation of this country, as many of us do.”

All American citizens’ constitutional rights are in jeopardy if we believe and accept the FBI’s assertion that for speaking out about the U.S. government Assata Shakur is a terrorist.

“I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984,” writes Shakur on her website, www.assatashakur.org. “I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one.”

All American citizens’ constitutional rights are in jeopardy if we believe and accept the FBI’s assertion that for speaking out about the U.S. government Assata Shakur is a terrorist.

Laura Savage is a graduating senior in journalism at San Francisco State University and is interning with the SF Bay View this semester. She can be reached at lsavage26@gmail.com.

“Eyes of the Rainbow,” directed by Gloria Rolando, is the classic film on the life of Assata Shakur. To comply with Assata’s wishes expressed below and to make this beautiful film easily available, we are posting it here in six parts.

“Like most poor people in the United States, I have no voice. The Black press and the progressive media, as well as Black civil rights organizations, have historically played an essential role in the struggle for social justice. We should continue and expand that tradition. We should create media outlets that help to educate our people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. I am only one woman. I own no TV stations or radio stations or newspapers. But I believe that people need to be educated as to what is going on and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in America. All I have are my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media and those of you who believe in truth and freedom to publish my story.” – Assata Shakur, www.assatashakur.org

by Joshua Arce

Local hiring and contracting advocates attending one of many San Francisco School Board meetings – this one on Feb. 12, 2013 – are renowned filmmaker Kevin Epps (“Straight Outta Hunters Point 1 and 2”) and Mike Brown of Inner City Youth holding a sign that calls for “Jobs for Black contractors and youth.” – Photo: Ken Johnson

That is when School Board Commissioners Norman Yee and Sandra Lee Fewer began what may turn out to be a historic effort to reform the district’s local hiring and contracting policies. Last week, school officials introduced a draft policy based on San Francisco’s successful local hiring ordinance and local business enterprise policy that comes close to delivering on many months of hard work by the School Board and a dynamic coalition of leaders and organizations. A final vote is expected in June.

Last fall, Yee and Fewer began a series of conversations with community advocates, organized labor representatives, local contractors and San Francisco city officials to explore the potential for a new policy modeled on the landmark San Francisco Local Hire Ordinance crafted by Supervisor John Avalos and successfully implemented by Mayor Ed Lee. Yee and Fewer worked with civil rights non-profits Chinese for Affirmative Action and Brightline Defense Project, who jointly published the groundbreaking 2010 “Failure of Good Faith” local hiring report, to develop a resolution intended to deliver on this community input, entitled “Creating an Equitable Pathway to Community Contracting and Hiring.”

Last week, school officials introduced a draft policy based on San Francisco’s successful local hiring ordinance and local business enterprise policy that comes close to delivering on many months of hard work by the School Board and a dynamic coalition of leaders and organizations.

Little did Commissioner Fewer know that, as Commissioner Norman Yee became San Francisco Supervisor Norman Yee in the November 2012 election, she would inherit a torch of leadership that she has carried like an Olympic marathon runner, building support among her School Board colleagues and an increasingly broad cross-section of the public along the way.

Robert Woods of ABU and the Black Human Rights Leadership Council testifies passionately at the Jan. 29, 2013, School Board meeting as beloved community advocate Cati Okorie, who knows the tragic consequences of locking Black youth out of the economy, waits her turn. – Video frame: SFGovTV

Student and parent organizers Coleman Advocates for Youth and Children polled their members and found access to good-paying construction jobs on school district construction is a priority for public school families. Community contractors organized by Liberty Builders as the Rising Sun coalition engaged the school district to call for direct access to build schools in the City’s southeast sector. Building trade unions such as the Laborers, Carpenters and Operating Engineers stood in support of community partnerships they have developed over the past several years working to implement the City’s local hiring law. Contractors organized among members of the Latino Democratic Club pushed for transparency in reporting how school construction contracts are awarded.

Discussions at School Board hearings over the past several months have often been intense. In January, a young man told of his struggles to support his family as the economy continues to rebound and expressed grief in losing his 20-year-old son to violence. Meetings between the Rising Sun coalition and school officials became heated and spilled over into very public exchanges. School personnel insisted on “carve-outs” for small projects for which they argued local hiring and contracting requirements need not apply. The district’s chief counsel even fumbled on the legality of local hiring, stonewalling School Board members for months until finally admitting to the San Francisco Chronicle in February that he was mistaken and agreeing that mandatory local hiring is a legally sound option for School Board consideration.

San Francisco School Board Commissioner Sandra Fewer has been carrying the local hiring and contracting torch lit by Norman Yee.

During this span Commissioner Fewer was joined by many of her colleagues in expressing support for reform. The newest member of the School Board, Commissioner Matt Haney, came aboard as a co-sponsor of the “Creating Equitable Pathways” resolution, stating his desire for a solution that works for all local hiring and contracting stakeholders, accompanied by increased coordination with the City and County of San Francisco’s policies.

San Francisco School Board Commissioner Sandra Fewer has been carrying the local hiring and contracting torch lit by Norman Yee, now a member of the Board of Supervisors. Successful implementation of a strong policy that really puts excluded communities to work on school construction will make her forever a hero to disadvantaged San Franciscans.

Perhaps the most unsung hero during deliberations that have at last produced a draft policy for public review and community comment, however, is School Superintendent Richard Carranza. The son of a sheet metal worker who has committed himself to both college and career options for district students, Superintendent Carranza has stood firm in guiding his staff through a fact-driven and analysis-intensive process of crafting new district policies.

“We have come a long way toward a local contracting and local hire policy,” said Liberty Builders’ Dr. Willie Ratcliff, who previously reached impasse with the superintendent during discussions with the Rising Sun coalition. “I congratulate Superintendent Carranza for his stand against even some of his staff who wanted no change at all. And I want to thank the School Board commissioners for listening to our demands to stop the discriminatory lockout of people of color and other residents of San Francisco from jobs and contracts being given to others who pay no taxes in San Francisco.”

“I have been doing this work for decades and have rarely seen public officials turn things around as quickly as the superintendent and School Board commissioners have done,” said Dr. Espanola Jackson, the iconic Bayview Hunters Point activist and co-chair of the Black Human Rights Leadership Council of San Francisco, who recently celebrated her 80th birthday.

“We have come a long way toward a local contracting and local hire policy,” said Liberty Builders’ Dr. Willie Ratcliff, who previously reached impasse with the superintendent during discussions with the Rising Sun coalition.

The “Creating Equitable Pathways” resolution was unanimously passed by the School Board in March, complete with an amendment to replicate to the fullest extent possible the provisions of the San Francisco Local Hiring Policy. An April 9 letter calling for School District adoption of the San Francisco Local Hire Ordinance signed by 15 community-based organizations that supported Supervisor Avalos’ successful 2010 effort to require local jobs for local communities preceded the April 23 unveiling of a long-awaited draft local hiring and local contracting policy for school district construction.

Dr. Willie Ratcliff of Liberty Builders and Rising Sun Developers – he is also the publisher of the Bay View – testifies on Jan. 29, as an unemployed construction worker known as Focuz stands behind him holding a sign that reads, “Black contractors for Black jobs.” – Video frame: SFGovTV

There are also serious flaws with the draft policy. It continues to suffer from a $2 million “carve out” that exempts small projects where local workers and contractors can benefit the most – community advocates have called for the new policy and project labor agreement to apply to all projects big and small.

“The $2 million carved out by school personnel cuts the heart out of the program,” declares Dr. Ratcliff. “No local hiring and no local contracting for smaller contracts says to us that they’re for big contractors only, and you are not invited to apply. We need to start meeting again on this ‘$2 million set aside for the big boys’ and to create an equitable pathway for all local hiring and contracting stakeholders. As the owner of Liberty Builders general contractor and the general partner in Rising Sun Developers LP, I am requesting that we continue to meet and make this the best law in the country with support of all stakeholders. ‘San Francisco knows how,’ they say; so let’s do what is good for all.”

The draft also falls short in targeting opportunities for past and future public school graduates who are most hungry for these good-paying jobs that they and their families fund with their tax dollars. The sanctions proposed for local hiring non-compliance are vague and weak to the point of likely being ineffective.

ABU, a major player in the creation of San Francisco’s local hiring ordinance, shut down demolition work on the old Willie Brown Academy Aug. 21, 2012, when their appeals to the school district for local hiring were ignored. The Bayview Hunters Point community is counting on building the new middle school slated to replace it. – Photo: ABU

The long journey to an equitable pathway for community workers and contractors at San Francisco Unified has seen great progress over the past year; and the same policy makers, community members, labor leaders and community contractors that brought us this far appear poised to carry a torch now held by many across the line between longstanding hope and a truly historic reality.

Joshua Arce, executive director of the civil right non-profit Brightline Defense Project, can be reached at josh@brightlinedefense.org. Brightline is a non-profit civil rights advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and empowering communities. Brightline’s efforts have included campaigns to shut down dirty fossil fuel power plants in Southeast San Francisco, promote local renewable energy, and develop local hiring policies and community workforce agreements to increase blue-collar and green-collar employment opportunities for residents of economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and environmental justice communities. Learn more at www.brightlinedefense.org.

U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke at a National Postal Forum in San Francisco on March 18, prompting picketing by rank and file postal employees and their supporters. Protestors opposed Donahoe’s support for post office closures and layoffs of USPS (U.S. Postal Service) workers.

Post office employees and their supporters picketed U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe when he spoke at a National Postal Forum in San Francisco on March 18. They oppose his collaboration with the post office closures and layoffs that are part of a scheme to privatize the U.S. Postal Service

Protestor Anna Villalobos of Oakland told me that Donahoe is “like a puppet. He has to do what the Board of Governors says.” Villalobos noted that the USPS Board of Governors are all pro-privatization. Donahoe, she said, “came up the ranks but he’s under-qualified and way over his head. He has aged drastically in the past few years. Physically he looks horrible.”

Advocates for continuing six-day postal service, as opposed to cutbacks on Saturday service, argue that the alleged fiscal crisis facing the postal service is a bogus invention of corporate interests salivating over the prospect of privatization-related profiteering, according to “Corporatizing the Post Office” by Russell Mokhiber. As the excellent site, www.savethepostoffice.com, reported recently on just one of those businesses, “Pitney Bowes stands to make millions if not billions off of the privatization of the mail processing system.”

An article by Jack A. Smith describes a 2006 postal “reform” law which requires pre-funding of 75 years’ worth of future USPS retiree health benefits. No other federal agency or private enterprise is forced to pre-fund similar benefits. This economic requirement is exacerbated by the stipulation that the Postal Service meet this goal in 10 years.

Speaking before local news cameras at the March 18 demonstration, San Francisco Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson noted that in a time of massive unemployment, “to propose layoffs is unconscionable … We need jobs.” Paulson argued that what Donahoe “is proposing is the exact opposite” of what workers need.

As a protestor held a sign to mostly supportive passing cars reading, “Mr. Donahoe, follow the Pope’s example and step down,” Chuck Locke of the American Postal Workers Union said, “We stand for workers, we stand for family,” and criticized Donahoe for supporting cutbacks while speaking at a seminar which cost around $500,000.

Veteran left-wing activist Richard Becker stressed the need to prioritize job programs in a time of mass unemployment. Becker pointed out that alleged USPS budget shortfalls pale in comparison to money spent on the Iraq war, which cost $3 trillion. Becker argued that the rollbacks to postal service and selling of post offices were “for the benefit of the superrich. That’s what privatization is about.”

Protestors opposed Donahoe’s support for post office closures and layoffs of USPS (U.S. Postal Service) workers.

Activist Margot Smith took the microphone and said, “The post office is not bankrupt. They’re being starved so they can be privatized. It doesn’t make financial sense.” She noted that rural post offices under threat of closure are “the only way people have contact with the outside world in some of our remote areas.”

Indeed, broadband internet does not reach 50 percent of rural residents and 35 percent of all Americans.

Perhaps the final word on the allegedly dire financial challenges facing the USPS comes from ace agitator Jim Hightower, who in his newsletter commented on the cries about “unprofitability”: “So what? When has the Pentagon ever made a profit? Neither has the FBI, Centers for Disease Control, FDA, State Department, FEMA, Park Service etc. Producing a profit is not the purpose of government – its purpose is service.”

The Postal Service is the largest employer in the U.S. after Walmart and has the country’s largest unionized workforce. The USPS is also one of the leading employers of minorities and women. As of 2010, minorities comprised 39 percent and women comprised 40 percent of the workforce. African-Americans made up 21 percent of the USPS workforce, with 8 percent Latino and 8 percent Asian-American/Pacific Islander.

Dave Welsh, retired letter carrier and member of the San Francisco Labor Council, says the now-legendary 1970 wildcat postal strike “showed the power of the working class to shut something down.” About the challenge today, he adds: “If postal workers and their customers unite, we can change all kinds of things. People think the rollbacks are inevitable. They’re not inevitable. If we unite, we can stop them.”

One attendee I chatted with was recently retired postal worker Joe McHale, who has been following legislation regarding the Postal Service for years. He told me that at the policy-making level, reducing service to five days has been “in the mix for two or three years” but that postal workers didn’t expect it to come up so quickly. McHale said, “The U.S. Postmaster’s legal staff seems to think they can do whatever they want,” and described the Saturday closing campaign as very “top down.”

“It’s as if they said, ‘We don’t care if we’re exactly right; we’re going to do what we want. Now you do what you have to do.” McHale said the National Day of Action was a rank and file “answer in the PR arena.”

National Association of Letter Carriers California State President John Beaumont told me that any progressive legislation in support of postal workers was inevitably blocked by privatization fans in Congress, especially House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Beaumont answered charges that competition from internet commerce would inevitably drive the USPS out of business by pointing out that e-commerce had actually helped the post office by providing more such orders, with parcel deliveries up 20 percent since last year. He said that though in the short term closing Saturday service could save around $2 billion, in the long run this cut would inevitably cost the USPS big bucks through lost service.

The Postal Service is the largest employer in the U.S. after Walmart and has the country’s largest unionized workforce. The USPS is also one of the leading employers of minorities and women.

Also milling around the upbeat crowd was retired letter carrier and full-time activist Dave Welsh. I spoke with Welsh on a bench alongside several still-working letter carriers. Welsh began by singing the praises of the CPWU, a rank and file outfit that does direct action and solidarity work outside the legislative arena and whose website states, “They say cut back. We say strike back.”

Welsh noted, “With a lot of the private pension plans, a company goes out of business and suddenly there’s no pension for the worker. Now they want to do the same thing with the public sector.” Welsh said, “I think we can build a strong movement once we unite public and private sector workers and our communities.”

Welsh argued that the now-legendary 1970 wildcat postal strike “showed the power of the working class to shut something down.” He described the current situation as involving a “tremendous power we have untapped … If postal workers and their customers unite, we can change all kinds of things. People think the rollbacks are inevitable. They’re not inevitable. If we unite, we can stop them.”

Stay in touch with legislative and grassroots solidarity campaigns on behalf of postal workers at www.savethepostoffice.com and www.cpwunited.com/.

San Francisco writer Ben Terrall can be reached at bterrall@gmail.com.

by UFree Network Media centre

Israel is considered by both international human rights organizations and media polls as one of the worst countries regarding human rights abuses. Amnesty International and Middle East Monitor issued various reports in which they expressed concerns about the Israeli’s practices.

Palestinians mourn the death of Arafat Jaradat, 30, tortured to death in an Israeli prison over only six days, Feb. 18-23, 2013. He leaves behind a pregnant widow and two children. The Israeli Prison Service claimed he died of a heart attack, but the autopsy showed he was in excellent cardiovascular health. He had sustained, however, a total of six broken bones in his spine, arms and legs. Since 1967, 72 Palestinians have been tortured to death and 53 have died due to medical neglect. When Jaradat died, 3,000 prisoners refused meals and impassioned protests erupted across the West Bank. – Photo: AFP

Since the occupation of Palestine in 1948, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned. From 1967 onwards, over 700,000 Palestinians – 20 percent of the population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip – have been detained. This number represents approximately 40 percent of the total male Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories.

International law sets the foundation for humane and fair treatment of prisoners, assuring that prisoners are not humiliated or tortured. Several countries, including Israel, deny these laws and regulations and practice different forms of humiliation and torture.

Israel is considered by both international human rights organizations and media polls as one of the worst countries regarding human rights abuses.

Palestinian prisoners and detainees are exposed to unfair trials, administrative detention, solitary confinement and are deprived of seeing their families. In addition, physical and psychological torture is exerted by Israeli security services. This report reveals the different methods used by Israeli forces to torture Palestinian political prisoners and is based on interviews with former Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Palestinian prisoners and detainees: a political issue

Detention and imprisonment became one of the tools for Israeli forces to oppress the Palestinian people calling for freedom and self-determination. This led to never-ending arrest campaigns that imprisoned hundreds of thousands Palestinians over the past seven decades. According to Addameer Detention Report, there were 4,812 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention centers in February 2013, including 178 administrative detainees, 12 women and 219 children – 31 under the age of 16.

UFree Network, established to defend the rights of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, mentioned in previous reports that there are no juvenile prisons for Palestinians. As a result, children often serve their sentences in the same cells as adults. More than 6,000 Palestinian children have been detained since 2000.

In February 2013 there were 219 Palestinian prisoners and detainees under 18, more than 10 percent of them being under the age of 16. A large number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees are accused of executing acts of terrorism or participating in such acts. However, those prisoners were calling for freedom and self-determination, but they did not select terrorism as the appropriate strategy.

Living conditions in prisons

In addition to the arbitrary practice of administrative detention, the restrictions on family visits and the practice of torture, Palestinian prisoners and detainees are denied access to basic health services. Israeli authorities refuse to provide the needed medications to prisoners suffering various health problems. On different occasions, the prison authorities were reported to give prisoners with chronic health disease solely pain killers.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a report issued by the Justice Ministry’s Public Defender’s Office revealed widespread overcrowding, inadequate access to medical care, poor hygienic conditions and excessive punitive measures in most Israeli facilities. In a recent report by the Independent Commission for Human Rights, the organization stated that they are “gravely concerned over the extreme deterioration of the Palestinian prisoners’ conditions in the Israeli prisons and detention centers.”

Torture in Israeli jails: methods used

Israel uses both physical and psychological torture methods while interrogating Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Recently, Arafat Shalsh Jaradat, 30, was murdered by Israeli intelligence – Mossad – while he was under extreme torture in Majdo prison facility. Jaradat died due to a heart attack because of heavy beating.

Palestinian prisoners and detainees are exposed to unfair trials, administrative detention, solitary confinement and are deprived of seeing their families. Physical and psychological torture is exerted by Israeli security services.

The torture methods and its duration vary from one detainee to another, but their overall goal is to intimidate prisoners and seek information that, in many cases, does not exist. This report reveals the main methods used by Israeli forces to torture Palestinian political prisoners.

The methods of torture were obtained by UFree through a series of interviews with former Palestinian prisoners and detainees. For the sake of clarity, the methods are divided into two categories: physical and psychological methods. However, many of the methods used are a combination of both physical and psychological torture.

Physical methods

1. Repeatedly beating or kicking the prisoner in different parts of the body – head, hands, face, abdomen, back, genitalia – using hands and/or metal tools. Sometimes the prisoners’ hands were being tied to the wall or to metal bars during the beatings. Former prisoners also reported to have been beaten deliberately on wounds and injuries caused earlier.
2. Tying the prisoners’ hands and/or legs together for a long period of time. Former prisoners reported to have been tied to the ceiling through their hands and legs. Others have been tied and left in the rain or cold weather for a long period of time.
3. Shaking prisoners violently. This is being done by investigators who change from time to time.
4. Forcing the prisoner to sit on a small chair – chairs for kindergarten kids – for long hours and sometimes days. This is associated with covering the head with a dirty plastic clothing bag. While the prisoner is in this position, he is exposed to very loud music and deprived of sleep.
5. Forcing the prisoner to remain standing for a long period of time.
6. Forcing the prisoner to sleep on the floor without mattress, even during wintertime. Former prisoners also reported they were forced to sleep while sitting on the floor.
7. Blindfolding a prisoner and dragging him or her on the stairs.
8. Spraying gas in the face of a prisoner and using electric shocks against them.
9. Pulling out the hair of the prisoner.
10. Pouring cold water on the prisoner while asleep.
11. Suffocating the prisoner by putting his head in the water and telling him that he will be drowned to death.

Psychological methods

1. Placing the prisoner on a chair with his head covered whilst meanwhile drops of water hit the head regularly.
2. Depriving the prisoner from food for a long period of time or providing the prisoner old or spoiled food.
3. Exposing the prisoner to loud music for a long period of time.
4. Using military and police dogs to frighten the prisoners. Investigators threaten prisoners the dogs will be unleashed and will attack the prisoner.
5. Threatening the prisoner will be sexually abused. Former prisoners reported being forced to be nearly naked.
6. Speaking negatively about the prisoner’s family members and/or threatening the prisoner that their family members will be caused harm. Some former prisoners reported being threatened that their wife would be sexually abused.
7. Depriving the prisoner from defecating or urinating for a long period of time. Other former prisoners reported being forced to defecate or urinate in front of prison inmates.
8. Telling the prisoner, wrongfully, that his family will visit him today. Other former prisoners were wrongfully informed that one or more family members passed away.
9. Spitting in the prisoner’s face.
10. Forcing the prisoner to verbally abuse his/her religious and national symbols.
11. Jailing some of the relatives of the prisoner and torturing them in front of the prisoner.

Legal background

The treatment of Palestinian political prisoners and detainees is a violation of Articles 32, 49 and 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. The use of torture methods is not in line with Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). According to Conor Foley of the University of Essex and the Human Rights Centre, torture is also prohibited in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the American Convention on Human Rights (1978) and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (1981).

Additionally, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1987) and the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture (1985) reject the use of torture methods.

Conclusions and recommendations

Palestinian prisoners and detainees face the arbitrary practice of administrative detention, restrictions on family visits, the denial of medical care and the practice of torture. This report reveals the most frequently mentioned methods of torture practiced by Israeli forces against Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

The documented methods were obtained through interviewing former Palestinian prisoners and detainees and violate international law. The international community must meet its legal obligation by putting pressure on Israel to abide by international law and the treaties cited above. UFree therefore recommends the following:

1. European Union-Israeli relations should be frozen until the latter abides by international law.
2. United Nations and its agencies must expose Israeli crimes and save the lives of Palestinian prisoners. Press releases and condemnations are not adequate any more; freezing Israeli participation in the U.N. meetings is a step in the right direction.
3. Palestinian Authority should freeze its security contacts with Israel and take action to stop its human rights violations.
4. Civil society organizations must engage in exposing the atrocities perpetrated by Israel. The BDS (boycott, divestment and sanction) campaign can be the cornerstone of any steps in this direction.

This report was documented and compiled by the Media Centre of the UFree Network, an independent European-wide human rights network set up to defend the rights of Palestinian political prisoners and detainees. They can be reached at www.ufree-p.net or www.ufreenetwork.eu or email secretary@ufree-p.net or media@ufree-p.net. The network can also be found on Facebook, followed on Twitter and subscribed to on YouTube. Join their email list at http://ymlp307.net/xgmmbeyhgmgh.

On April 18, Rumec was economically and morally destabilized with the deportation of Comrade Miguel Suarez to his native Mexico. With a successful construction business growing, assuming the leadership of the new labor movement and establishing a non-profit organization, Miguel Suarez was expelled from this country just moments before being exonerated of minor charges at traffic court in Santa Clara County.

Juan Ruiz and Miguel Suarez stand on either side of Malcolm Shabazz, grandson of Malcolm X.

Upon his arrival in the U.S. at the age of 18 about 12 years ago, Miguel had ambitions of becoming an independent business owner. From a labor element of the construction industry, Comrade Miguel grew to become a business owner who employed friends, family members and local community individuals. His alternative form of doing business allowed for his growth to acquire resources that were once unclaimed by his community. His acquisition of the historical building Cine Mexico, a community theater, is a symbol of his constant growth as a successful business owner.

Rumec was economically and morally destabilized with the deportation of Comrade Miguel Suarez to his native Mexico.

Maintaining a business was not the ultimate goal for Comrade Miguel. His observation of the necessity of organizing and educating our labor force was the purpose he felt obligated to fulfill. Miguel took leadership of the new labor movement – assigning people various duties, organizing the community and orienting everyone to the oppressive circumstances we face. His representation of our people was driven from a sense of duty and obligation to a fair and just cause. Leading and educating our people was Miguel’s daily task.

The Olmec “heads,” huge stone sculptures created earlier than 900 B.C. depicting kings with African features, demonstrate the presence of Africans in Central America long before Columbus “discovered” America. This one is in Veracruz, Mexico. The mixture of Black and Brown blood began long before Spanish conquistadores brought enslaved Africans to Mexico.

Miguel took leadership of the new labor movement – assigning people various duties, organizing the community and orienting everyone to the oppressive circumstances we face.

With an insatiable appetite to educate and assist our people, Comrade Miguel was in the process of establishing a non-profit organization. By providing architectural forums in Spanish and English, informing workers of current construction codes and educating construction laborers on their rights in the industry, Comrade Miguel was providing a service to our community. This very same service, which our government is not providing for the people, is the basis of the non-profit in the construction industry. His idea was to prepare our people and arm them with knowledge to fight the ignorance and poverty that floods our streets.

Yanga, a towering figure in Mexican history, is said to have been a member of the royal family of Gabon when he was stolen and carried to Mexico. After leading a rebellion, freeing himself and other Africans, he and his followers established a maroon colony near Veracruz around 1570. Many battles with Spanish troops ensued; finally Yanga’s terms were accepted in 1618, giving his people the right to their land and independence. This monument stands in Yanga in Veracruz, the first free town in the Americas.

Miguel Suarez was a threat to the system imposed on us. His vision went so far as changing the criminal mindset of people to a revolutionary business oriented way of thinking. This plan would ultimately fight the system that focuses on enslaving the mind of our men and women.

The absence of Miguel Suarez in the movement has been felt by all his comrades.

As a respected businessman, leader of a movement and father, Miguel Suarez will be missed in the community. The struggle will continue with his plan carried out by myself, Juan Ruiz, and comrades in the company. Now working with him internationally, Rumec will continue to carry on his legacy and educate our community on forming independent businesses. At the same time, we will fight ceaselessly to return Comrade Miguel Suarez to the community and family who need him.

Juan Ruiz of Rumec can be reached at rumec_buss@hotmail.com or (408) 380-9650.

African and African American women face an infant and maternal mortality crisis in America! Infants and maternal mortality rates in these communities are twice as high as the rates for white women in the U.S.

The African Women’s Development Fund USA (AWDF USA) has launched an awareness campaign, Saving Our Future, to educate community members and organize the leadership in hopes of changing the pattern. The campaign, funded by the California Endowment and the Kendra E. Burroughs Memorial Fund, grew from a series of community dialogues in 2012, where community partners from all over the Bay Area participated in panel discussions to make people aware.

It is now in its public phase, where information is being spread to the greater public as a means to lower African American and African infant mortality rates.

Saving Our Future is a two-year multi-media campaign and community dialogue that kicks off at the annual Soul Stroll, an event hosted by the African American Community Health Advisory Committee, on May 18 in San Mateo at Coyote Point Park.

AACHAC’s vision is “to eliminate health disparities through innovative models of health education and services across generations and diverse communities.”

“The AACHAC has been a partner in Saving Our Future for some time now as we’ve geared up the campaign,” says Nancy Deyo, senior advisor of communications for AWDF USA. “We felt that the Soul Stroll for the African American and African immigrant communities, among other communities, was the perfect venue for us to launch (this campaign) because it brings together 3,000 people in the Bay Area who have an objective about how to improve their overall health.”

There will be a booth at Soul Stroll to hand out information about how to have a healthy birth.

“This is really the first step that we’re taking in this new public awareness campaign to try and get the community to join up with us in combating this problem,” said Deyo.

Participants can sign a petition and pledge to join efforts and show they are committed and interested in spreading information to others and contacting public officials to show support for the campaign.

African and African American women face an infant and maternal mortality crisis in America! Infants and maternal mortality rates in these communities are twice as high as the rates for white women in the U.S.

In an April 17 press release for Saving Our Future, the AWDF USA wrote: “African-American and now second-generation African immigrant women of all backgrounds have the country’s highest infant mortality rate – more than two times the infant mortality rate of white women. And African-American women die in childbirth at four times the national average.”

A preview of the campaign’s 30-minute cable show previews Jackie Copeland-Carson, AWDF USA executive director, speaking with other health care and community leaders about Black infant and maternal mortality rates and what it’s going to take to change the cycle. The entire show will be aired on Channel 30 in early May for the Palo Alto area and later streamed on the Midpeninsula Community Media Center website for all to access. Currently, there are short video clips available on YouTube that individuals can watch.

“This is not just about coming in when a woman is pregnant, but supporting women’s health throughout their lives,” says Dr. Amani Nuru-Jeter, associate professor for the Community Health and Epidemiology School of Public Health at U.C. Berkeley.

Data shows that African immigrants come to the U.S. having the same infant and maternal mortality rates as white women, but their daughters – raised in America – have twice as high mortality rates over just one generation. More alarming is that Black women with high income and education levels still have worse birth rates than white women who haven’t completed high school.

Clearly there is more to the issue than access to health care and income.

“This is not just about coming in when a woman is pregnant, but supporting women’s health throughout their lives,” says Dr. Amani Nuru-Jeter, associate professor for the Community Health and Epidemiology School of Public Health at U.C. Berkeley.

“There is belief that racism, stress, lack of social support, environmental causes may be a factor,” said Deyo. “These are complex issues that need to be addressed, not just prenatally, but through a woman’s lifetime. It is an opportunity for the health care community to help women put together life plans, so by the time she becomes pregnant she already has a plan to have a healthy birth.”

According to Copeland-Carson in the video, the AWDF USA is sponsoring Saving Our Future to “bring our communities together to first become aware of this challenge and then take joint social action together and provide mutual support to do something about it.”

The show references a PBS special, “Unnatural Causes,” that focuses on the disproportionate infant mortality rates among Black women – regardless of economic status – and questions what the root causes might be.

“There is belief that racism, stress, lack of social support, environmental causes may be a factor,” said Deyo.

“AWDF USA was created 12 years ago by Africa’s first women’s foundation,” said Copeland-Carson. “It was created to address the challenges facing women on the African continent and women of African descent in the United States. Our vision, our mission is to become America’s trusted partner for giving to African and African American women’s issues.”

“We’re really trying to focus on the overall health of our community,” said Bernestine Benton, coordinator for the Prenatal Advantage Black Infant Health Project.

The Prenatal Advantage Black Infant Health Project (BIH) seeks “to reduce the infant mortality, low birth weight and Sudden Infant Death (SIDS) rates in the African-American community. Our goals also include increasing first trimester prenatal care visits by African-American women and fostering the continuity of health care services before and after pregnancy.”

According to Deyo, goals of the campaign include 1) greater public awareness about the problem, 2) improvement in the Black infant and maternal mortality rates, 3) participation of community and public leadership – community organizations, elected officials, public health officials – and support for what needs to be done to change the birth outcomes.

Laura Savage is a graduating senior in journalism at San Francisco State University and is interning with the SF Bay View this semester. She can be reached at lsavage26@gmail.com. 

Dominated by Blacks at the player level, sports is a $500 billion a year industry. Aside from players’ salaries during their brief careers, however, what is the Black community’s share?

“We must leverage our athletic success for economic development in our community,” says Magic Johnson. Everett L. Glenn, president of the National Sports Authority, a division of ESP Education & Leadership Institute, is applying that principle to construction of the 49ers’ new stadium under construction in Santa Clara.

As of April 18, 2013, when this photo was taken, the first year of construction of the new 49ers’ stadium in Santa Clara has involved no Black or other contractors of color, even though the 49ers’ players roster is nearly 70 percent Black. – Photo: Gary Reyes, Bay Area News Group

As a result, communities of color have been precluded from the enormous financial benefit of participating in this project and the pride associated with contributing to building an edifice for a home team that has much love and support in the communities they represent.

“We are challenging the lack of minority participation on the $1.2 billion new Santa Clara stadium,” says Glenn, who points out that “the 49ers’ roster is nearly 70 percent Black.”

“The challenge is supported by civil rights and economic development organizations representing over 15 million members of the minority community, including the National Urban League, National Action Network, National Association of Minority Contractors, National Hispanic Contractors Association and the U.S. Black Chamber.

“The initial response to our inquiry about minority participation on the project by Robert Rayborn of Turner Construction, co-project director, was that minority participation was ‘not on our radar.’ When pressed by media outlets following the story, Turner and city officials claimed that under Proposition 209, an anti-affirmative-action law passed by California voters in 1996, they were required to be ‘color blind’ when they selected the firms that won roughly 60 public subcontracts, ranging from plumbing to electrical work to steel fabrication, worth more than $700 million,” Glenn explained. The new stadium is partially funded by tax dollars.

Communities of color have been precluded from the enormous financial benefit of participating in this project and the pride associated with contributing to building an edifice for a home team that has much love and support in the communities they represent.

“Dave Hatheway, a consultant representing the city on the project, said project officials were worried about running afoul of Proposition 209’s ‘color blind’ policy by reaching out to minority-owned contractors separately, creating a quota for them or even tracking the race of the owners that won contracts. These same officials claim that Proposition 209 makes illegal any outreach to minority groups, which it doesn’t.

“Moreover, we have written documentation that the parties affirmatively reached out to majority contractors but did not reach out to minority contractors even though they have fully developed databases of minority contractors based on working with minority contractors on projects funded by federal dollars that include minority participation goals,” Glenn declared.

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Executive Director Kimberly Thomas Rapp tells NBC News why they and 20 mostly Black national and local organizations are challenging the exclusion of contractors of color from construction of the Santa Clara 49ers’ stadium. – Video frame: NBC News

“Compare that to the effort made by the developers of the Giants-Jets stadium in New Jersey, financed with private dollars, which included a robust effort to involve all contactors and resulted in significant minority contractor participation.”

Organizations “representing over 12 million individuals including many fans of the San Francisco 49ers and the NFL write to call your attention to the virtual exclusion of minority-owned businesses from contracting opportunities for the new Santa Clara Stadium and to demand that remedial measures be undertaken immediately to rectify this situation,” wrote the Lawyers Committee on April 19 to the Santa Clara Stadium Authority Governing Board.

Practices “approved by the Stadium Authority and carried out by Turner-Devcon joint venture design builder have led to abysmally low minority business participation … Such exclusion is not only bad public policy; it also exposes the Authority to legal liability under California’s anti-discrimination laws.”

“In fact, the under-signed have analyzed all of the approved subcontractor bid lists and are not aware of a single minority-owned firm on the list. This is astounding, particularly in light of the tremendous availability of minority-owned businesses in Northern California.”

“Under California’s anti-discrimination laws,” the Lawyers Committee wrote, citing Government Code Section 111135, “a recipient of state funding may not engage in practices that have a disparate impact on minority groups.”

“The Stadium Authority’s contracting practices also violate Article 1, Section 1, of the California Constitution, passed by the California electorate as Proposition 209. The provision prohibits public agencies in the state from granting ‘preferential treatment’ on the basis of race or ethnicity,” the Lawyers Committee told the Stadium Authority.

So, contrary to county officials’ and the contractors’ claims that efforts to include minority contractors would violate Prop 209, their exclusion of Black contractors and other contractors of color by giving preference to white contractors is itself a violation of that same constitutional mandate.

Everett L. Glenn brings a level of expertise and sophistication not generally found on the athlete side of the table. A former athlete, he holds a degree in psychology from Oberlin College and a law degree from Case-Western Reserve University School of Law.

The letter, signed by 20 local and national organizations, calls for the Stadium Authority to comply with the laws voluntarily so to avoid a court battle, insisting that “the Authority must immediately take all available steps to open up its contracting process, including making a specific commitment to involve minority-owned businesses in the remaining work on the stadium project and in future contracting opportunities under the Authority’s purview.”

The 49ers’ long residence at Candlestick Stadium in San Francisco’s Black heartland, Bayview Hunters Point, generated few economic opportunities for that poorest of all San Francisco neighborhoods. Will the team’s move to Santa Clara end exclusion and improve the economic prospects for the communities that produce the football stars whose talent and sacrifice earn billions for an almost totally non-Black industry?

To learn more, contact Everett L. Glenn, president of the National Sports Authority, a division of ESP Education & Leadership Institute, at eglenn@thensa.org and visit nationalsportsauthority.org. Bay View editor Mary Ratcliff can be reached at editor@sfbayview.com or (415) 671-0789.

View more videos at: http://nbcbayarea.com.

Wearing the California Innocence Project’s XONR8 hoodie, high school football star Brian Banks signs with the Atlanta Falcons less than a year after his exoneration and release from prison, where he’d served five years. When he was arrested, he’d been expecting to attend USC on a football scholarship. – Photo: Atlanta Falcons

The California Innocence Project director, along with attorneys Alissa Bjerkhoel and Michael Semanchik, will walk 600 miles from San Diego to Sacramento to protest the incarceration of their innocent clients, bring attention to the cause of wrongful convictions, and present clemency petitions for 12 clients, “The California 12,” to Gov. Jerry Brown.

Brooks and the California Innocence Project made international news last May with the exoneration of football player Brian Banks, whose story was recently featured on 60 Minutes. Banks, other exonerees, family members and supporters of the project’s clients, California Western students and staff, and activists are expected to join the march for portions of the 55-day walk across the state.

Brian Banks wept in court May 24, 2012, when he was exonerated after five years in prison on a kidnap and rape charge when he was only 16. – Photo: Brittany Murray, San Jose Mercury News

About the California 12

At a cost to the state of around $8.5 million, the California 12 have been wrongfully incarcerated for a combined 190 years. One of the 12, William Richards, remains in prison despite having his conviction reversed in 2009 after the California Innocence Project presented DNA evidence of his innocence due to an appeal by the prosecutor. Through the Innocence March, organizers hope to raise awareness about wrongful convictions and the incarceration of innocent people, and to secure clemency for the California 12.

More rallies will be held along the march route:

• April 30 Rally Day in Oceanside with California Innocence Project Exoneree Adam Riojas
• May 3 Rally Day in Laguna Beach
• May 8 Rally Day in Santa Monica
• May 16 Rally Day in Santa Barbara
• May 25 Rally Day in San Luis Obispo
• June 3 Rally Day in Monterey
• June 6 Rally Day in Santa Cruz
• June 9 Rally Day in Santa Clara
• June 13 Rally Day in Berkeley
• June 20 Final Walk to State Capitol and Presentation of Petitions to Governor Brown

About the California Innocence Project

Founded in 1999, the California Innocence Project is a California Western School of Law clinical program dedicated to the release of wrongfully convicted inmates and providing an outstanding educational experience for students enrolled in the clinic. The California Innocence Project reviews approximately 2,000 claims from inmates each year and has earned the exoneration of nine wrongfully convicted clients since its inception.

California Western School of Law is the independent, ABA/AALS-accredited San Diego law school that advances multi-dimensional lawyering by educating lawyers-to-be as creative problem solvers and principled advocates who frame the practice of law as a helping, collaborative profession.

by Cynthia McKinney

April 29, 2013, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – It is fitting that on the same day as this headline appeared, “Pro-Israeli US lawmakers urge bombing Syria air bases, arming militants, invasion,” I delivered the following remarks to the United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine:

Former six-term member of Congress and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate testifies at the United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on April 29. – Photos: Yosuke Kobayashi

Sadly, what we in the U.S. call “special interests” are able to buy public policy by way of campaign contributions and misleading media campaigns. These “special interests” are aided and abetted in the U.S. by a concentrated media that has no obligation according to U.S. court decisions to tell the public the truth. In other words, U.S. media have won in U.S. court the right to knowingly lie to the people they ostensibly serve. I will briefly delve into this unusual and anti-”democratic” state of affairs now controlling in the U.S. once again before I conclude my remarks.

2. After my tenure in Congress, I became involved in international human rights activism. During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead (which was its war against Hamas and others), I joined with a group of human rights activists who tried to deliver medical supplies to the people of Gaza; the Israeli military stopped us. While in international waters, an Israeli Defense Forces warship rammed the pleasure boat that I was on with the other volunteers, and totally destroyed our boat. Neither the medical supplies nor we volunteers reached Gaza.

3. Approximately six months later, we, the volunteers from the first thwarted effort, reassembled in order to make another attempt to reach Gaza by sea, traveling through international waters, with the hopes of entering into Palestine by way of Gaza’s territorial waters. By this time, Operation Cast Lead had ended, President Barack Obama had been sworn in, and he had appealed publicly for an easing of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Gazans had made an appeal for school supplies for the children still reeling from the trauma of three weeks of what the United Nations called “one of the most violent episodes in the recent history of the Palestinian territory.” So, some of us answered that call with school supplies for the children and building supplies for the adults so that Gaza could rebuild from the devastation after Operation Cast Lead.

On this effort to answer a humanitarian call for help, I, along with 20 other volunteers, was kidnapped by the Israeli military while in international waters, our boat was seized, we were taken by an extremely circuitous route to Israel, where we never intended to go, and I was incarcerated in an Israeli prison for seven days.

Sadly, what I witnessed while in Israeli prison pointed to Israel as an apartheid state and the gross mistreatment of, particularly, Ethiopian women who had been lured to the “Holy Land” for job opportunities that vaporized because they were not of the correct religion. In addition to that, my observation at the time was that Ethiopian Jews are used as an important pillar – even enforcer, ironically – of Israeli apartheid. I can expand on this aspect of my observations later if there are specific questions or requests for more information from this body or from individuals in attendance at this conference.

4. Needless to say, for a second time, I was prevented from entering Gaza. Upon hearing of my ordeal, Member of Parliament George Galloway, who was in Cairo leading “Viva Palestina USA,” contacted me and invited me to come to Cairo and enter Gaza by land, which I did. Upon entering Gaza, I was able to see the destruction inflicted on the people by Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. I scooped up a bit of the soil and put it in this container.

McKinney holds a container of soil from Gaza that she collected shortly after Israel’s bombing during Operation Cast Lead. “Sadly, as noted in the Goldstone Report and admitted by the Israeli Defense Forces,” she testified, “this Gaza soil is probably contaminated with whatever remains of the chemicals that were used by the Israelis against the people of Gaza: chemicals ranging from white phosphorus to inert metals” and may also be laced with depleted uranium. – Photos: Yosuke Kobayashi

The United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights is also aware that civilian targets were bombed and totally destroyed. I visited a few of those targets.

5. One stop on my private tour of the destruction in Gaza was the American International School and amid the rubble I spotted a bright yellow something that I couldn’t quite make out what it was. So, I climbed through the jutted shards of concrete and exposed rebar to retrieve the object. This is that object: an English language children’s art book stamped with the initials of the American International School in Gaza, “AISG.” I was standing in what was left of the school’s library.

6. Another stop on my tour of the effects of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead was a neighborhood school, not nearly as big and grand as the American School. There, I could see the path of one missile that blew a hole clear through several walls of the school. There were markings on the chalkboard, including the Star of David. I saw several cans of peanuts on the floor. This is one of them. It is written in Hebrew. The Israeli soldiers blew up the school and then sat down in its ruins and enjoyed peanuts and drew religious and political markings on the chalkboard.

7. Both boats that I was on were seized by the Israelis and destroyed by them. The humanitarian aid on the boats did not reach Gaza and only token aid was delivered by the land convoy to the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the bulk of it stranded in Egypt, not allowed into Gaza by the Egyptians or the Israelis.

8. What is amazing is not only that this happens over and over again, but that Israeli leaders who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity leave office and are never held accountable for their policies, as was done by victims of Augusto Pinochet and as is being done currently by the International Criminal Court. Another aspect of this impunity is that Israel continues to receive U.S. weapons and technology which it uses against civilians in contravention of U.S. law. As these weapons are used or become outdated, the U.S. replenishes Israel’s weapons stock every year.

9. One measure of this impunity is brought to bear by the pro-Israel Lobby that operates in the political sphere of the U.S. I am a former member of Congress because pro-Israel sympathizers known as the “pro-Israel lobby” ensured my ouster from Congress and that of many other members of Congress who dared to try and draw attention to U.S. law, Israel’s human rights violations, Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons, or any other inconvenient facts that were better buried and left unknown.

10. What many of you might not know, because these things just aren’t discussed as widely as they should be, is that many of those members of Congress who were put out of office by the pro-Israel lobby were the stolen children of Africa, descendants of Africans trafficked in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I will call the names of a few and tell you where you can find information about them as they tell their own stories:

• Gus Savage, member of Congress from Chicago, Illinois, was targeted for defeat by the pro-Israel lobby because he dared to engage in foreign relations within the purview of a member of Congress on the African Continent, in Egypt, among other places. He recounted his ordeal on the floor of the House of Representatives and revealed the secrets of the pro-Israel lobby on the Congressional Record where students and others interested in this topic can find his words today: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r101:20:./temp/~r101lw459S:e0.

• Earl Hilliard, member of Congress from Birmingham, Alabama, was the first Black member of Congress to serve the people of Alabama since the U.S. Civil War’s Reconstruction Era. He was ejected from the Congress by the pro-Israel Lobby because he, like Gus Savage, traveled to Africa and in particular to Libya. He also traveled to Lebanon and learned of new weapons for that time that had been used there by Israel. For this transgression, Earl Hilliard had to go. He is interviewed in a Dutch documentary that is available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ6WLB9oRUk), where he describes the vicious campaign that was run against him by the pro-Israel Lobby.

• And then, there’s me. Just this month, I published a book entitled, “Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom” (http://www.claritypress.com/McKinneyII.html), in which I describe just a few of the tactics that were used against me by the pro-Israel lobby to destroy my career in Congress.

• These three political “take-downs” were very publicly done in order to send a message to others who might also be inclined to speak up out of moral conviction, as Savage, Hilliard and I did.

• This weeding out also occurs on the local level with state and local elected officials like my father and others targeted for defeat because of the potential threat to the interests of the pro-Israel lobby that they pose.

• In addition, on a public and private level, targeted individuals have to endure soft repression that makes life difficult. All of this needs to be put on the record if one is to fully understand the power of the pro-Israel lobby and the pall that it casts on the political process in the U.S. and, from what I have been told, also in Europe.

• Finally, the political landscape for Blacks in the U.S. is negatively affected by this weeding out process, because their strongest and most outspoken authentic leaders are vulnerable to the challenges from candidates who are well funded by outside “special interests.”

11. In light of this, I would like to put this thought to you: Can you even imagine what U.S. policy would be like at the United Nations if the will of the people were carried out without the interference of the pro-Israel lobby? The Durban World Conference Against Racism was a watershed that could be revisited time and time again with U.S. support and participation, except that powerful lobbies want otherwise.

I know, it’s hard to imagine things differently. But it is not hard for me and that is one vision that keeps me going: U.S. policy made in the image of the values of the people of the U.S. At a conference whose theme is African solidarity with the Palestinian people, I thought it was important to mention not only how the pro-Israel lobby skews politics in the U.S. against the Palestinians, but also against African descendants inside the U.S.

12. I focus on this important aspect of policymaking by focusing on who gets to make the policy because I believe that this is one key reason why Palestinians are forced to suffer while, at best, platitudes and delay serve as the effective policies of the U.S. and European countries.

13. The short version of this tragic story is that pro-Israel forces inside the U.S. are willing to use their money to buy political influence and protection for Israel across the political spectrum while the same cannot be said of pro-peace, pro-justice forces. I liken the situation to game day when one team shows up in beautiful new uniforms with all of the latest and best equipment, primed and ready to execute its strategy in the game of play, while the other team doesn’t even show up on the pitch.

I believe that one remaining untested justice frontier is the political battleground in U.S. and European capitals. It is inside these essential capitals that pro-Israel lobbies have become comfortable operating with very little opposition from the other side.

14. I am tired of losing when, I believe, we really do not have to lose. I fundamentally believe that the people of this world are good and want peace. I have spoken to Afghanis and Pakistanis, to Yemenis and to Somalis, Palestinians and Americans, and I find them to be peace-loving peoples.

15. So, how do we move from where we are to where we need to be? That is the fundamental question. I focus on the political because the political creates the legal. And the political creates impunity.

16. Just in my personal experiences, I have outlined breaches of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international law and U.S. law by the occupying power: Israel.

17. I served as a juror on the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine that recently concluded its sessions with a finding that both the U.S. and Europe are guilty of contributing to the atmosphere of impunity with which apartheid Israel carries out its policies against Palestinians and anyone who stands in its way.

18. I also recently served as an official observer as the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission received testimony from Palestinians on their treatment inside Israel as well as in the Occupied Territories.

19. Through my service with both of these organizations, I have met many courageous Palestinians and Israelis who want to live peacefully with each other and who put their lives and their livelihoods on the line every day for peace and the rule of law. I do believe that much of the suffering could be alleviated if we would put sufficient energy and resources behind putting out in public view how the pro-Israel lobby misdirects U.S. and European policies and prevents pro-peace and justice politicians from ever having the opportunity to put those values, along with our basic human dignity, permanently on the table for public debate.

20. Finally, I am not Palestinian. I am not Arab. I am not Muslim. But I am human. And that is enough for me to acknowledge the dignity of others who are oppressed and to epitomize what this conference is all about: African solidarity with the Palestinian people for the achievement of its inalienable rights, including the sovereignty and independence of the state of Palestine.

21. Thank you.

For news from, by and about Cynthia McKinney, former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, subscribe to her Updates at http://lists.allthingscynthiamckinney.com/listinfo.cgi/updates-allthingscynthiamckinney.com. She can be reached at Cynthia@runcynthiarun.org.

The Metro Transportation Authority pledged significant African American participation during the construction phase of the Metro Crenshaw-LAX Transit Corridor and also signed a project labor agreement to ensure that Blacks receive adequate employment representation, but contractors have drastically under-performed in the hiring of African Americans in the first phase of the Crenshaw Advanced Utilities Relocation PLA for Targeted Worker Attainment.

A Black heavy equipment operator works on the preliminary phase of the Crenshaw Rail Project on Crenshaw Boulevard. The project is expected to generate 18,000 jobs. – Photo: U.S. Department of Transportation

The executive order on the Crenshaw Advanced Utilities Relocation summary showed an appallingly low percentage of Blacks working. The report indicated that no Blacks were hired during the month of December 2012 when the bids went out and that only 2.65 percent of the workforce was Black in the month of January 2013.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and local Black community activists were outraged, and the mayor demanded a more aggressive campaign to ensure Black participation and increase employment among African Americans as part of advanced utility relocation activities for the Crenshaw-LAX Transit Corridor Project.

After the mayor mandated the promoting of African American hiring during the construction phase, the number of Blacks hired in the month of February nearly doubled the percentage of the previous two months to 5.81 for February and escalated again in March to report its greatest gains yet, reaching almost 8 percent.

“Finally, I think we are moving in the right direction because more African Americans are now included in the work force,” said Mayor Villaraigosa. “However, I am not satisfied and will not be until I see that African Americans who live in this community are employed and reflected in the bottom line.

“I believe that it is only appropriate that residents of this community be active participants and work on this rail system being built. I want to see the number of people hired that represents the population of the community. They deserve it and I demand it. My legacy as mayor of the City of Los Angeles rides on it, and my commitment to Leimert Park and the entire Crenshaw community will not waiver.”

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa holds a press conference during a tour of construction of the new Crenshaw light rail line as Congresswoman Maxine Waters stands beside him. The project also includes a new transit vehicle maintenance and storage facility. – Photo: U.S. Department of Transportation

The new Metro Rail extension will offer an alternative transportation option to congested roadways and provide significant environmental benefits, economic development and employment opportunities throughout Los Angeles County. Riders will be able to make easy connections within the entire Metro Rail system, municipal bus lines and other regional transportation services.

The project’s purpose is to improve public transit service and mobility in the Crenshaw Corridor between Wilshire and El Segundo boulevards. The overall goal of the proposed project is to improve mobility in the corridor by connecting with existing lines such as the Metro Green Line and the Expo Line.

The majority of the funding for the project came from Measure R, the half-cent sales tax initiative approved by Los Angeles County voters in November 2008.

Kenneth Miller is assistant managing editor of The Los Angeles Sentinel, the largest paid African American owned newspaper in the West. He can be reached via generalinfo@lasentinel.net.

A senior British politician has revealed Britain’s involvement in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister.

The leader of the Congolese independence struggle from Belgium was brutally murdered just seven months after taking office on the direct orders of the U.S. and Belgium. Britain, whose involvement had long been suspected, also had a hand in it.

Patrice Lumumba – Photo: AFP

The killing demonstrated the fraud of independence for the former colonial countries in Africa. The Congo was and remains today a poor but vastly underdeveloped country, despite its enormous mineral resources, including uranium, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese and zinc.

When the million-strong Congolese working class, second only in size to that in South Africa, organized mass strikes and demonstrations in 1959, Belgium moved swiftly to grant the country independence in the hope that the national bourgeoisie would be more able to restore calm. It organized the transfer of power in such a way as to ensure that “independence” would be a formal fiction. The Western corporations’ ownership of the Congo’s vast mineral wealth meant that the imperialist powers were determined to keep control over the country after independence.

But the political situation spiraled out of control when Lumumba imposed import tariffs and forcibly broke up strikes by workers in Leopoldville (Kinshasa). Black troops mutinied against the Belgian officers Lumumba left in command of the army after independence. Moise Tshombe, acting to protect Western mining interests and the Belgian military, seized control of the resource-rich Katanga province and declared Katanga’s independence. Another secession movement developed in the mineral-rich province of Kasai. Belgium sent its army back into the former colony, supposedly to protect its nationals.

Lumumba threatened to appeal for Soviet aid as a means of freeing the country from domination by Belgian mining interests and Belgian troops. Washington used this as the pretext for allying with Belgium to seek his elimination. When Lumumba invited in United Nations peacekeeping forces, they too subordinated themselves to the machinations of Belgium and the U.S., refusing to take any action to prevent the murder of the new prime minister.

The killing demonstrated the fraud of independence for the former colonial countries in Africa.

Lumumba was assassinated as the direct result of orders from the Belgian government and the Eisenhower administration, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and local clients financed and “advised” by Brussels and Washington. In 2001, the U.S. government released archive material related to the Kennedy assassination that included an interview with the White House minute-taker under the Eisenhower administration, Robert Johnson. According to Johnson’s account, in a meeting held with security advisers in August 1960, two months after Congo became independent, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA chief Allen Dulles to “eliminate” Lumumba so that the Congo did not become “another Cuba.”

“There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued,” Johnson recalled.

Dulles referred to the Congolese leader as a “mad dog.” A week later, he cabled station chief Larry Devlin authorizing the “removal” of Lumumba, up to and including his assassination.

A telegram sent three months before Lumumba’s death by Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, then minister for African affairs, to Belgian officials in the Congo stated, “The main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium is clearly Lumumba’s definitive elimination.”

Lumumba had already been deposed and placed under house arrest. The meaning of these words was absolutely clear – it was an order to assassinate him.

In November 2001, 40 years after the event, an all-party commission of enquiry acknowledged Belgium’s role in Lumumba’s murder.

Britain too, fearful for its substantial interests in neighboring Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, endorsed the assassination. A British Foreign Office document in September 1960 notes the opinion of a top ranking official, who later became the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, that “I see only two possible solutions to the (Lumumba) problem. The first is the simple one of ensuring (his) removal from the scene by killing him.”

In this last photo taken of Patrice Lumumba, he is bound and being carried out of Elizabethville on a truck in mid-December 1960. His assassination was ordered by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower with the concurrence of Belgium and Britain. – Photo: Horst Faas, AP

Walton served until 2009 as research assistant for Professor Christopher Andrew’s authorized and sanitized official history of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, “Defense of the Realm.”

In “Empire of Secrets,” Walton claims – despite the evidence – that it is unclear who organized Lumumba’s assassination and that the jury was still out on Britain’s role. Walton wrote, “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know.”

Lord Lea replied, citing a conversation he had had with Baroness Daphne Park a few months before she died in 2010: “Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park … She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organized it.’”

She had claimed that if the West had not intervened, Lumumba would have handed over Congo’s – now the Democratic Republic of Congo – rich mineral deposits to the Russians.

When asked by The Hindu for further evidence substantiating such allegations, Lea replied, “That’s the conversation I had with her and that’s what she told me. I have nothing more to add.”

In an interview with the Times, Walton called on MI6 to declassify its internal archives on Lumumba. He said that MI6 must be placed “in the position it deserves in the history of anti-colonial movements in Africa and elsewhere.” This could only be done if MI6 “releases records from its own archives.”

He added that Lord Lea’s claim about the involvement of MI6 in Lumumba’s assassination was “an interesting twist in this story,” but that with the release of MI6’s records, such claims would be “impossible to substantiate.”

MI6 refused to comment on Lea’s revelation. An official said, “We don’t comment on intelligence matters.”

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph 10 years ago, Park said that in every posting in the intelligence agency she had two roles – as a diplomat, answerable to the Foreign Office and as an intelligence officer, reporting to MI6. “You do an ordinary job with an extra dimension,” she explained.

She added that she had smuggled Lumumba’s private secretary – who wanted to defect – across the border under a blanket in the boot of her car.

Following Lumumba’s assassination and the war against secessionist Katanga, the Congo was ruled for decades by the reactionary dictator and kleptocrat, Joseph Sese Seko Mobutu, a U.S. stooge, who systematically looted the country. Following the overthrow in 1997 of his debt-ridden regime, which had outlived its usefulness to Washington, the Congo has been subject to a horrific civil war whose resulting dislocation, famine and disease have killed more than 5 million.

Jean Shaoul, a professor at Manchester University, can be reached at jean.shaoul@mbs.ac.uk. This story first appeared on the World Socialist Web Site.