Tag: Glen Ford

“Maybe the best measure of the contribution of fellow freedom fighters is the ferocity of the state’s pursuit and prosecution of those dissidents – and nobody has been pursued with more ferocity by the US national security state than Julian Assange.” – Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

Most Western press judged the African Union harshly for its refusal to send troops to Burundi without Burundi’s consent. However, the A.U. troop deployment was never an African solution to African problems. It was always a Western solution to the West’s problem with Burundi’s current government. Black Agenda Report Editor Glen Ford said that Western nations pay most of the A.U.’s bills, so A.U. troops often do serve Western interests, but this time the West had pushed too hard.

When a Black radical dies in Mississippi, one should never accept at face value the state’s word on the cause of death. When that revolutionary Black man dies soon after becoming mayor of the state’s capital and largest city, history and reason compel us to put assassination first on our list of possibilities.

Secretary of State John Kerry made headlines this week when he suggested, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, that President Obama might soon be visiting Africa. Kerry gave no details about when or which countries. KPFA’s Ann Garrison spoke to former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney about the president’s relationship to the continent of his father’s birth.

Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with Cynthia McKinney, and I asked her about leadership. She replied that at the local level in the Black communities, there is leadership. It no longer gets media coverage, but it is there. Real leaders are those with the courage to dissent and to resist. It is the act of resistance that transforms an elected person into a leader.

Emancipatory journalism aggressively argues that we need radical community-based journalism that, while professional, organized and researched, is clear about its bias in favor of oppressed communities and their political organizations and struggle.

I am pleased to stand with my colleagues today who are outraged at Nobel Peace Laureate President Obama’s decision to wage war on Africa in Libya. At the outset, let me state that Libya is home to tens of thousands of foreign students and guest workers. The students come from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. The messages I have received from concerned Africans state that these young, innocent people, inaccurately labeled by the U.S. press as “Black mercenaries,” have been trapped in hostile territory and are hated by the U.S.-allied Al Qaeda insurgents.

On the afternoon of Feb. 21, 1965, I went to the Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm X speak. It was the saddest day of my life. An update has been added to this story, originally published in 2009.

A long-standing code of silence inside the U.N. is coming to an end regarding what is probably the largest genocide ever since the U.N....

The leaked U.N. report to be officially released Oct. 1 is not the first such report to have been drafted by the U.N. – nor is it the first one to be covered up. On Oct. 11, 1994, Robert Gersony of USAID reported that Kagame's RPF army had been committing systematic massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994.

This past Sunday over 1,200 people showed up at Salem Methodist Church in Harlem to listen and weigh in on a discussion that has been raging on in our communities but is oftentimes swept under the rug.