An Open Letter from the American "Left" allegedly on behalf of unnamed persons said to be Iranian political prisoners has provided cover for U.S. imperial aggression against Iran by refusing to acknowledge Iran's right to defend itself against zionist infiltration and ignoring the rights of Palestinian and Black political prisoners.
The recent Open Letter signed by many prominent and well-known figures from the American Left and anti-racist reformist ranks was recently printed in the British newspaper The Guardian. While it's absolutely understood that the Western corporate media has engulfed entire swaths of humanity in an Information bubble, where the mediums of mass communication are in themselves the message, those genuinely concerned about the outright impunity of rising fascism across the Western world must challenge the corporate monopoly on disinformation, especially when it's Black activists who use false equivalencies of “oppressive” Islam versus Western ethno-European (Christian) Democratic “freedom” to shield the Democratic Party and its Republican counterparts from complicity in Israel’s Palestinian genocide and their manufactured “war on terrorism”.
It is no coincidence that Muslims, Hamas and the Palestine resistance, Iran, Lebanon’s Hizballah and Ansur’allah (known as Houthis) are all on the front line against American and Zionist imperialism in Western Asia, and not the U.S. Socialist Left, or Progressive Liberals, not even so-called Revolutionary Black Nationalists demanding Reparations, are fighting white supremacist imperialism with their lives on the line. False equivalencies lend cover to reactionary Muslims extremist. On the other hand, groups such as the Rapid Support Force (RSF) in Sudan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, JNIM in the Sahel, and Al-Qaida in North Africa are all covertly supported, funded and armed by America and Europe’s allies in the Gulf states of the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. These proxies of Saudi Wahhabism are running amok in Africa, where the struggle for Pan-African Unity and the call for reparations are at a crucial stage. Indeed, the U.S., France and Britain have been expelled from western Africa and are looking to return under the guise of aiding in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
From the anti-migrant hysteria sweeping the metropoles of Europe, to neo-fascist ICE agents swarming through America’s cities like stormtroopers in green fatigues, the voices of radicals and revolutionaries decrying capitalism’s human slaughter of women and children through sanctions, wars and genocide, along with the planetary destruction of the environment wrought by dependence on fossil fuels, are increasingly silenced and isolated by publications such as The Guardian. The role of so-called “liberal-conservative” news outlets in distorting the voices of those demanding fundamental change is not only insidious, but effective.
But all that’s not real is camouflage. So how and why did The Guardian, a supposedly independent and neoliberal newspaper, print an obvious Left-flavored “Open Letter” supporting bogus political prisoners and while excoriating Iran’s version of government using the West’s derogatory label of an authoritarian “theocracy,” and have it signed by Black and White American Leftists with histories rooted in the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s? Black Feminist anti-patriarchal activists, along with non-secular, left-leaning academic critics of America’s system of “democratic fascism”, i.e., Western democracy, all piled on as they were outraged that Iran had the audacity as an independent sovereign nation to detain, try, and execute U.S. and Mossad agents and terrorists while in a war for its very existence.
We must also ask why release such a patently absurd “Open Letter" during Black August, a month commemorating the Revolutionary Radical armed resistance of Black freedom fighters? Moreover, the letter, signed by the likes of Angela Davis and Prof. Robin Kelley, strangely coincides with a CIA-Mossad-orchestrated operation in Iran that killed hundreds of police officers and protestors prior to the zionist and U.S. military strikes that killed the leadership of the Islamic Republic, including its Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.
It does seem more than coincidental that just when Iran’s security agencies raided and smashed several CIA-Mossad cells, equipped with Skylink radios, weapons, and bomb making materials, arresting dozens near its borders with Afghanistan and Iraq territories hosting Kurdish “Mujahideen e-Khalq,” well known as an anti-Iranian CIA Kurdish proxy that Davis and her cosignatories went all in on supposed “political prisoners,” and Iran’s use of the death penalty. Their seeming concern for “political prisoners” in Iran never once recognized the Iranian government’s right to defend itself against zionist orchestrated terrorist infiltration and murder of Iranian citizens.
Nor, for that matter, have Davis or her feminist cronies ever supported Black political prisoners of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) or from the prison-born Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) accused of killing armed agents of white supremacy commonly referred to as “law enforcement” and correctional guards. Like documented informers such as Al Sharpton, Davis and the latte Left, only are comfortable with Black moral leadership by non-violent victimhood. Revolutionaries who pick up the gun to defend the physical and human integrity of their people’s community are never mere victims, they are conscious freedom fighters. To the likes of those whose “identity politics” plead for non-violent reform.
The families of victims of racist murder and police violence are worthy of Black and left support, but not necessarily by extension the advocates of identity politics, who always come out of the woodwork to demand “justice” for the grieving relatives of those murdered by the state or right wing racists. This is Black Leadership by “victimhood”. It allows public figures, sports heroes, and just plain decent human beings to come forward and pay for the funerals of grieving apolitical families. Leadership by victimhood provides inauthenticity and pulpits for the ambulance chasers, and creates funding channels for non-profit foundations, all in the name of seeking justice for the Black victims of white supremacist violence. A classic example of this was the creation of the hashtag movement “Black Lives Matter” before its leaders took the money and bounced. Meanwhile, Black Political Prisoners, like Kamau Saddiki or Mumia Abu-Jamal (who was duped into signing the Open Letter by yet-to-be-determined “supporters”) remain political afterthoughts and will probably die in prison.
So it’s no coincidence that the Open Letter signed by the likes of Angela Davis and a cabal of Left activist from the sixties, and academics pontificating on class and racism in capitalist America have found a voice at the “liberal” Guardian Newspaper to camouflage their reactionary Western Islamophobia, their “westernized neoliberal anti-imperialism” that masks their endorsement of U.S. Imperialist military aggression against Iran and who cosplay a “two state solution” with the zionist settler states’ “greater Israel” expansion project without cutting their liberal funding and demonization of their academic status as “anti-Semitic”.
Like many Westernized ideologues, identity politics advocates, fake apolitical “Pan-African” culture aficionados, who claim their historical roots and struggle have less to do with capitalism white supremacist construct, and more to do with “equality for all” in the context of Bourgeois Democracy, the Open Letter is a wake up call to those who genuinely and unambiguously stand against Western democratic fascism at home, and U.S. Empire abroad. Anti-imperialist, abolitionist activists should know that we have no allies who would throw shade on America’s military attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran at the behest of another ethno-European-settler State, Israel, by defining captured Mossad and CIA proxy operatives (who in many cases supported or suborned the killings of scores of Iranian policemen and peaceful protesters) as “political prisoners.” Given the Guardian’s ignoble history as the neo-liberal mouthpiece of the British empire, those who consider themselves on the “right side of history” should not only challenge the political efficacy of its publication of the disingenuous “Open Letter,” but demand an accounting and a political, ethical explanation from all of its signatories. Even the origin of the Letter should be made public.
Finally, where’s the “open letter” condemning Israeli torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners, or Genocide in Gaza? Or against U.S. military and economic support for the UAE’s involvement in the Sudanese Civil war? In this age of information technology, weaponized data and the rise of A.I., “All That’s Not Real is Camouflage”.
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad is the founder of the Institute for Pan-African Policy Development in Accra, Ghana. He is a former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He was a leading member of the New York chapter of the BPP, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, a member of the Panther 21, and a political prisoner.
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