For Class Struggle Defense of the Muslim, Black, Brown, & Immigrant Communities!

June 9, 2017
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Fascism, Immigration, Immigration Rights, Racist Terror, UNITED STATES
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Down with Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Muslim Terror!

Organize Mass Labor-Centered Mobilizations and Labor, Black & Brown Self-Defense Guards to Smash Racist Reaction!

For Class Struggle Defense of the Muslim, Black, Brown, & Immigrant Communities!

No Refugee and/or “travel” Muslim Ban and No Border Wall!

“ACT! for America,” the largest anti-Muslim hate group in the U.S. organized the 20-state, 28-city “March Against Sharia” for June 10. These marches have nothing to do with standing against religious reaction, but are rallying points for fascists and white nationalists to organize further anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim terror. The rally in Batesville, Arkansas is being organized by neo-Nazi Billy Roper who promoted it on the neo-Nazi Stormfront message board.⁴ The seedbed of this racist activism has been carefully tended by big capitalists to the tune of $42.6 million just between 2001-2009, the latest information we can get from IRS 990 forms, and this funding has doubtless been stepped up in the Make America White Again era. Lawmakers with the Ku Klux mindset encourage these white street thugs with vocal support for Trump’s Muslim “Travel” Ban court cases and for his refugee ban and Border Wall. Likewise, racist rallies encourage the bourgeois politicians and their golf partners in the “Justice Department.” See for yourself if what we say isn’t so:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/act-america

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/reports/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/

https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/08/pdf/islamophobia_chapter1.pdf

ACT! was able to get a permit for a rally on June 10th in New York City where they stated they can get 90 people to come out and support their ‘Christian’ nation ideas. The pretext that America is on the verge of losing its sovereignty to Sharia Law is preposterous on the face of it. Nevertheless, political pressures like big money, that nowadays famous “person” with political rights, have caused legislatures in many small localities to enact explicit anti-Sharia laws that are really aimed exactly against Muslim-American persons’ civic and civil rights. The working class must reject such ignorance and organize to suppress such racist organization-for-violence.

We are participating in the City Hall Park action denouncing “ACT! For America” and against the objectives of the racists within the bourgeois state and government. This action is noteworthy for its support by Syrian Americans and those who solidarize with the Syrian revolution as well as the refugees from the Assad dictatorship’s war to retain power and reward their sponsoring allies. Victory to the Syrian revolution!

The ascendancy of the Know-Nothing demagogue Trump administration has witnessed every kind of social reactionary emerging from the halls of Congress, from the state legislatures, with actual fascists and racist terrorists taking to the streets in the open, coast-to-coast! CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reports “anti-Muslim hate crime incidents rose dramatically in 2015 and then increased a further 44 percent in 2016, going from 180 incidents in 2015 to 260 in 2016.”¹ In Portland, in May, two men who came to the defense of two Muslim women were stabbed to death, while a third man was seriously injured by a man yelling racial slurs. On June 3rd, in Ohio, a Muslim woman was beaten unconscious with facial fractures after trying to protect another Muslim woman from racist harassment.² The police, who themselves are professional racist terrorists, have refused to investigate this and no arrests have been made. The UK has also reported an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes since the London Bridge attacks and this has put the microphones of the mainstream media in front of the maws of white supremacists for commentary.³ If Muslims are prime targets at the moment for the fascists and racist vigilantes, blacks, immigrant, Jews, transgender folks and ultimately, the working class will be back again in their gunsights at any moment.

But the AFL-CIO and Change To Win federations’ leaders so far have had no noticeable expression of opinion on either. Their silence is damning and is testimony to their chauvinist indifference. We are “led” by a privileged caste of an anti-internationalist trade union bureaucracy incapable of uniting and defending the working class. Now more than ever we need a rank and file uprising to democratize the trade union movement and fight for its political independence, to organized the unorganized and form multi-racial multi-ethnic self-defense squads against racist and fascist threats and violence.

The Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC) in New York City has called for a “No Platform for Fascism: Noise Demo against Hate!,” endorsed by the New York City Antifa, Workers World Party and associated groupings and this is slated to take place at Foley Square, beginning half an hour before the time specified on “ACT! For America’s” police permit. Workers World Party says to meet across the street from the fascists.

We of the Communist Workers Group think this is a setup and otherwise politically objectionable and even crazy. This is a setup because the police permit itself is an exceptional display of evidence that the Copperhead wing of the New York capitalist class is alive and well. This means the police will go the extra effort to protect the racists. The organizers for the Foley Square action are not mobilizing the trade unions to form defense squads, and in the end they will not overwhelm the phalanx of police and will not deny the fascists their platform; their action is not designed to, since “ACT!” will undoubtedly get media airplay and have prepared statements to distribute. So the MACC call is to make noise, not shut them down. In making noise they will play at effective anti-fascism, while the bourgeois media will accuse the left of violence against “free speech” anyway. But sad to say, only certain leftists even consider the necessity for anti-fascist self-defense and they have not prepared to bring along any trained, disciplined battalions of workers and oppressed peoples. Instead we have a fake left adventure at a time when legislatures talk about banning demonstrations! This right to assembly we are determined not to lose, and this means mass working class self-defense must be organized. There is no “alternative” choice and this question is exactly one of survival of the one productive class in society, as Trotsky pointed out in the Transitional Program. We adhere to this program.

Anti-fascist organizers must not give any credibility to the Workers World Party (WWP) claim to being defenders of Syrian refugees. The WWP supports the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, who has been creating masses of refugees from his war on the Syrian people! Even as we denounce U.S. imperialism as the main danger to the Syrian revolution and the Arab Spring, Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated both the class political policies and the day-to-day war criminality of a fascist regime. We say Assad is a fascist, a mortal danger to the survival of the working class. To make an alliance with him, as WWP does, means no united front is possible between champions of the workers and the so-called WWP! So while the WWP supports fascism in Syria, we will march with the victims of al-Assad and their relatives and defend their rights. Defend refugees’ civil and human rights here and the Syrians’ right to revolution against the fascist Assad dictatorship!

Endnotes