[News] Nooses at Columbia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor10102007.html

October 10, 2007


Enough is Enough!


Nooses at Columbia

By SUNSARA TAYLOR

2006: A noose is hung from a "Whites Only" tree in a Jena, Louisiana 
high school.

September 20th, 2007: tens of thousands descend on Jena in an 
outraged and joyful protest.

October 9, 2007: a noose is hung at Columbia Teacher's College as 
part of a spate of nooses, racist threats and brutality lashing back 
across the country. A white supremacist website has published the 
home addresses of the Jena Six, encouraging people to take "justice" 
into their own hands.

TODAY: Time for everyone who refuses to go backwards and worse to 
stand up, resist, and take the future into OUR hands!

What are NOOSES?

NOOSES -- are an open threat of racist terror rooted in generations 
of slavery: children auctioned out of their mother's arms, feet 
mutilated to prevent against escape, backs scarred with welts from whips.

NOOSES--are in line with a whole system of white supremacy enforced 
by courts that have warehoused nearly a million Black people into 
prison, carried out by brutal police who see "driving while Black" as 
a crime punishable by death, and reinforced through countless daily 
insults and discrimination large and small.

NOOSES--are a message to Black people as a whole, but particularly 
Black youth, that the U.S., the so-called "leader of the free world," 
has no future for them other than massive criminalization, gangs, 
dead-end and disappearing jobs, imprisonment, early death or 
know-nothing-bible-banging.

The hanging of this noose at Columbia also takes place after the 
appearance of racist graffiti lashing out at communists and 
advocating "nuk[ing] Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all 
the savages in Africa," and a whole atmosphere of fascist 
intimidation and thuggery being whipped up and mobilized in the 
upcoming "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" October 22--26th initiated 
by David Horowitz. This week involves over 100 campuses, speakers 
like Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, Rick Santorum and is ominously being 
called "the biggest conservative protest ever." Invoking progressive 
themes like "free-speech" and combating "the oppression of women in 
Islam" as a cover, they plan to harass Muslim Student Associations 
and Women's Studies departments, and silence anyone that questions 
the Bush regime's official narrative, including even those concerned 
about global warming.

The people planning this week are the ideological foot-soldiers of a 
whole fascist clamp-down on society right at a time when the Bush 
regime is neck-deep into a deeply unpopular and genocidal war in Iraq 
and is preparing a new potential war against Iran. David Horowitz 
himself waged a campaign against reparations by crowing that Black 
people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz is planning to come 
and speak at Columbia, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity on October 26th.

This fascist assault will not "just go away" and cannot be ignored. 
It must be exposed, confronted with the truth about who the real 
fascists are, and politically defeated.

If anything cried out with urgency for a revolutionary movement and 
massive political resistance it is the world today: the nooses, the 
legalized torture, the wars for empire, the moves towards a dark ages 
theocracy for women and gays and science, and the massive grinding up 
of human lives and human potential in the vast sweatshops, swelling 
shanty-towns slums, and whole regions left to waste in disease and disaster.

We have learned from the righteous history of rising up and fighting 
against the oppression of Black people, against unjust wars, the 
oppression of women and from revolutionary struggles for emancipation 
the world over--power concedes nothing without a struggle!

Two futures are being posed for this generation...what will you do? 
The direction of the whole world is being fought over--campus life 
cannot go back to normal.

It is time for a new generation to wake up and fight for a whole 
different world!
What could be more important than that?

Who Is David Horowitz?

It is worth reprinting this description from Revolution Newspaper:

Horowitz is a self-described "battering ram" against any thinking in 
academia that challenges a whole range of lies this system has 
perpetrated. He's played a major role in slandering, hounding, and 
even ending the careers of progressive teachers. Horowitz established 
his credentials with the ruling class by renouncing his involvement 
in the 1960s movements for social change in a series of slanderous 
articles, books and conferences. He "made his bones" in the '90s, by 
waging a high-profile campaign against reparations for 
African-Americans, with the theme that Black people should be 
grateful for slavery! Horowitz took out huge ads in campus newspapers 
proclaiming this vicious lie and to this day makes it a major part of 
his attack. He wrote a book on the "art of political war" that Karl 
Rove distributed to key Republican campaign operatives. He is a 
vitriolic defender of everything from the extermination of the Native 
Americans and the enslavement of Black people, to the savage and 
criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of those 
whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He has set up a website that 
clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of revolutionaries, radicals, 
dissenters and liberals and reports every slander, rumor, lie and 
innuendo that comes his way. And, bankrolled from the ruling class, 
he has organized the falsely named "Students for Academic Freedom," 
which literally takes notes on lectures and rips things out of 
context in an attempt to get professors who do not sufficiently bow 
down to the Bush agenda fired. The modern-day Nazi-type student 
groups inspired by Horowitz organize so-called "games" like "Catch an 
Illegal Immigrant" on campus. In short, Horowitz defends every crime 
that this system has ever committed and is now preparing to justify 
even more, and to intimidate and silence any who would question or resist this.

Sunsara Taylor writes for <http://www.revcom.us/>Revolution Newspaper 
and sits on the Advisory Board of <http://www.worldcantwait.org/>The 
World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime. She can be reached at: 
<mailto:sunsarasworld at yahoo.com>sunsarasworld at yahoo.com




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