Thursday 19 May 2016

10 Reasons as to Malcolm X's Relevance on his 91st Birthday Today

Happy birthday Malcolm X

The Malcolm X Movement gives 10 reasons as to what is his relevance today in the situation our peoples find themselves in?

1. Black Power self reliance - ie., the strategy that states colonised peoples can unite and self organise against colonialism without the patronising and sabotaging hand of the western white left and liberals, but we can ally and unite with them on our own terms.

2. Black Power strategic courage and determination - stand your ground, stand by your people and comrades when under attack, don't water down but advocate and pursue your aims, design your tactics towards your strategies. Full freedom, fighting for a total end to colonialism and all the oppressions that it brings!

3. Stay out of the imperialist system defined comfort zones - Develop wisdom, but also be focused on your peoples struggle without hesitating, no matter how much our struggles and peoples are demonised, attempts at making them invisible by the enemy, we keep on keeping on, we keep on loudly and proudly representing them and supporting them. Stay out of the imperialist comfort zone, and develop your work and theories.

4. Fearlessness - "The price of freedom is death" - Malcolm X. Understand that the struggle is against the greatest violent force ever known, but that our peoples struggles yesterday and today is overcoming that violence, and we are part of that struggle and sacrifice, and with militant intelligence and wisdom we must proceed no matter what the price.

5. Constantly learn and self critique - always challenge what you know, listen to others who might be able to develop your understanding even though you may not agree with them. Learn from sucesssful ideologies that have actually liberated our peoples, learn from their struggles, from our leaderships across the world. Visit these struggles, peoples, leaders and countries and work with them and learn from them.

6. Global unity of actually existing forces of struggle - Malcolm X and the wider Black Liberation Movement in the USA was always massively inspired by revolutions across the world and especially Africa against colonialism and for liberation and socialism. Malcolm X made very clear that the Black Liberation struggle in the usa and the liberation of Black peoples in the 'west' is predicated on Africa and Asia being freed, that is why Malclolm X's primary inspiration was the Bandung Movement led by Nasser, Mao, Tito, Nkrumah, Nehru and Sukarno.

7. Organise hard on every level - Malcolm X developed newspapers (Muhammad Speaks, for example), developed self defence security, developed conferences and debates, and did amazing public speaking, organised people into different organisations, made delegations across europe, Africa and Asia.

8. Turn hostile elements into revolutionary elements - Malcolm X always engaged directly and conceptually by those who internalise the oppression of the system, especially those who play a 'gangster' role, ie., an imperialist defined counter revolutionary role in our communities against our peoples, and Malcolm X sought to critique them, recruit them and change them totally into revolutionaries.

9. Develop maximum unity between people and organisations - Especially towards the end of his life, he was working hard to reach out to many different forces including socialists, anti-imperialist nationalists, communists, civil rights leaders to develop a united struggle against capitalism and imperialism.

10. Dedicate your life, heart and soul, to the global struggle against colonialism and racism.


Sunday 15 May 2016

MXM Easter Rising Event Report - 'The Most Important 1916 Centenary Event'

'This is the most important 1916 event I have addressed' - Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey
Event report on Malcolm X Movement's and Crimes of Britain's event 100 Years Since the Irish Easter Uprising

Friday 13 yesterday turned out to be a fantastic day to salute the revolutionaries and martyrs of the great Irish Easter Uprising in 1916.day the 13th there was a tiny bit of bad luck that was overshadowed by an enormously informative and inspiring evening. The Malcolm X Movement's event was entitled 100 Years Since the Irish Easter Uprising, and we were honoured to have two special guests, both of whom very kindly flew in especially for this event, being former PLO Ambassador to Ireland and veteran senior Palestinian revolutionary Saeb Shaath, and the most well known and respected living female Irish revolutionary Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey. It was also a great privilege to have on the panel leading global Black radical decolonial scholar Hakim Adi and finally our young comrade Gerard MacNamara from the excellent and highly successful social media project Crimes of Britain as well as MXM coordinator Sukant Chandan chairing the event. The revolutionary 'craic' was being had in full effect! The room was packed with over 80 people in total in attendance.

Sukant Chandan opened the event for the MXM as chair by stating that the historical importance of the 1916 Uprising are many including the fact that it was the only anti-imperialist uprising in Europe during the first imperialist war, and that it electrified the anti-colonial peoples especially of the British empire as it struck the enemy right on its doorstep at such a critical moment. Chandan stated the reason the MXM has put on this event and the reason that of all the centenary commemorations across the world why this one stands out is due to the fact that no one until this event has brought clearly the global anti-imperialist analysis from Africa and Asia into the analysis to 1916. Chandan singled out Peter Middleton for particular thanks who was in attendance and whom in the 1990s, was a leading political organiser in London for Irish freedom, including amongst many other the weekly protests outside Downing Street.

Gerard MacNamara from Crimes of Britain and co-organisers of this event made his maiden public speech, and a brilliant talk outlining the history of British colonial looting and genocide against the Irish people, in the forced famines against the Irish for example in taking away millions of gallons of butter away from the Irish, tearing off roofs of houses so people could not squat them and how this colonial supremacism AKA white supremacy/racism against the Irish is still normalised today. MacNamara stated that Channel 4 recently floated the idea of having a comedy on the Irish famine. While at the time of the famines a British army colonel stated: "you must pay or get out, I tell you, I care no more about turning you out on the roadside than I do about shooting the bird which flies across my path".

Hakim Adi made a very informative speech as to how the Irish struggle had inspired Black / Pan-African liberation, including stating how Claude McKay, a leading Halrem Renaissance man of Jamaican heritage spent time in London uniting with Irish revolutionaries in the 1930s. Adi also relayed how much the Irish struggle informed many ideas in the leader of the millions-strong global United Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey, who named his own building Liberty Hall after the Irish revolutionaries building in Dublin also called Liberty Hall that is still a trade union hub today.

Saeb Shaath gave a impassioned contribution imparting knowledge to the attendees as to the plots of the British colonialists in their oppression of Ireland and how they developed their oppression to then export to the rest of the people of the British colonies. Shaath focused especially on colonial partition, of which the British are the global masters, and how they have divided and partitioned many countries and regions, including Palestine and the Arab world. Shaath then recounted the current situation of British imperialist meddling in the North African and Middle Eastern regions. There were many cheers and applause for Palestinian liberation throughout his contribution from the audience.

Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey very generously flew in from Derry especially for this event but the flight was delayed for an hour so she entered the event at 830pm. However, she was welcomed by great cheering and applause and everyone spontaneously and en-masse chanted her name in unison to welcome her, reflecting the great respect and admiration her role and sacrifices for Irish freedom and socialism inspires. Devlin spoke in her typically eloquent and articulate manner on a number of issues that captivated all in attendance. She stated that she has spoken at many centenary events, events attended by great numbers of people but that the MXM event she was addressing was the most important one that she had spoken at because while Irish people have been commemorating and saluting 1916 for 99 years, it was an event like this that brought together all the global dimensions and impact of 1916. Devlin stated that the Irish people who were starved out of Ireland by the British colonialists first went to the North Americas as Irish speakers not English speakers. Devlin explained that they were not a part of the colonial 'white' club, and that there was a process that turned Irish people into white people, and that was through realising that if they spoke English that they could not be visibly defined as being phenotypically be seen as anything other than white. Devlin stated that she did not identify with those of Irish heritage that saw themselves as white in the USA, but she identified closely with the Black Panthers, with the Native American movement and other radical movements. Devlin's contribution was met with great applause and a long standing ovation.

The event saw young Black and Asian and radical white British youth and Irish patriots and revolutionaries gather together to understand each other and to unite with each other. No one else is doing this important work in England in bringing together communities of resistance, communities of oppressed peoples.

The full speeches have been recorded on video and will be uploaded in the coming two weeks and will be shared across MXM accounts and supporters on social media.

The MXM would like to give a big thank you to all our speakers, and all those who attended and put in the hard work to make this event a success.

Malcolm X Movement facebook

Next MXM public event:
1926 General Strike: 9 Days That Shook Britain

MXM twitter

Email: 2015mxm@gmail.com



Tuesday 3 May 2016

Afeni Shakur, Mother of 2Pac Passes Onto the Ancestors

The Malcolm X Movement sends love and solidarity to Afeni Shakur and her loved ones as she passed onto the Ancestors. Although we in the MXM never worked directly with Afeni Shakur, we have a long and close relationship to the Black Panther Alumni and admire and respect Afeni Shaur for her role in being one of the leading cadres of the Black Panthers in the New York chapter, and also the ordeals and challenges she had to face as a result of USA state repression of her directly as a member of the Black Panthers and as a strong Black person and more so a strong Black woman in a context of resisting intense and brutal colonial repression.

During the repression of the Black Panthers, Afeni Shakur and twenty other leading cadres of the New York Black Panthers - dubbed the 'New York 21' at the time - faced trumped up charges of terrorism against shopping malls and police offices. With Tupac Amaru Shakur (AKA '2Pac' in later life) in her womb while in prison, Afeni defended herself in the trial that saw all 21 Panthers being acquitted of all charges.

With a growing baby Afeni Shakur was closely associated with the Black Liberation Army, an armed revolutionary off shoot of the Black Panthers who carried on operations into the late 1970s. For her associations and past associations Afeni Shakur and her family continued to be subject to repression and harassment, with little Tupac even being questioned by the FBI in this primary school.

Despite all these challenges and many others, or perhaps because of these very challenges and the radical political community in which Tupac was veing raised as a child, Tupac achieved brilliant results in school and was an extremely bright and gifted child by his mid teens, as so many of our Black and Asian and working class children are. But the impact of repression is multifaceted and deep going, maybe some of the impact of all this trauma manifested itself towards the latter years of Tupac's life with continued and intensified USA state harassment of Tupac and his family.

Tupac's own step father - Mutulu Shakur - was in prison related to his time in the Black Liberation Army, and the USA state ensured that Mutulu and Tupac's communication was ended, and that brought to an end a very fruitful and interesting dialogue between the two whereby Mutulu was constantly questioning and discussing with Tupac about his cultural work as a rapper and artist.

One has to remember that Tupac was actually a leader of the New Afrikan Panthers before he became very famous, and it was fame within a colonial industry and the people around him that led to him drifting away from the type of debates and reflections that Tupac was having with his step father and others as to the on-going liberation struggle and the changes in the lives of Black people since the demise of the Black Panthers. Tupac as well as Biggie were killed in what in what points to a continuation of the counter-revolutionary covert program of state repression, dirty tricks and assassination. At a time when the imperialist system was seeing great strides in the colonial destruction of the potential and actuality of Hip-Hop and Rap as a means of uniting and advancing the Black Liberation Movement, anti-imperialism and much more, the threat of leading 100s of millions of Black youth and youth loyal to the Black Liberation was a threat too large and had to be destroyed.

Afeni Shakur and her family and comrades suffered another great tragedy after all the hurt, trauma and loss from the days of the Panthers and since. Afeni like so many Black women and mother warriors across the world took on what must have been a near impossibly task of maintaining her own life and working hard to ensure the legacy of her son.

Although Afeni moved away from some of the revolutionary politics of the Panthers, nonetheless it is inspiring that she developed her own spiritual strength to keep her going in this life until today. We salute Afeni Shakur, a true Black rose that grew irresistibly through the many layers of concrete that our enemies poured onto her and her family. Panther Power, Black Power!

Tupac's dedication to his mother, Afeni Shakur


Monday 2 May 2016

MXM Investigate UK State Criminality in its Support of Terrorism


Malcolm X Movement coordinators Dan Glazebrook and Sukant Chandan are writing a four-part series for the Russia Today news website on one of the biggest political scandals in the UK: the UK state collusion with terrorism in the Muslim world. Here follows the first part.





British collusion with sectarian violence: Part one

In the first of a four-part series, Dan Glazebrook and Sukant Chandan look at the recent spate of revelations about the involvement of British security services in facilitating the flow of fighters into Syria.

Over 13 years ago, in March 2003, Britain and the US led an illegal and unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, a fellow UN member state. Such a war is deemed to be, in the judgment of the Nuremberg trials that followed World War Two, “not only an international crime” but “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

The mainstream narrative surrounding this war, and the endless catastrophes it bequeathed to Iraq, is that it was the result of a series of unfortunate ‘intelligence failures’: the British government had been led to believe that Iraq posed what Tony Blair called a “clear and present danger” to international security by intelligence that subsequently turned out to be false.

Blair told us that the Iraqi government had an active nuclear weapons program, had acquired uranium from Niger, had mobile chemical weapons factories that could evade UN weapons inspectors, and had stocks of chemical weapons able to hit British troops in Cyprus within 45 minutes.

All of these claims were false, and all were blamed on ‘intelligence failings’, creating an image of an intelligence service totally incapable of distinguishing between credible information and the deluding ravings of crackpots and fantasists, such as the notorious Curveball, the source of many of the various made-up claims later repeated in such grave and reverent tones by the likes of Tony Blair and Colin Powell.

In fact, we now know that sources such as Curveball had already been written off as delusional, compulsive liars by multiple intelligence agencies long before Blair and co got their hands on their outpourings – and the British government was fully aware of this.

The truth is, there were no intelligence failings over the Iraq war. In fact, the intelligence services had been carrying out their job perfectly: on the one hand, making correct assessments of unreliable information, and on the other, providing the government with everything necessary to facilitate its war of aggression. The Iraq war, then, represented a supreme example not of intelligence failure, but intelligence success.

Fast forward to today, and we are again hearing talk of ‘intelligence failings’ and the supposed incompetence of the security services to explain a debilitating Western-sponsored war in the Middle East: this time in Syria.

Earlier this year, British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond admitted that 800 British citizens had gone to join the anti-government terrorist movement in Syria, with at least 50 known to have been killed fighting for Al-Qaeda or Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). The British security and intelligence community, we are to believe, were simply unable to stop them.

Opportunist political opponents blame such shocking statistics on incompetence, while the government and its supporters increasingly weave them into an argument for greater powers and resources for the security services. Both are wrong; and a closer look at some of these so-called ‘intelligence failings’ makes this very clear.

In December 2013, it emerged that MI5 had tried to recruit Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, just a few weeks before Rigby’s murder. Adebalajo had been on the radar of both MI5 and MI6 for over 10 years. He had been under surveillance in no less than five separate MI5 investigations, including one set up specifically to watch him. He was known to have been in contact with the senior leadership of Al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, based in Yemen, and he had been arrested in Kenya on a speedboat on the way to Somalia with five other youths, where he was suspected of hoping to join Al Shabaab.

The Kenyans were furious when they handed him over to the Brits only for him to be turned loose, presumably to continue with his recruitment activities.

The following month, 17-year-old Aseel Muthana left his family home in Cardiff to join rebel fighters in Syria. His brother Nasser had left three months earlier, and his family were worried that Aseel would try to join him. So they confiscated his passport, and informed the police of their concerns. The police kept the family under close scrutiny. They even arrived at his house at 5pm the day he left for Syria, to be told he hadn’t been seen since the night before. He boarded a flight at 8.35pm that night, using alternative travel documents issued by the Foreign Office. His family were horrified that he had been allowed to travel, without a passport, despite all their warnings.

A similar case occurred in June 2015, when three sisters from Bradford traveled to Syria – it is thought to join IS – taking their nine young children with them. Again, the family had been under intense scrutiny from the police ever since their brother went to join IS in Syria earlier that year. And far from being unaware of the risk of their being recruited, counter-terrorist police were, it appears, deeply complicit in their recruitment.

A letter from the family’s lawyers said they were “alarmed” by the police allegedly having been actively promoting and encouraging contact with the brother believed to be fighting in Syria: “It would appear that there has been a reckless disregard as to the consequences of any such contact [with] the families of those whom we represent,” the lawyers said, and continued: “Plainly, by the NECTU [North East Counter Terrorism Unit] allowing this contact they have been complicit in the grooming and radicalizing of the women.”

October 2014 saw the trial of Moazzam Begg, for various terrorism-related offences. Begg had admitted to training British recruits in Syria - but in his defense, he made the incendiary claim that MI5 had explicitly given him the green light for his frequent visits in a meeting they had arranged with him. MI5 admitted it was true, and the trial collapsed.

Six months later, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an interview with Aimen Dean, a founding member of Al-Qaeda who was subsequently recruited by MI6 as a spy. Part of his work for MI6, he said, involved encouraging young impressionable Muslims to go and join the ranks of Al-Qaeda.

Then in June 2015, Abu Muntasir, known as the godfather of British jihadists, thought to have recruited “thousands” of British Muslims to fight in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma, Bosnia and Chechnya, gave an interview to the Guardian, repenting his actions. He explained that he came back from fighting in Afghanistan to “create the link and clear the paths. I came back [from war] and opened the door and the trickle turned to a flood. I inspired and recruited, I raised funds and bought weapons, not just a one-off but for 15 to 20 years. Why I have never been arrested I don’t know.”

That same month, a second trial collapsed, for much the same reasons as Begg’s. Bherlin Gildo was arrested in October 2014 on his way from Copenhagen to Manila. He was accused of attending a terrorist training camp and receiving weapons training as well as possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist. The Guardian reported that the prosecution “collapsed at the Old Bailey after it became clear Britain’s security and intelligence agencies would have been deeply embarrassed had a trial gone ahead.”

In January 2016, it was revealed that Siddhartha Dhar traveled to Syria in September 2014 while on police bail for terrorism offences – the sixth time he had been arrested for terror-related offences, and not long after MI5 had reportedly tried to recruit him. Police had demanded he hand in his passport, but did not follow it up; this was despite the fact that he had revealed - live on BBC morning television no less - that he would “love to live in the Islamic State.” He later posted pictures of himself posing with guns in Raqqa, and is suspected of being the so-called ‘new Jihadi John’, appearing in an IS video executing suspected spies. The original ‘Jihadi John’ – British-Kuwaiti Mohammed Emwazi – had also been well known to the British security services, having – just as Adebolajo and Dhar - apparently been offered a job by MI5.

Is this all just a ‘catalogue of blunders’, more ‘intelligence failings’ on a massive scale?

These cases demonstrate a couple of irrefutable points. Firstly, the claim that the security services would have needed more power and resources to have prevented the absconding is clearly not true.

Since 1995, the Home Office has operated what it calls a ‘Warnings Index’: a list of people ‘of interest’ to any branch of government, who will then be ‘flagged up’ should they attempt to leave the country. Given that every single one of these cases was well known to the authorities, the Home Office had, for whatever reason, decided either not to put them on the Warnings Index, or to ignore their attempts to leave the country when they were duly flagged up. That is, the government decided not to use the powers already at its disposal to prevent those at the most extreme risk of joining the Syrian insurgency from doing so.

Secondly, these cases show that British intelligence and security clearly prioritize recruitment of violent so-called Islamists over disruption of their activities. The question is – what exactly are they recruiting them for?

At his trial, Bherlin Gildo’s lawyers provided detailed evidence that the British government itself had been arming and training the very groups that Gildo was being prosecuted for supporting. Indeed, Britain has been one of the most active and vocal supporters of the anti-government insurgency in Syria since its inception, support which continued undiminished even after the sectarian leadership and direction of the insurgency was privately admitted by Western intelligence agencies in 2012. Even today, with IS clearly the main beneficiaries of the country’s destabilization, and Al-Qaeda increasingly hegemonic over the other anti-government forces, David Cameron continues to openly ally himself with the insurgency.

Is it really such a far-fetched idea that the British state, openly supporting a sectarian war against the Ba’athist government in Syria, might also be willfully facilitating the flow of British fighters to join this war? Britain’s history of collusion with sectarian paramilitaries as a tool of foreign policy certainly suggests this may be so. This history, in Ireland, Afghanistan and the Arab peninsula, and its role in shaping British policy today, will be the subject of the articles to follow.

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