Saturday 30 July 2016

Two Byron Restaurants Shut Down with a Swarm of Insects


London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement Shut Down Two Byron Restaurants with a Swarm of Insects 





London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement have taken affirmative action against Byron restaurants chain in response to the Byron restaurants chains despicable actions in the past weeks having entrapped waiters, back of house staff and chefs in collaboration with UK Border Agency. Some 35 staff members who, many of whom were led off in handcuffs and have been deported out of the country while hundreds more are hiding in fear.

Many thousands of live cockroaches, locusts and crickets into these restaurants. We apologise to customers and staff for any irritation, however, we had to act as forced deportations such as this and others are unacceptable, we must defend these people and their families from such dehumanised treatment.

In a context of a unelected new Tory government that is the most vicious and right wing government in living memory, and in the context of growing racist and even fascist oriented policies encouraging and fostering mass resentment, racism and xenophobia towards ethnic and migrant communities, the MXM and LBRs decided we had to take some clear action to remind our communities we have the ability to strategically defend ourselves under this growing repression and exploitation in the face of adversity.

UK government minister David Davis is arguing for fascist policies that even far-right and fascist organisations stopped campaigning for decades ago in his advocacy of forced mass deportation of migrants, and a minister in the German Bavarian government is also advocating forced
mass deportation of migrants. The Brexit victory was a massive boost to anti-immigrant hate and racism, Trump is ascendant in the USA, fascist parties are about to win national elections in France and in Austria.

We as immigrant communities, Black, African, Asian, Latin American communities must all unite and defeat this growing menace that is before us, otherwise our very future as communities inside the 'West' is in direct jeopardy.

This growing racist and fascist policies, political discussion and atmosphere is taking this colonial and capitalist system into deeper crises where wars abroad and further repression at home will be increasing unless immigrant and allied communities halt this march of oppression. It's a great challenge before us, but the stakes are increasingly high for our communities and our families and communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and East Europe.

The deceptive actions of Byron is in line with this growing far-right repression of the state. The very immigrant labour that has since the medieval times been a necessary part of our societies to function, the very ones who cook, serve our food, clean up after the nation and much much more and the ones
being targeted the most. LBRs and MXM stand in solidarity with them, and consider our immigrant communities one of the first communities we should be defending and they should be in the lead of a working class and oppressed peoples struggle against colonialism and capitalism.

Our intentions of this action were to:

1. Make Byron pay for their horrifically exploitative misdeeds.

2. To inspire others to ensure Byron is shut down until they either go out of business and, they apologise to those staff impacted especially the deportees, and compensate them and their families according to sums the victims decide including any remaining wages, overtime or holiday pay due.

3. Serve as a warning to other businesses in the hospitality and catering industry that you will be targeted by those who stand in solidarity with immigrants if you entrap migrant workers.

4. We warn all immigrant communities and families that now is the time to stand up, unite, organise and push back and defeat this upsurge of anti-immigrant racism and oppression.

We apologise to customers and staff for any disruption, however, with the growing climate of racism and xenophobia, a line must be drawn and we say: enough is enough. No one is 'illegal'. We’ve acted today in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are being deported daily. If you stand in solidarity against the underhand entrapment of its workers that Byron has carried out. You should support the actions in defence of migrant workers and refugees.

London Black Revs & Malcolm X Movement
Friday 29 July 2016


Friday 22 July 2016

'Europe' Formed through A Colonial Genocide Against Africa, Asia and Islam


The Malcolm X Movement will be holding an event (details HERE) for Cedric Robinson and his amazing work - Black Marxism. Below is an extract from that work, this is an extract from Robinson explaining the genesis of modern Europe and European-ness, and how from the feudal times that feudal and the colonial conceptual nature of 'race' and 'racism' was at the heart of the developing concept of what Europe is and has become. This process took place in counter-opposition to the civilisations of Africa and Asia which were inspired and organised by the faith of Islam. This process of genocidal colonialism that developed a racialised white supremacist character, is fundamental in understanding how re-build a Black (non white) but also African and Asian revolutionary analysis and practice towards liberation. These and other connected themes will be explored and discussed at our event.

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Islam and Eurocentrism 
Extract from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, p97-100, 1983

The history of Europe for the millennium following the fifth century of the Christian era had not been markedly uni-linear. That immense span of time had contained little if any basis for teleological certainty. Indeed, there had been eras such as the eighth century when the very presence of Western high culture had been faint, preserved in scattered outposts whose own fate was made doubly uncertain by barbarian invasion and the pathetic social and material conditions of the pagan societies that surrounded them.

By the year 700, European learning had fled to the bogs of Ireland or the wild coast of Northumbria. It was in the monasteries of Ireland that fugitive scholars pre- served a knowledge of the Latin and even of the Greek classics. It was in a monastery in Northumbria that the greatest scholar of his time, the greatest historian of the whole Middle Ages, the venerable Bede, lived and wrote. And it was from the monasteries of Ireland and England, in the eighth and ninth centuries, that English and Irish fugitives would return to a devastated Europe.

Christendom slowly recovered. During what would be called the Dark Age, allied with barbarian chiefs and kings, converted or otherwise, the church gradually grew into the most mature base for the feudal organization that characterized the early Middle Ages. It acquired land, and the peasants and slaves who made that land productive and valuable. Without the slightest sense of its moral bankruptcy, moreover, the leaders of the Christian Church unmercifully exploited its human base, legitimating the brutality of the nobility, their secular kin, and sharing the profits from the labor of bound workers and a foreign trade more than eight centuries long that delivered European slaves (among other goods) to Muslim merchants. Feudal Europe, for a time, however, proved to be capable of expansion while rotting from within-but it was only for a time.

By the thirteenth century, that phase of European development was at a close; the system collapsed. The ruling classes of feudal Europe were succeeded by their Mediterranean factors: merchants, traders, and bankers. They in turn spawned or defined the roles for those actors who supplied capital, technical, and scientific expertise, and administrative skills to the states that would lead the emergence of capitalist Europe. By then, however, European culture and consciousness had been profoundly affected. Legend, as we have seen, acquired the authority of history. Moral authority continued to dissipate. The mystifying veil, which the feudal ruling classes had created to hide, or at least soften the crushing oppression that they had put in place, was in tatters. Prester John's [1] first appearance in the European imagination of the twelfth century was consequently understandable.

The legend, if it indeed originated from within the ruling class, accomplished two very disparate ends: for one it presented Europe's intelligentsia with a powerful and splendor, Roman counterpoint, inspired by Christian idealism, biblical imagery and splendor, Roman law, and Greco-Egyptian civil craftsmanship. Here was the ideal Christian society, measure by which the failures secure in its political body and spiritual soul, It was the and insidious corruptions of actual Christendom could be calibrated in detail. A model Christian Empire, which, when compared to Europe, displayed those faults that had contributed to the inability to defeat Islam either spiritually or militarily. This was the legend's internal function.

Its other significance, however, was even more critical. The legend transmuted the world beyond Europe, "the Indies," into Eurocentric terms. Whatever was the reality of those lands and their peoples, came to be less and less important. For the next 300 years, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, the legend of Prester John provided Europe's scholars and their l learned coreligionists with a structured a obfuse prism through which the authenticity of every datum, every traveler's report, every intelligence of its foreign trade, every fable of its poets, and every phatic foible of its soldiery could be screened and strained. Even direct evidence was not immune, for in the next century, G. K. Hunter tells us, this "frame of reference" was sustained:

"The new information which the English voyages of the sixteenth century brought to the national culture had to be fitted, as best it could, into a received image of what was important. This means that the facts were not received in quite the same way as they would have been in the nineteenth century. Historians of the last century were much taken with the idea of the Elizabethan imagination liberated b the voyagers. But there is little evidence of this outside the unhistorical supposition, "that's how I would have reacted." The voyages certainly did expand of physical horizon, but it is not clear that they expanded the cultural horizon at the same time. The image of man in his theological, political and social aspects could not be much affected by the discovery of empty or primitive lands." (G.K. Hunter in Shakespeare in His Own Age, 1964, p40)

The architects of European consciousness had begun the construction of that world-view that presumed the basic structure of other than European societies was at its foundation a European structure, that the moral, ideological, and spiritual scaffold of these societies was the same bottom structure discernible in European culture, that the measure of mankind was indeed the European. The legend of Prester John and his wondrous realm, the formidability of this purely Christian king who waited in patience for his Christian allies at the other end of the world, all this was the form impulse in its appropriate medieval costume. Thus, when the miraculous kingdom could not be located in the deserts and steppes of central Asia or even Cathay, it did not cease its fascination but was transferred to the south beyond the upper Nile The of other people fantasy and its attendant resolve to bend the very existence and being into convenient shapes were important beginnings for the destruction past. While the vitality Islam had seemed to mock the pathetic feebleness of of Christ's chosen, humiliating them in defeat and with the persistent threat of further occupations and invasions, the legend was compelling. And a basic lesson of propaganda learned: Europe's destiny was incompatible with the autochthonous non-European worlds. An increasingly prominent concomitant of the European millennium (roughly from the tenth to the present century) would be the refutation of those terms.

In freeing itself from Muslim colonization, Europe once again had a vigorous bourgeoisie and the state institutions to begin the construction of its own extra- European colonialism. From the fifteenth century on, that colonialism would encom pass the lands of Asian, African, and New World peoples and engulf a substantial fraction of those peoples into the European traditions of slave labor and exploitation. Capitalists were, from this point on, no longer dependent upon the material restraints Europe presented for the primitive accumulation of capital. What Genoese, Pisantine, and Jewish capitalists accomplished for Portugal and Spain in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, on their expulsions from Iberia they transferred to north western Europe. Soon after, an English bourgeoisie succeeded those of Belgium and the Netherlands in the domination of the now-extensive world system. We have, however, gone far beyond our immediate interests in the Muslim part in Europe development. Here we must conclude, still somewhat arbitrarily and abruptly, the survey of the significance of Islam in European history. For the moment it will have to be sufficient to remind ourselves that Islam once represented a more powerful civilization, and, again, one closely identified in the European mind with African and Black peoples.

In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in a way to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.

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[1] 'Prester John' was a myth, whereby European colonialists imagined a perfect Christian utopia ruled by Prester John that existed somewhere in the 'pagan' lands of the 'East'. ie., it was a legend that justified and motivated the colonialists to colonise and conduct genocide - MXM

Sunday 17 July 2016

Post-Brexit Call to Action

By MXM Coordinator, Felix Robins
06 July 2016

Now that the results are in, it is easy to see why there is so much mourning across social media; it is a dark day for many reasons and the future is not looking any brighter for the refugees on their way, resident migrants or even those of us lucky enough to be a citizen. However, some would say it is to be expected; all of us who draw family lineage on the wrong side of empire will know that in crisis, like any wounded predator, imperialists often become their most ferocious and unpredictable.

Last week Wednesday: The Malcolm X Movement (MXM), Ealing Momentum, Momentum - Black ConneXions and Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC) all got together to organize a “Remain / Leave Debate” to discuss the future beyond the referendum; more specifically, how this future relates to all of us non-white, non-British and non-Christian people living here in England. On the panel there was: Lee Jasper, representing BARAC; Sukant Chandan from MXM; Marlene Ellis from Momentum-Black ConneXions; Nana Asante, representing Africans for Jeremy Corbyn Values; Raj Gill out of West London Unite Community; and Former Cllr Zahida Abbas Noori. Despite the broad range of political backgrounds and views, there were a great number of agreements across the panel, which was what made the event such a success.

There was general agreement across almost the entire panel at the beginning laying the responsibility for the rising tide of fascism, represented by ‘Brexit’ and all its supporters, jointly with: the impotence of current mainstream leaders in dealing with the far right and their campaigns creating disenfranchised masses in the first place. But let’s not forget that “Britain has racism embedded deep in its cultural DNA”1. Moving forward from Friday’s results, there can be no room left for any denial: we now live in a country, in 2016, where a majority, no matter how small, has supported an openly-racist campaign; the culmination of which is going to lead to dire consequences on all fronts.

All is not lost. The event concluded by focusing on the most pressing action points that we need to consider. In the face of one of the most divisive forces on earth, embodied in British fascism and imperialism, unity is one of the most important defenses we have, whether it is: Lee Jasper’s unity through ‘common cause’, which can be used to reach those vulnerable EU migrant’s here who have been spat on by the result; or the age old definition of ‘politically black’, put forward by Nana Asante as well as Lee, which unites all people who fall outside of the well defined category of ‘politically white’. Either way, Sukant brought the event back to the present by making it clear that radicalism is as important a factor: the establishment have not only failed to solve this problem, they have actively contributed to its creation; so it falls on us to make our own solutions. Marlene adds to this perfectly by reminding us that we are not few, we are many; a force to be reckoned with so lets change the way we think to encompass this.

Brothers, Sisters, Aunties, Uncles, Comrades and Partisans: now is the time for action! There are those among us who have experienced first hand the kind of hate that is bubbling over now: they didn’t run; they organized, mobilized and resisted by any means necessary. So we have a duty to do the same.


 

The UK and the Brexit or when some Dumb people breaks it!

The UK and the Brexit or when some Dumb people breaks it!

By Malcolm X Movement coordinator Dr Moustafa Traore

It has been a bit more three weeks now since the referendum that resulted in the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union took place. The Brexit, as it is commonly known, is not effective yet; it will be implemented soon, though since a prime Minister was designated few days ago. On the internet petitions calling for a new referendum coming mainly from British citizens who regret their votes in favour of the Brexit has been circulating since the first hours the referendum results had been released. In Britain, many are those who, a day after the referendum, thought that their vote would have been different had they been more informed about what the EU really is and what it involves.

Let’s be clear and sincere on the issue. Most people who voted against the European Union did so mainly because of immigration. The quite well organised campaign presenting immigration in the United Kingdom as facilitated and empowered by the European Union was undoubtedly decisive in the choice most British made on the voting day. Many are those in Britain who attribute the difficulties they face with in their everyday lives to the presence of immigrants. The lack of border control within the Euro Zone is according to them the reason why immigrants can easily enter the country, take jobs and council houses that should normally be reserved to British first and only.

But what is the veracity and truth of all these ideas of immigration being an inconvenience to the UK? There is no doubt that all this is nothing more than a myth. Concretely speaking it is important to first of all to be reminded that the birth rate of the UK is so low that immigration is a necessity to maintain and ensure the renewal of new generations.

If most politicians in favour of Brexit pointed out the presence of large Eastern European communities to justify scepticism towards the EU, it is also important to underline that due to religious similarities and the colour of their skin, the East European community is, nonetheless, an easy blending community that in no way threatens Britain’s cultural landscape.

Secondly; let us not forget that some members of the Royal family have some East European blood in their veins. The current Queen’s husband -Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh- is to some extent not really West European, given the fact that he was born in Greece from a Greek family and only converted to Anglicanism later so that he could marry Queen Elizabeth II. A more accurate study and analysis of the comments made by Brexiters a few days before the vote reveals that immigration, not from Eastern Europe but clearly from Asia and Africa is what seemed to be the problem for the racists advocating for an exit, so as to better control British borders against immigration.

What these racists, and probably racialists and white supremacists do not understand is that Britain would have never become “Great” and also consequently “Great Britain”, had it not been for its different colonies. What a selfish behaviour it is, indeed, to loot remote countries for centuries and not expect to have the now deprived people coming and knocking at your door!

Had Africa and Asia not been denuded of their wealth for centuries, no massive waves of immigration from Africa towards Western countries would have ever taken place.

Besides, if it appears to be effective, the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union might undoubtedly announce some new referendums likely to take place in Scotland, Northern Ireland or again Wales. Following the results of the referendum, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon, made it clear that a new referendum on Scotland’s being part of the United Kingdom was likely to happen after the “No” expressed by England to the EU. No need to say that if that happens, the racists and racialists white supremacists would have succeeded in doing one thing which is through racism making Great Britain a little Britain.   

Raw livestream video from MXM's Muhammad Ali Memorial Event

Wednesday 6 July 2016

MXM Coordinator Argues Against Tory On Post-Brexit Racism


Saif al-Islam is Freed! / Nato War on Libya Based on Same Lies and Deceit as War on Iraq

On the day that the Chilcot Report in part illuminates the deep flaws of the war on Iraq, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been freed in Zintan, a development that relates directly to the Nato war on Libya that repeated many of the same apparent mistakes and crimes that were committed on Iraq by leading Western states. There were similar fundamental flaws in the Nato war of destruction against Libya in 2011 as there was against Iraq in 2003.

The Nato war against Libya was based several lies that have since been proven to be so, such as the lie that the Libyan government bombed peaceful protestors and that African mercenaries were being deployed when actually there was a pogrom of lynching of Black people from the outset of the rebellion, including the total eradication of the only Black African town in North Africa, Tawergha which had a population of 40,000 people.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been released by the Zintan tribe in the city of Zintan in the west of Libya after being in detention for nearly five years. Since 2011 similarly to Iraq, Libya and the Libyan and African and Asian people there have been left in a collapsed society where abduction, rape, people smuggling, thousands of militias have proliferated and led directly to the fall out of terrorism in the region including links directly to terrorist attacks in Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.

The 'refugee crisis' is also a direct fall out of the Nato war against Libya that has led and continues to lead to tens of thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Sahel and Sahara areas. Similar to Iraq, Libya was destroyed as it was a strategic unifier and uplifter of its own region in the African continent and had successes in that regard and was about to develop further Pan-African and South-South unity and development. Very similarly to UK and USA's plans for the war on Iraq, the same forces planned the same proxy militias to compliment the Nato's massive airstrikes campaign.

Saif al-Islam is a leading political figure in Libya both in the previous government of the Libyan Jamahirya and since. He is one of the most important national figures in Libya who has the capacity like other leading political prisoners and political figures active in Libya and in the Diaspora who is able to unite Libyans in the current plight they are in.

The Zintanis and most of the tribes and peoples in the Western Mountains are allied to the House of Representatives (HoR) based in Tobruk. The HoR has a legal process for reconciliation and forgiveness for political prisoners that includes Saif al-Islam. Zintan has completed this process in relation to Saif al-Islam and will be releasing him imminently. In stark contrast there was the massacre of over a dozen young men by militias in Tripoli last month, there was no due process, this was a illegal massacre motivated for purely narrow sectarian political interests. There needs to be justice and reconciliation for thousands of other similarly detained people in illegal detention across Libya, especially in Tripoli, Misrata, Sirte and other areas were Daesh or Daesh type forces have a presence.

However, there has been especially in the last year considerable moves by the social movements and patriotic tribes in developing a growing united Libyan process to healing the wounds of division and collapse between the Libyan people and their neighbours, and develop peaceful political processes in uniting the people towards an independence movement that reunifies and uses the God-given natural resources of Libya back to a socialised distribution for the benefit of all people of Libya and Africa. The freeing of Saif al-Islam is another historical development towards the reunification and independence of Libya, and many Libyans have welcomed this development.

Please get in touch with the Malcolm X Movement for Libyan and non-Libyan specialists who can speak to media on this issue.

[end]

One of the Malcolm X Movement Coordinators Addresses Thousands on Post-Brexit Racism