Tuesday 7 November 2017

MXM public event: Black Bolsheviks, with Hakim Adi, 630pm Fri 10 Dec Housmans Bookshop, N1 9DX


BLACK BOLSHEVIKS
Special guest speaker: Hakim Adi
630pm Fri 10 Dec, Housmans Bookshop
Housmans Bookshops, Kings Cross, N1 9DX
£5 Suggested entry

FB event page

Dear friends,

MXM are proud to announce that leading Black scholar Hakim Adi will be giving a talk and taking questions and comments at our Black Bolsheviks event this Friday, It is the centenary of the Bolshevik October Revolution which was a massive surge against colonialism and racism as the new revolutionary state in by many means directly supported the global revolutionary movements against colonialism. Arguably Africa and Asia would not have seen liberation from colonialism without the 1917 Revolution and then the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Be prepared to learn so much about a primarily important part of our revolutionary history.

Please see attached some memes related to the event, feel free to share.

In solidarity
MXM Coordinators Team

Wednesday 30 August 2017

MXM public event: Marcus Garvey: Origins of 'Race First' - 630pm Sat 23rd Sept, Housmans N1 9DX

Marcus Garvey & the Origin of 'Race First'
630pm, Sat 23 Sept 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road, N1 9DX
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Guest speaker: Brother Omowale (Pan-African Community Society Forum)

We are proud to announce that we are hosting Brother Omowale, a leading Pan-Africanist organiser and researcher in London on the subject of Marcus Garvey and the the origins of 'race first' in Garvey and Garvey's historic movement of the United Negro Improvement Asoociation (UNIA).

Monday 7 August 2017

MXM public event: Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance

Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance

Facebook event page

630pm Fri 25 Aug
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Speakers confirmed so far:

Sister Juni - East Oxford Carnival organiser
Arnie Hill - London Black Revs

As Black and Brown and migrant working class communities continue to feel the increasing squeeze of British colonial state oppression and exploitation, in the aftermath of the Grenfell state massacre, as Notting Hill Carnival itself sees pushes to basically annull it by removal out of the historic community of Ladbroke Grove: the Malcolm X Movement brings together this event and conversation exploring the histories of Carnival, its role as resistant cultural expressions of our experiences, and what is the outlook for the Carnival weekend in the and generally.

Wednesday 26 July 2017

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism - Fri 28 July Housmans, 630pm N1 9DY

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism
630pm Fri 28 July
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Libyan people from different parts of Libya will be speaking about terrorism in Libya and its roots and nature and how it reaches other parts of the world including Manchester. They will be speaking about the on-going persecution of darker skinned Libyan and non-Libyan African people, exposing the realities of the people smuggling and who is behind them. There will also be a person from Tawergha (pictured are internally displaced children from Tawergha), which was the ONLY Black African town in North Africa which has been totally wiped out by Nato proxy armed gangs.

Tuesday 6 June 2017

public event: Elections, Islamophobia & Terrorism - This Fri 630pm Housmans Bookshop, N1 9DY

Elections, Islamophobia and terrorism
630pm Fri 09 June 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

The political situation in Britain continues to worsen as the British Tory government and state continues to ramp-up racism particularly focused around the fallout of Brexit, in addition to that the three terrorist attacks in the three months that has raised the spectre of British state collusion with terrorism has enabled the Tory government to now signal to the country that they can be nearly racist as possible with calls for mass deportations and arrests of Muslims becoming louder and louder. This is event is an invnitation to a conversation led by some of the leading grassroots activists and advocates for the Muslim community, ant-racism, anti-imperialism and for socialism to discuss the results of the general election.

Speakers:

Arzu Merali - Co-founder and Head of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, IHRC is the leading organisation fighting Islamophobia in this country for decades

Glenroy Watson - President of the RMT trade union's London Region the Secretary of Global Afrikan Congress uk a Pan Afrikan Reparatory campaigning group

Nargess Moballeghi - Independent journalist and documentary film maker. Formally head of news at Press TV UK, and has been working as a journalist for 12 years

more speakers TBC shortly.



Please note: this is an event oriented towards migrant and Black and Brown communities, not to be dominated in any way by the white left. This event will be filmed for public viewing online and attending this event means you give permission to be filmed, however please let the organisers know if you don't want your face on camera.

IFTAR: We will be going to the local Turkish/Kurdish restaurant Best Mangal where comrades can have their Iftar with us (some of whom are fasting) if you so wish, you have to buy your own food and drinks, apologies we can not provide that.

Sunday 28 May 2017

'We told British govt they were advancing terrorists in Libya'

The Malcolm X Movement are very concerned that it is being exposed in many media reports for example here, here and here that the British intelligence services seems to have much more knowledge of the recent history and movements of the Salman Adedi the Manchester attacker than they and the British government are owning-up to. The Malcolm X Movement are proudly connected to and support the struggle of the Libyan people to resist terrorism and Nato and to struggle to reunify and stabilise their country and once again socialise their wealth for the benefit of the many and the African continent. We work with the anti-imperialist Libyan community also in England, and have had events with them and will do including the event coming up Libyans Against Terrorism, Racism and Slavery and Colonialism in late July this year. Moussa Ibrahim is our comrade, he was the last English-language media spokesperson for the Libyan Jamahirya, the socialist Libyan state that was destroyed by Nato and terrorist forces in 2011. He recently commented to us about his attempts at trying to critically engage the British government about their collusion with violent supremacist political forces in Libya, we at the MXM thought we should share this with you, as this is an issue that the British public need to know about that can better inform them further, beyond the mass rejection of the manner in which the British government has cynically tried to use the tragedy and horror of the Manchester terrorist attack:

"We told them all, British government and British media, collectively and one on one, publicly and in confidential meetings, that they were funding, arming and advancing the cause of the terrorists. They refused to listen. They understood it all. they planned it, they envisioned it, they hoped for it. Western Capitalism cannot survive without global wars, international terrorism, foreign intervention, and chaos. It is all part of the profit-making, money-generating mechanisms to feed the Capitalist Monster. It is not about religion, human rights or democracy. It is an essential, long-practiced and well-established strategy of imperialism. The left are idiots who lost their way and are unable to use genuine analytical tools and critical thinking to see through the lies and misinformation. They are intellectually and emotionally enslaved by the oppressive forces they claim to fight against. They have the minds and hearts of sheep." (comment made to MXM on 27/05/17)

Moussa Ibrahim also delivered a talk to the Malcolm X Film Festival series of events that we delivered in spring 2015, including this event in West Belfast:



Friday 26 May 2017

Salman Abedi: How David Cameron and Theresa May brought their Libyan Revolution to Manchester

Salman Abedi: How David Cameron and Theresa May brought their Libyan Revolution to Manchester

By James Stuart, a Malcolm X Movement Coordinator

If the Labour leadership had any guts at all they would go all guns blazing on the developing Abedi collusion scandal. This tory government was central to unleashing hell on Libya, it sent scores of British Libyan terrorist exiles it had given aid and shelter to, back to Libya as its boots on the ground in their 2011 war on Libya.

British born Salman Abedi was one of them. His father had been a member, in the 1980s and 90s, of the (proto-al Qaeda) Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a fanatical sectarian murder gang that brought terrorism to Libya and was sheltered and funded by the UK.

This is as clear cut a case of collusion as you will ever see. Even more so than the murky, but long proven and exposed, connections between British intelligence and sectarian loyalist paramilitary murder gangs in the six counties, this time the Prime Minister openly announced it.

As Home Secretary and in regular contact with the UK's intelligence services through the Joint
Intelligence Committees, Theresa May would have been central to greenlighting the recruitment of terrorists and sending them to Libya and elsewhere. And, crucially, in her role as boss of the UK Border Agency, in giving them entry to live in the UK and the British passports that allowed them to travel across borders unhindered.

That one of those terrorists, taking the training and contacts he had been granted only by the collusion of the British government's work in Libya, has come home and used his skills to bring the Libyan "revolution" back to the UK, should be hammered home by the opposition.

That 22 innocent people, many of them children, died in Manchester is intrinsically linked to the many thousands more innocents that died in Libya, and are still dying today, often washing up on Europe's beaches. It is a scandal of monumental proportions and needs to be brought fully to public attention

(Of course, it is pertinent to remember that large sections of the English Left fully supported this "revolution" and the terror and destruction it wrought, and still do support it as it continues in Syria)

To imagine that Salman Abedi, who was sixteen years old and still at school when he was first sent to fight in Libya in 2011, and was a frequent traveller to what is left of that country to engage in further acts of terrorism at will, up until just a few weeks ago, could do so without the full knowledge of the British intelligence services is beyond credibility.

Indeed they admit Salman Abedi was "known" to them, in actual fact he has to have been in direct contact with them. We also know that British intelligence and special forces are on the ground even now in Libya continuing to sow chaos and destruction, just as Salman Abedi and his father and brother were.

From Ireland to Afghanistan, to Libya and Syria, collusion between British intelligence services and the most ideologically reactionary and sectarian terrorist death squads has been standard operating procedure for British counter insurgency policy against states and movements it wished to overthrow for at least half a century or more.

There are so many questions that absolutely must be raised and demanded to be answered. Jeremy Corbyn should be calling for a full inquiry into what was known and by who. Who greenlighted Abedi, as a child, being recruited to fight in Libya? In fact we know the buck stops with Cameron, Hague and Theresa May. Now is the time to bring them to account.

#Collusion

Thursday 25 May 2017

event: Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism
630pm Fri 28 July
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY

Facebook event page

Libyan people from different parts of Libya will be speaking about terrorism in Libya and its roots and nature and how it reaches other parts of the world including Manchester. They will be speaking about the on-going persecution of darker skinned Libyan and non-Libyan African people, exposing the realities of the people smuggling and who is behind them. There will also be a person from Tawergha (pictured are internally displaced children from Tawergha), which was the ONLY Black African town in North Africa which has been totally wiped out by Nato proxy armed gangs.

MXM event: Somalia Resists Famine, relief worker's report back

Somalia Resists Famine: relief worker's report back
630pm Fri 23 June
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Somalia is a proud people with a leading anti-colonial past and recent history. A once stable and prosperous liberated country it has in recent decades been ravaged by imperialist-instigated destabilisation. Today in part as consequence to all this the Somali people have been facing a drought and famine. Mohammed Ibrahim Shire (pictured) has been doing excellent work by returning to the Homeland from England to assist directly with the relief work and will be educating us about what is happening there and putting it into wider political contexts. 

Mohammed Shire is also the author of one of the only political biographies of Somali anti-imperialist socialist leader Siad Barre, he will be bringing some copies with him to sign and sell.

Tuesday 21 March 2017

France CFA: A French crime against Humanity?



No Black man can pretend to be a freedom fighter today, while failing to focus on what keeps Africa from advancing. And what, other than neo-colonialism, keeps Black Africa struggling and lagging behind?  The majority of French ex-colonies have kept the chains that shackled them under French control and influence, both economically as well as militarily.

Weakness of French activism
In February, as African Americans celebrated Black History Month, many Black activists, in France, asked themselves why such movement has failed  to emerge, in the Hexagon, ignoring that French Black history is in fact a genuine African History that should first and foremost promote the African continent and denounce neo-colonialism-rather than focus only on the USA, and its civil rights movement of the 1950-1960s.

Its no secret, that French Black organisations fighting against the different forms of injustice the diaspora suffers have, in their clear majority, never had the least intention to sincerely and concretely include in their struggle the current unfair exploitation, and spoliation of the African continent. This explains their absence in the protests and demonstrations organised by the newly arrived undocumented Africans. Their silence is also blatant when it comes to pinpoint neo-colonialism in the African continent; as if by ignorance, or maybe as in a similar desire as some other French Black people who, on the other side of the Atlantic, had, in the 1920s, decided to call themselves creole and not Black once in the USA.

Neo-colonialism and Franc CFA

If the military ties between France and its former Black African colonies are well known, and quite often debated in the mass media, things are totally different when it comes to economy. Very few know that the Franc CFA, which is the currency used in some fourteen African countries is an impediment to investment and freedom of economic choices for African countries using it.
No politician campaigning in the Elysee race in 2017 is unaware of these facts, in France. Yet, the big discourses pledging devotion to work for a world with more justice are void of any denunciation of that neo or new-colonial system put into place and elaborated by General de Gaulle in 1958.

History and economic system of the Franc CFA

The Franc CFA was created in 1945. It first stood for le Franc des Colonies Francaises d’Afrique. In other words, if the French currency at the time was the Franc Français, in the French colonies of Africa, it was the Franc CFA that people used to trade and exchange. Today, fourteen African countries still use currencies with the same initials or Abbreviations. Franc CFA, however, now refers today to two distinct African currencies: - the Cooperation Financière en Afrique; which is the currency mostly used in the former West African French colonies. – And, the Communauté Financière d’Afrique; used in the former French central African colonies.
Before France adopted the European currency in the 2001, the Franc CFA currencies used in these African countries were all directly and exclusively convertible into the French Franc; which, of course, was an impediment to free and easy trade with the rest of the world. Since the adoption of the Euro by France, and the disappearance of the Franc Francais, on the 1st of January 2002, the different Franc CFAs have also become directly and exclusively convertible in Euro.

A legacy from the Nazi regimes
Many are the economists and experts who have studied what inspired the French government after the Second World War to issue that African currency in its then colonies. According to them, it appears that it was the Nazi Germany of Adolph Hitler that had previously imposed such currency system on defeated and occupied France, between 1943 and 1945. The aim was to better control the French economy and society. After the Second World War, and the so-called liberation of France, the French government will develop the same system in its African colonies.
When most African colonies access to independence in the late fifties and sixties, the economic system of the Franc CFA, as well as the presence of the French army in these territories are preserved and maintained.
The reason for this is simple: when in 1958, the General Charles de Gaulle gives the ex-African Colonies the possibility to choose between complete independence or a partial independence -with some strong economic and military ties with France-, only Guinea Conakry opts for the first proposition. A difference clearly appears, then, between countries that have chosen complete independence and those who have decided to maintain military, economic, and even political ties with France.
The few African leaders who later tried to leave the Franc CFA zones were all, without exception, targeted and toppled off through military coups, planned and organised by France. That was precisely the case for President Modibo Keita from Mali in 1964, or again President Sylvanius Olympio, in Togo, in 1963.
A Crime that only few dare to denounce
This episode of the history of the French colonial Empire also tells us that many African countries have never accessed real independence. It also means that countries using the Franc CFA today are still partially French colonies. In such circumstances, it becomes difficult, indeed, for France to bluntly recognise colonisation as negative, or as a crime against humanity. If such thing were to happen, it is doubtless that the recognition of colonisation as a crime against humanity would, soon or later, lead to the denunciation and condemnation of the current relationship between France and its former colonies.
Today, the use of the Franc CFA by African countries implies that 50% of the benefits made every year, by each of these countries, has, since the 1960s, been stored in the French central Bank, to guarantee the stability and convertibility of the currency against the French Franc, and since 2001, against the Euro. As aforesaid, there are today three different Franc CFAs; and they are not interchangeable. In other words, Franc CFAs from Mali are not accepted in Cameroon or Congo. If someone from Mali travels to central Africa, he must change his Franc CFAs from Mali into euros that he will then have to change into the French CFA used in Cameroon or Congo.
I am not good enough at mathematics and economics; yet, I understand that with all these transactions and money conversions, there, probably, is some loss.  Besides, the fact that all African Franc CFA banknotes are also printed in France, in the village of Chamalieres, is quite suspicious. Moreover, in each of the committees of the different Franc CFAs, some French nationals, appointed by the French government, have permanent seats with a veto right. It is, therefore, easy to understand that no decision can be taken without the consent and approval of Paris.
It is in that sense that this very monetary system, inspired by the Nazi German regime of 1933-1945, is seen by many African organisations as a means for France to control the economy of its former colonies and also enrich itself at the stake of these same countries.
It is also the duty of all Africans around the world to defend and support the new initiative started by the Pan Africanists in Africa, and which consists in denouncing the crime that the Franc CFA represents.

By Moustafa Traore

Monday 9 January 2017

BBC's 'Real Housewives of Isis': Sanction, Invasion, Satirisation


Sanction, Invasion, Satirisation

Suicide bombings, beheadings, rape and terrorism are jokes when it’s in Muslim countries apparently 


[This is an exclusive piece written for the Malcolm X Movement, by brother Ali Muratović]




‘The Real Wives of ISIS’ makes ‘Muslims Like Us’ seem like a pro-Islam propaganda piece. It’s that bad. When I logged onto Facebook on Wednesday a friend had posted a link to, and a succinct analysis of, a sketch from the BBC’s appropriately named ‘Revolting’ to be broadcast this coming Tuesday, 10th January at10pm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgP5wEXqq3g

My friend’s post read: ‘From the same company who knew they were employing kiddy fiddlers and did nothing about it. All fun and games until you’re reporting about the horrors of it and how they are brain washing British people. Wouldn't see this about the holocaust would you?! Leave it bbc.’

And that’s the point. An institution prepared to cover for paedophilia and the rape of children is not going to have any problem demonising Muslims. The video has already been seen by 15 million internet users.

It should be no surprise that the British regime propaganda network, after more than 20 years of intensive anti-Islam propaganda needed to back up the Global War on/of Terror, produces a sketch deliberately mocking, demonising and minimising the suffering of Muslims in Iraq and Syria and more specifically the British Muslim families who have had their young daughters migrate there often without their knowledge.

A now global conflict which has torn regions, countries, tribes, communities, families and even individuals apart, is certainly NOT a joke. If the British find it funny to laugh at their own largely poor/working class WWII dead in Dad’s Army and similar comedy that’s one thing. It’s not any of their business to be laughing at other people. I’m sure if we found it funny we have more than enough Iraqi, Syrian and Muslim channels to do it ourselves. Perhaps, unlike the British, we Muslims take our civilization seriously.

The’ scary’ scarf

Central to the sketch is of course the presence of the headscarf, mentioned in the Qu’ran (24:30-31 and 33:58-59) and regarded wajib (compulsory) by almost every Muslim faqih (jurist). It’s worth mentioning here that women are not required to wear it in the home though to be fair that’s not easy to communicate in sketch format.

How often are visibly Muslim women given their own space on television in the UK? Aside from the impressive Nadiya Hussain, rarely if it isn’t a report or discussion about war, terrorism or ‘extremism’ (to be fair despite the deliberate instigation of intra-Muslim conflict this is something that Muslims Like Us did pretty well on).

On one occasion when a Hijabi was promoted to a position of serious prominence, Fatima Manji, a reporter and newsreader at Channel 4, received a vicious Islamophobic attack from The Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie who questioned whether the sister should be reporting on news stories relating to terrorism. Why exactly would the sister have been singled out by MacKenzie? It was crystal clear in the headline ‘Why did Channel 4 have a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of Muslim terror in Nice?’

A lady wearing a headscarf should stay in her lane according Britain’s best-selling newspaper, which is not all that different to the ideology propagated by ISIS.

In this context of rising Islamophobia, particularly directed towards sisters who publicly carry the flag of Islam on their heads and have borne the brunt of attacks for example herehere and here, within the past year, we should be looking to promote a true and naturally positive image of Muslim sisters.

What ‘The Real Wives of ISIS’ does instead is to reinforce the sort of propaganda that leads to these attacks in the first place and places the scarf in the strict and exclusive context of death squad terrorism.

Not only this, but the depth of the propaganda here extends to lies including that; Muslim women are happy with a lack of autonomy, would joke about literally being chained to a kitchen sink, hashtagging Jihadi Jane (I guess using her real name of Colleen LaRose would be inconvenient), mocking grooming (I doubt the white English grooming victims of Rotherham, Jimmy Saville, and elsewhere in the British establishment will be taunted as complicit very soon) and that the worst thing women in ISIS held areas have to deal with are ‘matching suicide vests’.

The serious issues of disappearance of women from public life, forced marriage, elimination of bodily autonomy in general and slavery are minimised when the Arab, the South Asian and the Muslim is the victim.

Iraq and Syria as Untermensch non-countries

Another case of outright racism, Islamophobia and double-standards is inherent in the context of Iraq and Syria as the setting. You won’t see the British mocking the 7/7 transport bombings or the beheading of Lee Rigby in their green and pleasant land. Where Iraq and Syria is involved, well of course, after decades of sanctions, demonisation, bombings and invasions, it’s fair game.

There are things that COULD be satirised about ISIS, if that’s your thing. I don’t think most people would have an issue with Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and his death squad operatives being mocked for the tyrants they are. Nor the criminal actions of Bush, Blair, Cameron, Clinton and Kerry that enabled the rise of ISIS in the first place ie. British/American/NATO sanctions, invasions and regime change operations in Iraq and Syria. Not to mention the deliberate pouring of billions of pounds worth of weapons and arms into both countries to stimulate war, division, sectarianism and general destruction and ruin. That SHOULD be mocked and called-out at every opportunity.

The Real Sisters of the Ummah

Let alone might we see the BBC provide empowering examples of pro-women pro-liberation Islam of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya which they dutifully helped destroy (shown in this excellent and moving documentary film), or the leadership of women in Iran personified by Vice-President Masoumeh Ebtekar, or the innumerable women of leadership and knowledge in Indonesia and Malaysia. Still yet the history of Zainab al Ghazali (1917-2005), member of the Egyptian Feminist’s Union and founder of Jama'at al-Sayyidat al-Muslimat (Muslim Women's Association) who lectured to thousands during the months of Ramadhan. Some of her writing is documented in Ayyām min ḥayātī (‘Days from my life) about her time in prison.

Instead we can be sure in the coming months and years that ‘The Real Wives of ISIS’ is just one more piece in the puzzle that depicts the hijab for the MacKenzie’s of this world as ISIS-like. That it makes us worried for our mothers, wives and sisters who will be viewed as terrorists like the actresses in the sketch.

Do the BBC expect the dark jokes about a deadly group ruining and taking the lives of human beings of every colour and creed in their thousands, with weapons from the West, to be found amusing by the families who have lost their dear loved ones?

And finally, a prediction: The British dedication to their ‘rich history of satire’ is unlikely to be in operation when the chickens come home for a long overdue roosting.

Ali Muratović