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U.S. and Western imperialism out of Libya now! Self-determination and national liberation for Arab and African people!

Tripoli, Sunday, March 20, 2011—Libyans mourn during the funeral of people who were killed after air strikes.

The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) condemns the U.S. imperialist attack on Libya—an attack that initiates yet another colonial war of occupation under the Obama regime, this time on the continent of Africa.

The U.S. and other imperialist powers opened the war on Libya with a “shock and awe” attack on March 19, the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The aggression against Libya included the launching of 100 “Tomahawk” cruise missiles and 40 bombs dropped from U.S. B-2 “Stealth Bombers.”

At least 60 civilians are reported to have been killed in this initial assault. This brutal action established the “no-fly zone,” that cleared the Libyan airways for a U.S.-backed invasion.

This enables the U.S. and other imperialist forces to terrorize the people of Libya with impunity, to steal Libyan oil interests in Benghazi and to try to secure a balance of power in the North African region in favor of the increasingly weakened U.S.

The U.S. initiated the action after the United Nations Security Council voted on Friday, March 18 to sanction the no-fly zone for the benefit of the imperialist powers.

The Security Council vote passed with the cowardly abstention of China and Russia, who are now making statements opposing the imperialist action. Even the neocolonial Arab League and the African Union, which generally act in the interest of imperialism, have opposed this war.

The U.S. charged that Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was attacking the people of Libya—this was used as a pretense for this newest colonial war in the Middle East. In reality attacks on citizens are being waged by U.S. neocolonial client states such as Bahrain and Yemen, to which the U.S. government has issued no response.

While imperialist U.S. president Barack Obama states that he will not send in “ground troops,” in fact the U.S.-led imperialist forces have already been arming and leading the so-called rebels on the ground in Libya. Despite U.S. media claims to the contrary, the Libyan “rebels” are a small, imperialist-backed group whose sole purpose is to undermine the Gaddafi government and usher in U.S. interests.

On March 7, UK newspaper The Guardian reported that Libyan farm guards arrested seven British intelligence force soldiers near the oil-rich Libyan town of Benghazi.

As African Socialist International (ASI) Chairman Omali Yeshitela has stated, “The real issue is the crisis of imperialism that is challenging the balance of power in the North Africa/Middle East region to the detriment of U.S. and world imperialism.”

Rapid changes resulting from the mass uprisings in long-time neocolonial states such as Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and others in the region have undermined the strategic interests of the U.S. and Western imperialist forces.

In light of these developments in a region rich with oil and other resources and which has strategic interests including protecting the settler state of Israel, “Iran and Libya have become increasingly significant to the imperialists,” said Chairman Yeshitela.

“Libya’s opposition to the white nationalist Israeli settler state and support for Palestinian resistance offers another problem for the U.S. and other imperialists,” he continued.

APSC also denounces the desperate attacks on the people of Yemen and Bahrain by U.S.-influenced and directed governments.

As Chairman Yeshitela has stated, “This is an attempt to push back the tide of history resulting from the growing resistance of the peoples of the world that threatens to push Western imperialism into its grave.”

Even as the U.S. is bombing Libya it is intensifying its war against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the days leading up to the bombing of Libya, U.S. drone bombings murdered 40 people in Pakistan where anti-American protests have been growing following the release of the U.S. CIA agent who murdered Pakistani citizens.

U.S. attempting to return the world to open colonial domination

The U.S. is openly attempting to control the elections in Haiti where the Obama regime has appointed William Jefferson Clinton as the colonial viceroy.

Last week imperialist U.S. president Obama called neocolonial South African president Jacob Zuma in an attempt to persuade Zuma to prevent popular, U.S.-deposed former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from returning to Haiti. Obama expressed no problem with the recent return of former murderous neocolonial dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier to Haiti, however.

Inside this country the U.S. is waging an increasingly deadly war against African and Indigenous people with massive military occupations of African and Mexican communities, ongoing police murders of African civilians, mass roundups into the colonial prison system and deepening poverty.

Inside the U.S. and throughout the world the masses of people are struggling to overturn the legacy of white power, which starves them and steals their resources and sovereignty for the benefit of the white world.

All throughout the Middle East and all over the African continent, in South America and inside the U.S., people are rising up by the millions!

The military assault on Libya is another desperate attempt to rescue imperialism from its inevitable downfall.

The anxiety of the white population—the oppressor nation—inside the U.S. and Europe is palpable as U.S. economic, political and military power faces serious threats to its parasitic existence on every front.

The crisis of imperialism is based on the fact that the U.S., Europe and capitalism itself were built on the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the Indigenous people and the theft of the land, resources and civilizations of the majority of the people on the planet.

Oppressed peoples of the world have had enough. They are struggling for justice and liberation by any means necessary.

African, Arab and Indigenous working classes are waging increasingly successful struggles to throw off the iron hand of this parasitic system. They are struggling for the return of their stolen resources and to regain control over their own nations, resources and governments.

APSC calls on the white population to abandon its unity with imperialism and join with oppressed peoples of the world, including those inside the U.S., who are struggling for national liberation, justice and power over their own lives.

White people who unite with the demands of the rest of the world’s peoples must go beyond calling for “peace.” This is a call to be part of creating a new and just world. Join the struggle to destroy imperialism and the pedestal on which we sit at the expense of the majority of humanity.

Participate in the Black is Back Coalition’s Conference on the Other Wars
March 26 in Washington, DC
www.blackisbackcoalition.org

U.S. out of Libya and the Middle East!
Victory to Arab and African people as they struggle for self-determination and national liberation!

U.S. and all imperialism out of Libya!
Reparations now!

Assassination threats against Chairman Omali Yeshitela part of counterinsurgency

This article is being reposted from Uhurunews.com. The Uhuru Solidarity Movement shares this article to express our solidarity with the just struggle of African people to defeat the counterinsurgency and win liberation and self-determination in their own hands. We call on all sectors of the Euro-American population to join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (uhurusolidarity.org). Africans have a right to resist! Hands off Omali Yeshitela!

In the same week that the U.S. government deployed over 200 assault weapon-toting police officers, FBI tanks and SWAT in military uniform in order to keep the African community of South St. Petersburg, FL on lockdown, the U.S. government’s counterinsurgency intensified against the Uhuru Movement in the form of direct assassination threats made against Chairman Omali Yeshitela.

A nationally syndicated white nationalist radio DJ called for the Chairman’s death.

In addition, in an online police message board, cops have been posting threats of violence against community meetings at Uhuru House, calling for the assassination of anyone, as they revealed a government-sponsored surveillance of the Uhuru House by a private investigator based in Sarasota, FL.

These media attacks do not represent the isolated rantings of a marginal sector of white society, but are part of a broader U.S. government-sponsored counterinsurgency against the African community in order to intimidate and neutralize the revolutionary leadership of the movement for African liberation.

During the Black Revolution of the Sixties, the FBI created a counterinsurgency program called COINTELPRO whose stated purpose was “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”

COINTELPRO was carried out by the FBI in collusion with local police departments in all of the areas where the Black Revolution of the Sixties was occurring.

Examples of COINTELPRO activities include the assassinations of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and over 30 members of the Black Panther Party, as well as countless others arrested or forced into exile.

Counterinsurgent operations against the African community and the movement for African liberation continue to this day, as evidenced in the recent counterinsurgent assault against the African community of St. Petersburg that consisted of a military occupation of South St Pete and a vicious ideological assault on the Uhuru Movement.

“Bubba the Love Sponge” Calls for Assassination of Chairman Omali

For several weeks now on a popular Tampa Bay radio program, a white radio DJ named Todd Alan Clem, better known as “Bubba the Love Sponge,” has devoted hours of air time to attacking and slandering the Uhuru Movement, even going so far as to call for the assassination of Chairman Omali Yeshitela.

On February 25, 2010, Clem played clips of Chairman Omali Yeshitela speaking at a rally in St. Petersburg after the police murder of Hydra Lacy, an African who allegedly killed two cops and wounded another during the police invasion of his home on January 24, 2011.

Clem and his co-hosts called on the FBI to investigate and shut down the Uhuru Movement. “The Mayor should be going to speak to the FBI,” said one of Clem’s co-hosts. They also called on the IRS to investigate the Uhuru Movement’s financial records.

After playing the clip of the Chairman speaking, Clem said, “Wouldn’t you just love it if the boys rolled up during one of these little meetings and they just cuffed and stuffed him?” He later said, “Does this not just incense you? Does this not just make you want to take up arms and go kill this guy?”

Clem’s white nationalist views are defined by his undying allegiance to the police and U.S. government.

He glorifies the occupying police forces and demonizes the Africans who are subject to police containment.

On the same morning that Bubba declared his desire to assassinate Chairman Omali Yeshitela, he interviewed the former mayor of Tampa, Dick Greco, and encouraged his listeners (the “Bubba Army”) to re-elect Greco “because he talks about the police and enforcing laws, which is great.”

In 2008, Clem established a 501(3)(C) nonprofit, “Bubba the Love Sponge Foundation,” to raise funds for the families of police officers who died occupying the African community.

Clem even carries an “honorary Sheriff’s badge” along with a stockpile of firearms in his automobile. (http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/media/2009/06/shopck-jock-bubba-the-love-sponge-clem-off-radi-othis-morning-after-losing-two-handguns-in-car-burgl.html)

Clem posted on his website a screenshot of the Uhuru News homepage and encouraged his clan of followers to comment on the articles. As a result, the “Bubba Army” has flooded hundreds of posts into the comments section of several articles on Uhuru News.

These posts have exposed white nationalism at its most raw and base level.

Comments have included demands for the “Uruhus” to “go back to Africa”, references to Africans as “tar babies,” “monkeys,” “velcro-headed niggers,” etc., and threatening comments to intimidate the supporters of the Uhuru Movement, such as: “You have more to fear than just the Bubba Army. There is a force greater than even that at work… Expect us.”

Rabid White Nationalism Exposed in Comments on Media and Police Sites

These comments are no different from those regularly posted in response to any article about the African community or the Uhuru Movement on the St. Pete Times or even the liberal “progressive” media outlet, WMNF.

Comments posted on WMNF’s article about the press conference held by the Uhuru Solidarity Movement to denounce the military occupation of the African community in St. Petersburg, FL, included references to a 16-year-old African, Nicholas Lindsey, as a “thug” and an “animal” who is “extremely lucky he’s not full of bullet holes right now.”

Some comments have been aimed at Penny Hess, Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), as well in response to APSC’s opposition to the military occupation of the African community.

A comment on a February 22, 2011 St. Pete Times website article entitled “St. Petersburg police search for killer as they mourn another fallen officer” says: “While we may kill many of them, we cannot win a battle against an enemy that is using unconventional tactics that quickly adapt to our force. If we, the citizens, wish to combat these people, we must use unconventional tactics. If we employ terror tactics on groups like the Uhurus and scare them underground, they will cease to be a threat. It’s time to take it to the Uhurus and eliminate them in their own territory.”

A search for “Uhuru” on LEOAffairs.com, an online message board for cops (as its website proclaims, “the online voice of Law Enforcement”) yields several hundred pages of comments related to the Uhuru Movement, especially in the section of the forum devoted to the St. Petersburg Police Department.

A comment in response to the video of the Chairman speaking at a rally for Hydra Lacy, posted under the username “Benjamin Martin,” writes: “Time for the Feds to step in or Society to take a stand to eliminate the problem. I’d be interested to know who was in the audience…”

On February 26, 2011, a LEOAffairs poster named “WithRespect” posted information regarding the weekly Sunday meeting at the Uhuru House, and wrote, “Drive-by comes to mind.” Another person under the username “run them over” wrote: “involuntary vehicular homicide would have been justifiable for the whole crowd.”

“Private Investigator” Participates in Campaign of Attack Against Uhuru Movement

It has also come to the attention of Uhuru News that a private investigator named Bill Warner has been spying on the Uhuru Movement.

Warner is based in Sarasota, FL and runs a blog to document his work as a private investigator. He and his wife also run a tile laying business, Warner Bros Carpet and Tile.

In the past week, Warner (who you can learn more about here) has posted a blog entry about the Uhuru Movement at least once a day, including personal details about the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party.

On the day before the Sunday community meeting at the Uhuru House, referenced in the above mentioned LEOAffairs post, Warner photographed the Uhuru House with a police car sitting right outside and posted it to his blog indicating his role in working with the police in the attack on the movement (HYPERLINK “https://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/“https://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/).

On February 28, 2011, Todd “Bubba” Clem interviewed Bill Warner on his show and said that he thinks the Bubba show should hire Bill Warner as their private investigator (http://www.btls.com/news/recaps/monday-february-28-2011.html).

Warner said he watched the Sunday meeting at the Uhuru House and claimed that the audience consisted of about 50 people, mostly white. This is an outright lie, and in fact, the video footage of the Sunday meeting does not contain any shots of the audience.

Warner employs the tactic of disinformation as part of the counterinsurgent “battle for perceptions.”

This can also be seen on Warner’s blog entries where he interchangeably refers to the Uhuru Movement as the Black Panthers, even though these are two separate organizations.

In the same show in which he interviewed Warner, Clem denied that he ever wished for physical harm against the Chairman. The official recap of that February 25 show contains no mention of Clem’s express desire to “take up arms and go kill” Chairman Omali Yeshitela (http://www.btls.com/news/recaps/friday-february-25-2011.html#comments).

That program was, however, recorded, unedited. Clem’s repeated pleas for arrest, imprisonment and assassination of Chairman Omali Yeshitela are heard loud and clear on this page.

Defining Counterinsurgency

These ideological attacks on the Uhuru Movement in the ruling class media are consistent with the official U.S. government’s strategy for counterinsurgency operations (COIN) that are found in U.S. Army General Petraeus’s widely distributed manual on counterinsurgency.

Petraeus defines insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government.”

Petraeus writes, “Insurgency has taken many forms over time, from struggles for independence against colonial powers, to the rising of disadvantaged ethnic or religious groups against their rivals, to resistance to foreign invaders.”

He coins the term liberation insurgency to denote a situation wherein “indigenous elements seek to expel or overthrow what they perceive to be a foreign or occupation government.”

Counterinsurgency is defined as “those political, economic, military, paramilitary, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to defeat an insurgency.”

Petraeus notes the significance of ideology as a motivating factor for insurgents. “The most powerful ideologies tap latent, emotive concerns of the populace, such as the desire for justice, religious beliefs, or liberation from foreign occupation.”

In a section titled “Media and the Battle for Perceptions,” Petraeus explains, “The media directly influence the support of key audiences for COIN forces, the execution of their operations, and the opposing insurgency.

“Recognition of this influence creates a war of perceptions between insurgents and COIN forces that is conducted continuously through the communications media.

“The media are a permanent part of the information environment and effective media/public affairs operations are critical to successful military operations.”

Patreaus writes that counterinsurgents should “respond quickly to insurgent propaganda. As stated above, delaying a response can let the insurgent story dominate many news cycles, allowing their version of events to become widespread and accepted.”

It is clear that the U.S. government has a plan in place for the African community whenever it shows signs of anti-colonial resistance, such as the heavy military occupation that ensued after a 16-year-old African on February 28, 2011 allegedly shot and killed a cop.

These media attacks are a component of the counterinsurgent assault on the colonized African community and the movement for African liberation.

The colonialist-capitalist State recognizes that the African working class, working under the leadership of the Uhuru Movement, presents a most serious threat to a parasitic capitalist social system that requires as its foundation the exploitation and oppression of African people.

These military and ideological expressions of white nationalism and anti-African hatred are indicators of the desperation of imperialism in deep crisis.

As anti-colonial resistance to U.S.-sponsored terror spreads throughout the African community in the U.S. and around the world, it is clear that U.S. imperialism is on its last dying breath.

The U.S. government’s desperate efforts to destroy the Uhuru Movement as representative of the leadership of the African working class will not succeed.

We are calling for Todd “Bubba the Love Sponge” Clem to be removed from the air.

Hands off the Uhuru Movement!

Hands off Chairman Omali Yeshitela!

African People have a Right to Resist! US government waging full-scale counterinsurgency in African communities!

On March 3, 2011, in St. Louis County, MO, Todd Shepard, 43, an African man, admitted to a jury that he deliberately killed a white policeman in 2008 after his girlfriend was murdered by a white cop in a crime that was ruled “justified.”

According to an article from ksdk.com, “Prosecutor Bob McCulloch asked Shepard, ‘It was your intent to kill him, right?

“Shepard said, ‘Yes.”

“’You were cool?’ McCulloch asked.

“’I was cool,” Shepard said…

“’You were deliberate?’ McCulloch asked.

“’Absolutely,’ Shepard said.

“He said he was looking for a white officer either on foot or in a car…

“Shepard said, ‘Among other things, the bullet not the ballot is the best way for the black man in America to gain power.’”

On January 24, 2011, MSNBC ran a story stating that “Police fear ‘war on cops,’” after a 24-hour period in which 11 police officers were shot in cities around the US, including in the states of Washington, Oregon and Indiana, as well in Detroit, MI, and Miami and St Petersburg, FL.

A month later in St Petersburg, a 16-year-old African high school student, Nick Lindsey, allegedly shot another police officer to death on Feb. 21, the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X by the US government.

Following the killing of the cop in February, the African community of St Petersburg was put under a military occupation. This collective punishment involved armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters and federal police forces wielding assault weapons while carrying out car-to-car and house-to-house searches over a 33-block stretch of south St. Petersburg.

It was the kind of operation reserved for the black community. We would not have seen this mass lockdown on the white north side of the city.

Yes, there is a war going on inside this country and it’s been going on for many years. It is a war waged by the US government against the African community, with the police on the front lines imposing a level of violence and brutality comparable to anything the US marines are carrying out in Afghanistan or Pakistan. This kind of war and brutality is unimaginable in the white community.

The war against the African community, fought under the "war on drugs," is a counterinsurgency, no different than the "war on terror" fought against the people of the Middle East.

In Afghanistan over the course of the US war, between 5,000 and 9,000 civilians have been killed by US forces, according to Press TV.

In the US about 9500 civilians—mostly African—have been murdered by police between the years of 1980 and 2005, according the article, “Killed by the cops,” on the web journal colorlines.com. That’s about one person a day.

“The number of black people killed by the police [in each city studied] was at least double that of their share of the city’s total population,” the article stated.

This is a war that has put more young black men in prison than in college, that has long been exposed as having imposed crack, heroin and other deadly drugs in the African community, that has created a multi-billion dollar prison industry that feeds the white community’s economy growth.

There are now more prisoners in the US than farmers and in rural America prisons are the third largest employer.

The US has five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Seventy percent of those prisoners are African, Mexican other “non-white” people. (New York Times, April 3, 2008)

According to www.drugpolicy.org, “the rate of drug admissions to state prison for black men is thirteen times greater than the rate for white men... Blacks constitute 13 percent of all drug users, but 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of persons convicted, and 74 percent of people sent to prison. (Race and the criminal justice system).

This is a US war waged for the purposes of suppressing a profoundly impoverished and historically oppressed African community, a community under the gun, without power over its destiny.

This war is waged against a community in which 38 percent of young people grow up without a future under the yoke of deadening poverty. Young African people live under the ever-present menace of police occupation with the ongoing threat of discriminatory sentencing, gratuitous violence, oppressive schools, false charges, joblessness and the likelihood of many years in prison. They see their friends murdered by police who walk away with no consequences.

Police killings of the nearly 10,000 unarmed African civilians in this country include a long list of young black men from Oscar Grant, executed by BART police in San Francisco while he was in a subdued position, to Sean Bell, gunned down by police on his wedding day in New York.

Seventeen-year-old Javon Dawson, shot in the back by police at a high school graduation party in St Petersburg in 2008, was the fourth black teen murdered by police in this city in the past several years.

Police murders also include representatives of the entire African population, including 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in Detroit and 92-year-old Katherine Johnston in Atlanta among thousands of others

African people are angry and fighting back.

A St Petersburg Times article from March 3, titled ”Officer’s slaying becomes a teaching moment,” states that high school students were wearing “Free Nick” t-shirts in support of 16-year-old Nick Lindsey who will be tried as an adult for allegedly killing the St Petersburg cop on Feb. 21.

According to the article, “a few students…seemed to want to dismiss Lindsey's actions because the teen is black and the officer white…

"’The mind-set of some of our kids, but not all, is that this is payback for all the times they've shot a black youth and gotten away with it,’ [Gibbs High School principle] Gordon said.

“The issue won't go away, school leaders said.”

Like any armed conflict the US wages against oppressed peoples anywhere in the world, this counterinsurgency is war without terms or rules of engagement.

And like counterinsurgency in Afghanistan or Iraq, it is a war to make money at the expense of the lives and futures of millions of African people.

It is a war to make sure that the community never attempts to rise up again to fight for justice, liberation and reparations again, in the way that the Black Revolution of the 1960s shook this government to its very foundations.

It was the government’s counterinsurgent COINTELPRO program that assassinated Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton and countless others African leaders fighting for power and justice for African people.

Such a war anywhere in the world elicits a just resistance. People under siege will fight back, and would rather “die on our feet than live on our knees for fear of colonial rule,” in the words of Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the anti-colonial liberation movement in Kenya in the 1950s.

For us white people, it is not enough to just call for peace.

We have to stand for the right of oppressed people everywhere to resist and win their national liberation from US domination—whether they are in Egypt, Palestine, Afghanistan or the streets of Brooklyn or St Petersburg.

We have to stand against Obama’s other war’s right here before our eyes—the violence and terror of the imperialist state carried out in our name against the African and other oppressed colonized communities inside these stolen borders.

We have to stand for the right of African people to resist imperialism and to struggle for Africa and all its resources, to overturn 400 years of enslavement, genocide and imperialist theft of African and Indigenous resources, land and labor that created the wealth and power of America, Europe and the white world.

As we can see all around us the entire world is rising up against US imperialism—including African and oppressed peoples inside this country.

We demand, US hands off the African community! Support African resistance! Reparations to African people now!

Join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (http://apscuhuru.org) and support the Black is Back Coalition’s Conference on the Other Wars, on March 26 in Washington, DC. http://blackisbackcoalition.org/

It’s time to jump off our crumbling imperialist pedestal built on the backs of Africans and other colonized peoples. Wake up and join humanity in bringing down imperialist white power. Be part of building a just world in which oppressed peoples gain self-determination and control over their resources and destinies.