Vol. 80/No. 1 January 4, 2016
Socialist Workers campaign against Washington’s war drive
“We’ve been discussing the war drive and why it’s important to fight against the rulers’ scapegoating of Muslims as we participate in the ongoing protests against police brutality here,” wrote Alyson Kennedy from the Socialist Workers Party in Chicago. “Like the abuse the cops mete out on the street, it’s designed to protect the interests of the wealthy rulers. We’ve sold dozens of Militants and several subscriptions at these actions.”
Taking this discussion to workers and young people involved in social protests and labor struggles is an important part of the SWP’s working-class campaign against imperialism and its accelerated war drive today.
Kennedy and another party supporter visited Wheaton College, near Chicago, Dec. 18. Two days earlier students at the private evangelical Christian college held a sit-in demanding the reinstatement of Prof. Larycia Hawkins. College officials suspended Hawkins for posting on her Facebook page, “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”
“Signs saying, ‘We Welcome You’ in Arabic and English dot front yards near the campus,” Kennedy continued. “Students told us they are in solidarity with Syrian refugees. Carly Bothman, 20, said she and some other students planned to wear the hijab on their flights home for Christmas, to ‘show solidarity with Muslim brothers and sisters.’”
“We set up an SWP literature table and took part in a Dec. 20 action outside one of Donald Trump’s towers in New York opposing the scapegoating of Muslims,” writes Lea Sherman. “Many of the 200 participants were from Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan and Yemen.
“We explained that Trump is not a fascist — as the protest organizers claimed — any more than President Franklin Roosevelt had been when he ordered the incarceration of Japanese into concentration camps during World War II,” she said. “The imperialist war drive, including attacks on workers at home, is bipartisan, whipped up by both the Democrats and Republicans, as Washington increases its military intervention in the Middle East.”
Sherman said they discussed why working people need a labor party based on the unions to organize independently of the Democrats, Republicans and other capitalist parties and explained why attempts to shout down those you disagree with, including bourgeois politicians such as Trump, sets back the workers’ movement.
A handful of members of the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee from Hunter College confronted the SWP members. “They had read and opposed the Militant’s coverage on the Middle East and on the importance of free speech in the working-class movement, and tried to shut us up, accusing us of being racists,” Sherman said. “Other protesters came around to see what was going on.”
“Three people subscribed to the Militant, including a young Bangladeshi man who said he thought Trump has a right to his opinions,” Sherman said. “And we sold more than a dozen single copies and a pamphlet of speeches by Malcolm X.”
Related articles:
Washington talks of Syria cease-fire, but steps up war
Islamic State getting weaker, not bigger
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