HANDS OFF ASSATTA! UNCLE SAM IS THE REAL TERRORIST!
Where: Harlem State Office Building – New York, New York 10027
CONTACT: info@blackisbackcoalition.org 917-830-5338
On Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 5pm Eastern Standard Time, the New York City Chapter of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice Peace and Reparations (BIBC) will hold a demonstration in front of the Harlem State Office Building to protest the U.S. government’s recent announcement of the increased bounty placed on the life of Assata Shakur from $1 million to $2 million and her addition to the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list.
The State claims that Assata Shakur is a U.S. domestic terrorist and is offering money to anyone who can take Assata from Cuba and bring her back, dead or alive, to the U.S. so that she can be forced to serve the rest of her “life sentence” for the alleged murder of a New Jersey state trooper in the early 1970s.
The BIBC is absolutely opposed to the U.S. governments labeling of Assata Shakur as a terrorist. Assata Shakur, like the masses of African and other oppressed peoples around the world, is a victim of terrorism inflicted by the U.S. government.
It is the U.S. government that has the longest track record of terrorism on the face of the planet. Currently there are over 700 U.S. military installations in the world today. In each of those colonized territories suffering such occupation, the people face outright terror. The Afghani people suffer civilian casualties on a regular basis due to trigger happy U.S. Marine maneuvers. The same can be said all over the planet.
In fact, Cuba, the country from which the U.S. aims to snatch Assata, has been a decade’s long victim of that same U.S. terrorism that African people in this country have come to know all too well. The economic embargos and military restrictions that the U.S. has imposed on the Cuban government and people are not unlike the public policy of policy containment of the Black community here in the U.S., a policy which serves at best as a poor substitute for economic development.
The U.S. occupation of Cuba (Guantanamo Bay) is not unlike the police occupation of the African community. The numerous assassination attempts by the U.S. on the life of Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders is not unlike the U.S. COINTELPRO initiated assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King.
Assata is being labeled a terrorist by the U.S. only because of her relationship to the Black Liberation Army, which, during the 1960’s and 70’s engaged in armed struggle against the U.S. government as a means of liberating Black people from its oppressive domination.
The U.S. is intensifying its attack on all remnants and symbols of resistance from the last genuine period of revolutionary struggle in this country. This attack on Assata is an attack on the African Liberation Movement and African people in general that cannot go unchecked!
This attack on the part of the U.S. is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of weakness and desperation that was necessary on the part of U.S. imperialism as a means of overturning the tides of history that are on course to wipe imperialism completely out of existence.
BIB also understands that the intensifying attack being made against Assata and the African Liberation Movement in general could only be made possible, with minimal political consequence, through a neo-colonial Black president Obama and U.S. attorney general Eric Holder.
While these government officials are Black, it is clear that they do not represent the interests of Black people. It is Obama who has intensified a campaign of imperialist war against African and African people around the world. It is Obama who has ordered the dropping of drone bombs in various parts of the African continent. It is Obama who has given a green light to the police throughout the U.S. to shoot and kill African people at will, an initiative that has resulted in the most recent finding that an African is murdered by the police in the U.S. every 28 hours.
The fact is that while George Bush’s regime set the stage for the bounty on Assata, it is Obama who has played the leading role in the play of U.S. imperialist repression waged around the world, a play whose final act consists of such attempts to completely wipe out any remnant of African resistance within U.S. borders.
Assata Shakur on the other hand, has represented the genuine interests of African people since she joined the movement for Black Power, as she continues to do today—even as she lives in Cuba in exile because of her acts of righteous resistance during the 1960s.
The Black is Back Coalition is calling on all lovers of genuine freedom and social justice to unite with us and attend this very important demonstration being held in defense of Assatta Shakur.
Free Assatta! Free Sundiata! Free Sekou Odinga! Free All BLA Prisoners of War! Free All Political Prisoners!
Current list of demonstration endorsers and attendees include:
Peoples Organization for Progress (New Jersey)
Glen Ford (Black Agenda Report)
International Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) – NYC
Diop Olugbala – InPDUM President
African Peoples Socialist Party – Newark, NJ
Nellie Bailey – Harlem Tenants Council
Ralph Poynter – Lynn Stewart Defense Committee
