In late July of this year, seven men—three of whom were white—were arrested in North Carolina on charges of plotting “violent jihad” inside the U.S.
Almost daily headlines reveal the U.S. government’s ongoing attacks on Arab and African people in the name of fighting “terrorism.”
But what about the white people who have allegedly joined the anti-U.S. movements?
History of “War on Terror” based on slavery, colonialism
Right after the attacks of September 11, 2001 then-president George W. Bush declared the “Global War on Terror.”
Within days Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which curtails constitutional rights and increases government surveillance on citizens.
Within three weeks the government instituted the Department of Homeland Security. The War on Terror was used as the justification to attack and slaughter the people of Afghanistan in 2001 and the people of Iraq in 2003.
As a country built on a pedestal of the enslavement of African people, the genocide of indigenous people and the theft of the land and resources of colonized peoples around the world, it’s very clear that the U.S. government is the real terrorist.
In the wake of September 11, 2001, thousands of Arab people were arrested by Homeland Security forces inside the U.S., many still held in secret prisons.
The government has announced “red level terror alerts” following headlines in the media about the so-called “Columbus Shopping Mall Bombing Plot,” "The Sears Tower Plot," “The Ft. Dix Attack Plot,” and many others.
African resistance inside U.S. labeled “terrorism”
It was no surprise that soon after Sept. 11 we began to see African faces flashing across TV screens as “homegrown terrorists,” in the government’s ongoing attempt to label the just resistance of African people in the U.S. as “terrorism.”
The “Portland Seven,” “San Francisco Eight,” “Bronx Four,” and the “Liberty City Seven” were groups of Africans, often community activists, who were slapped with terrorism charges after being framed by FBI agents.
The Liberty City Seven, supported by the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, were African community organizers born in Haiti who lived in Miami’s most impoverished neighborhood. Six of the seven were only convicted with pressure from the state after two mistrials exposed the state’s fraudulent “evidence.”
As a colonized people oppressed inside the U.S., African resistance fighters from Nat Turner to Huey P. Newton have been branded “terrorists.”
That’s why the Black Panther Party of the 1960s, the revolutionary center of the African Liberation Movement, was declared the “greatest internal threat to the U.S. government since the Civil War” by the FBI.
African community has long experienced white terror
African people in this country are all too familiar with white homegrown terror, having borne the brunt of savage lynchings, murders, burnings, jailings, beatings and rapes since the day the first captive Africans were forcibly brought to this stolen land in 1619 to labor for free.
Organized gangs of white workers terrorized African people in the northern cities for more than a hundred years, while Ku Klux Klan forces brutalized Africans daily in the south.
When the U.S. initiated the draft of white workers in the north to fight the Civil War with the possibility of ending the system of chattel slavery, white workers in New York rose up in the largest civil insurrection in American history apart from the Civil War itself.
In typical fashion, according to Wikipedia.org, the protests turned into "a virtual racial pogrom, with uncounted numbers of blacks murdered on the streets."
It took the U.S. military to suppress the mob using “artillery and fixed bayonets, but not before numerous buildings were ransacked or destroyed, including many homes and an orphanage for black children.”
Today, vigilante groups are murdering and terrorizing Mexican people on the U.S. border, and armed militia forces, white nationalists with large caches of guns, are growing.
White power groups are escalating as the U.S. economy continues to tank and are being fueled by the false assumption that the election of Barack Obama represents black power.
An August 2009 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the recent rise of anti-African “hate groups.”
“One law enforcement agency has found 50 new militia training groups—one of them made up of present and former police officers and soldiers,” the report stated.
The report sums up that the “1990s saw the rise and fall of the virulently antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement, made up of paramilitary militias, tax defiers and so-called ‘sovereign citizens.’”
“Sparked by a combination of anger at the federal government and the deaths of political dissenters at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the movement took off in the middle of the decade and continued to grow even after 168 people were left dead by the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's federal building—an attack, the deadliest ever by domestic U.S. terrorists, carried out by men steeped in the rhetoric and conspiracy theories of the militias.”
In other words, the militia movement of the 1990s was angry because white “dissenters” were murdered by the U.S. government.
Currently throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union there is a rise of deadly white nationalist assaults on African and Arab people.
According to an August 31 article on the BBC news website, “Nearly 60 percent of African people living in Russia's capital Moscow have been physically assaulted in racially motivated attacks, says a new study.”
With the election of Barack Obama as president in the U.S. and his claims that we now live in a “post-racial America,” he covers over the reality that we who make up the white population live on a pedestal of the oppression of African people in a country built on a foundation of slavery and genocide.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela recently stated, “Obama has gone out of his way to appease the most reactionary sectors of the U.S. population by absolving the U.S. government or the capitalist social system of any responsibility for our oppression and exploitation, both in the U.S and in Africa.”
White “Jihadists” side with oppressed against the oppressor
Despite our history of white terrorism against African people, there are cases of white U.S. citizens who took action against the government not by attacking African people but by joining the side of those fighting for liberation from U.S. terror.
In November 2001, John Walker Lindh, now 28, labeled the “American Taliban” by the U.S. media, was captured as an “enemy combatant” during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
Lindh is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after he was captured in a “violent Taliban prison uprising” where American CIA officer Johnny Spann was killed.
According to media reports Lindh “attended a lecture by Osama bin Laden before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.”
Lindh grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was home schooled and participated in special learning programs where he studied world culture, including Islam and the Middle East.
He was reportedly a devoted fan of hip-hop music and deeply moved by The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
On July 22, 2009 the FBI arrested seven men near Raleigh, NC on charges that they plotted to secretly buy weapons, attack military bases inside the U.S. and train for “Islamic holy war.”
Among those arrested were a white man, Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39, and his two sons Zakariya, 20, and Dylan, 22.
Boyd, a building contractor, is considered the leader of the group which according to the U.K. Guardian newspaper, is a “gang of mostly American Muslims.”
Boyd, known in the media as the “American Jihadist,” allegedly had converted to Islam many years earlier and went by the Islamic name Saifullah, which means Sword of God.
His son Dylan went by the name Muhammed, and according to news reports Boyd’s wife wore a burqa.
The indictment alleged that between 1989 and 1992 Boyd “received military style training in terrorist training camps located in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
The indictment also stated that in March, 2006, Boyd “traveled to Gaza and attempted to introduce his sons to others who believed in violent jihad.”
The Guardian quotes the FBI as saying that these arrests show that “terrorists and their supporters are not confined to the remote regions of some faraway land but can grow and fester right here at home.”
According to the media reports an eighth man, thought to now be in Pakistan is also being sought. The eighth man is the son of a Pakistani father while his mother is a white American who converted from Catholicism to Islam.
After living in Pakistan with her husband and five children, she returned to the U.S., to the Raleigh, NC area with her son about 10 years ago.
Anti-colonial freedom fighters branded as “terrorists”
As imperialism in crisis attempts to solve its problems at the expense of African and other peoples, it is clear that the U.S. cannot govern in the same old way.
Despite the history of white opportunism and violence, many Europeans and North Americans do not support the U.S. government’s oppression against the peoples of the world and African and Indigenous people inside this country and are looking for an honest stand to take.
In the wake of the defeat of the anti-imperialist movements that were the main trend in the world in the 1960s and 70s, some white people, motivated to take a stand against injustice are converting to Islam.
An article from the Jerusalem Post states that as many as 100,000 French and British citizens have converted to Islam over the last decade.
Throughout the Arab world Islamic resistance is a movement that has filled the void following the defeat of the political anti-colonial movements around the world, including the defeat of the Black Liberation Movement of the 60s here in this country.
In 1981, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig under Ronald Reagan, consciously launched a campaign to brand all anti-colonial freedom fighters as “terrorists.”
The U.S. so-called war on terror is nothing more than the same old aggression by U.S. imperialism to maintain control of the resources of oppressed peoples—many of whom are Muslim—around the world for the benefit of the U.S.
While the current Islamic resistance movement is part of the overall anti-imperialist trajectory around the world, it is not a socialist, worker-led movement.
The reality is every atrocity endured by Muslim people in the Middle East has been experienced here by African people, colonized here inside the U.S. for the past 300 years.
Struggle for justice, liberation found inside U.S. as well
While the “American Jihadist” attempted to take a principled stand, a white man in North Carolina does not have to go to Pakistan to see oppression and unite with resistance.
The struggle and the resistance of African and other colonized peoples are right here inside this country.
This is why the African People’s Socialist Party has worked tirelessly for nearly 40 years to complete the Black Revolution of the 60s.
This is why the Party is building the African Socialist International, organizing African people in Africa, the U.S. and around the world to struggle to reunite and liberate Africa under the leadership of the African working class.
This is why the Party has built the African People’s Solidarity Committee, the organization of white people working in white communities, directly under the leadership of the Party.
The Party's leadership enables white people to join APSC based on political unity with the goals and aspirations of African people colonized here and around the world for national liberation and justice.
The existence of the African People’s Solidarity Committee—and even the emergence of the white "jihadists"—clearly demonstrates the opportunism of Barack Obama for bowing down to white reaction.
The African People’s Solidarity Committee is a real example of the possibility of winning oppressor nation white people to a revolutionary stance in solidarity with oppressed people for national liberation.
But this can only happen through the leadership of the revolutionary African People's Socialist Party which takes a non-opportunist stand in their relationship with white people of the oppressor nation. They demand a principled stance by white people in relationship to their struggle.
The Party's leadership shows that the African Liberation Movement, speaking in its own voice can win genuine allies, including white people in this country and worldwide.
The African People’s Solidarity Committee, under the leadership of the revolutionary movement of African workers, allows white people to break with our unity with this parasitic, oppressive government and system.
It allows ordinary white people everywhere the opportunity to join in solidarity with the peoples of the world struggling for national liberation, the only forces capable of bringing down the imperialist system hated by the majority of the planet and of building a world based on justice and peace.
