Shame, shame USA! USA is a fascist state!
No justice, no peace!
By a group of Hong Kong residents who advocate against war
Over the past week, Israel has torn apart the ceasefire agreement, first suspending the exchange of hostages, then shutting off water and electricity to Gaza, then re-launchng the bombardment of Gaza overnight on Tuesday (18th), brutally killing 404 people. Gaza can have no peace for as long as it is under Israel’s threat of annihilation. Israeli President Netanyahu was given the green light by Donald Trump to carry out the massacre, with over hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons provided by the West.
All around the world, people are rising up in solidarity with the Palestinians, and to protest their own governments’ complicity in genocide. As a group of Hongkongers who oppose the war, we stand before you today to express our support for the liberation of Palestine and for anti-war activists worldwide, who are being slaughtered, suppressed and silenced. It is all the more important for us to state the truth: Western governments, led by the United States, have ignored the voices of their citizens and become complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, furthering Israel’s racist and colonialist aims.
The arbitrary detention of Mahmoud Khalil
The U.S. government is cracking down on the pro-Palestinian movement on all fronts, fearing that the people will tell the truth about the genocide. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist, was arrested without charge by ICE after demonstrating at Columbia University, demanding that the university divest from Israel. The U.S. is attemping to deport Khalil — a permanent resident — on the obscure basis that his activism causes “adverse foreign policy consequences for the US,” thereby labeling him as “terrorist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American”.
Listen to Khalil’s words from his prison cell: “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.”
Ironically, the legislation used to arrest Khalil was the same one used by the U.S. government in the 1950s to block Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe from entering the U.S. These Jews were falsed accused to be Soviet agents so that they could be deported. It is clear before our eyes who the real anti-Semites are.
Trump’s supression of pro-Palestine protests
Student activism across American universities has renewed the world’s attention to Palestine. They were brutally cracked down by the police and smeared as anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist by the Biden administration, and now Donald Trump has seamlessly taken over the mantle of suppression to punish any support for Palestine.
After Trump signed the new “combating anti-Semitism” executive order, the U.S. Department of Justice has formed a multi-agency taskforce, purportedly to root out “harassment” of Jews on campuses. Trump made completely baseless accusations that students who support Palestine were “anti-American”, even questioning whether they were real students. Trump has also cancelled $400 million in research funding to Columbia University, forcing it to suppress the pro-Palestine movement and purge its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department, to even have a chance to negotiate the resumption of funding. 22 Columbia students have already been disciplined, suspended, or expelled.
Last year, the California State Government passed a bill requiring schools to enforce rules “against harassment, discrimination, and behaviour that creates a hostile environment on campus.” Schools are to ban face-masks, ban campus occupations, penalise staff and students who take part in demonstrations, and adopt the government’s definition of “anti-Semitism,” which equates legitimate criticism of Israel with racial hatred. Under the rhetoric of “respect for diversity”, the pro-Palestine movement is actually suppressed.
The U.S. government would rather sacrifice the freedom of speech of its citizens and residents — ostensibly America’s most cherished First Amendment right — to appease the genocidal state of Israel. Trump calls the protesting students “anti-American”, but who is the one really “betraying America”?
Trump’s own anti-semitism
Trump has frequently used accusations of “anti-Semitism” to discredit political opponents and dissent for his own political gain. Last year, he charged that Jews who voted for the Democratic Party “hate Israel” and “hate their own religion” and should therefore “be ashamed of themselves”.
However, he has no problem with platforming actual anti-Semites. In 2022, right after Trump announced he was seeking re-election, he hosted a dinner with Kanye West, a rapper who has threatened violence against Jews, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, Holocaust-denying, far-right political pundit who vowed to kill Jews in a holy war. Trump even nominated Matt Gaetz, known for his anti-Semitism, to be his Attorney General, who only withdrew after intense scrutiny over his alleged involvement with sex trafficking and sex with a minor.
Trump does not give a damn about what is truly “anti-Semitic”, he does not care about the real discrimination faced by Jews in America, he only cares about his own political career.
Witch Hunt
The U.S. government’s false accusations of anti-Semitism have facilitated a Zionist witch hunt targeting Palestinian activists. The Canary Mission, a doxxing operation funded by the Israeli lobby, has been spying on activists in the U.S. on a large scale since 2014, releasing their personal information on the internet, and using mob violence to intimidate them. The Canary Mission even created blacklists to report protesters to schools, workplaces, and the police, resulting in the loss of jobs for some graduates who did no more than to sign a BDS petition.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security actively utilises the Canary Mission’s blacklist, and the Trump administration has recently claimed that it will use AI to identify protesters in person on social media in order to arrest and deport them.
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Where there is oppression, there will be resistance. There is no state apparatus, no matter how powerful, that can cancel a resistance movement.
We call for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, for an end to the arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, and for an end providing military aid to Israel, so that Palestinians can live in peace, freedom and equality.
