http://themilitant.com/2016/8001/800156.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 1 January 4, 2016
Socialist Workers campaign against Washington’s war drive
BY NAOMI CRAINE
“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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