Activists fight back
The truth is many shades of grey. There are thousands of young people who are filling the ranks of new organisations like Not In Our Name, United For Peace, Drum (Deshis Rising Up in Movement), SAPBR (South Asians against Police Brutality & Racism) and International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But you wouldn't know all this from watching CNN! The mainstream press is working overtime to hide these facts. But behind the scenes, on the streets, through the Internet and in alternative media outlets, a resistance movement is growing.
WHEN bad times come, there can also be a positive side effect. It wakes many of us from lethargy and apathy. That is what is happening in an America changed by September 11. As civil liberties and immigrant rights are attacked, and the Pentagon beats the war-drums, the activist community is waking up and mobilizing in unprecedented numbers. They are taking their dissent to the streets, to the college campuses, and to the internet. During the 1960's Vietnam protests, the slogan was "Hell No, We Won't Go". In 2003, the slogan is "Not In Our Name."
I arrived here for college thirteen years ago. For the first few years, many of our activist projects in the US were involved with Bangladesh. As recent arrivals from Bangladesh, we were still intimately connected with issues "back home". Fundraising for floods, campus events, letters to the editor -- the usual things. The earliest petition we wrote was in the early '90s, urging ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) to rescind a conference invitation to war criminal Ghulam Azam. That petition did not succeed in convincing ISNA. Instead, I got a hostile call from one of their officers. The man on the phone called me "brother" (which always make me suspicious) and asked me to amend my ways -- as if speaking out against a 1971 war criminal was blasphemy. We had the wind briefly taken out of our sails by that failure, but the activism continued. Over the years, many more Bangladesh petitions were written. The Shobak. Org website's back pages are littered with petitions for Badruddin Omar (the banned 21st February article), Farhad Mazhar (arrest after "Ansar rebellion" article), Rahnuma Ahmed (JU campus sexual harassment cases), and others. After a few years of living here, our activism shifted to take on more of our immediate surroundings. We started becoming involved in "American issues." The first Gulf War came along, our main project became anti-war protests. A South Asian identity became less important, this was a larger struggle against imperialist adventures. "No Blood For Oil" t-shirts were everywhere. With the end of that war, the peace movement ran out of steam. Domestic crises engaged us. A doctor was shot dead outside an abortion clinic. People formed human chains to protect the clinics. Affirmative Action was under attack in colleges, and we marched with Black students to protest. Genetically Modified foods became a hot topic, and neighborhoods petitioned supermarkets to start carrying organic food. The Globalization movement started forming, culminating in the watershed protests at Seattle.
Then came the xenophobia tide led by California's Proposition 187 and Peter Brimelow's book "ALIEN NATION". Although Brimelow was a British immigrant, he spoke out against the "wrong type of immigrants" (smelly brown ones). The first attack on the World Trade Centre happened (everything in our present day is like a sequel to an old film)...
Immigrants were suddenly in the spotlight. But the Oklahoma bombing helped push things in the other direction. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested, Connie Chung and other TV reporters who had immediately blamed Arabs were on the defensive. White extremists were a problem for those who wanted to pin all terrorism on the "dark hordes". During this phase of the struggle, we found new allies among the country's huge Latino population.
Returning home one night, I saw a convoy of police cars near my Hell's Kitchen apartment. "Must be an accident," I thought. The next morning I learnt that Patrick Dorismond had been shot on that block, by a police officer who thought he was reaching for a gun. Investigations found that he was unarmed! Soon after that, Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by the police -- he was only reaching for his wallet! New York city exploded with pent-up racial tension. A black man in Harlem ran in front of a TV camera, holding up his one-year old baby. "Shoot him now," he screamed, "You'll do it anyway. There ain't no place for a 'nigger' in this country."
Even though Amadou was an immigrant, the struggle for him became a Black struggle. Although these were bad times, it was exhilarating to go to rallies in Harlem and see so many Asian faces along with Black faces. When one rally blocked Times Square, the plastic handcuffs came out and police started chasing the protesters and herding them into vans. As we ran away from the police, I found myself running next to a co-worker from my office. "What are you doing here?" she said. "Why shouldn't I be here?" I replied. Both of us had worked at a corporate television network for two years without being aware of each other's politics -- we had kept our secrets well.
Protestors started calling New York a "police state". People were constantly protesting the NYPD's tactics. The police were getting used to meeting protesters who would hold up a wallet and chant, "Police Training 101/It's a wallet not a gun" and "It doesn't take 41/To kill a man without a gun". The Community board started putting up pacification posters that read, "New York needs CPR= Community, Police, Respect." People would deface or rip down those posters. Like an army under siege, the police responded by getting more aggressive. Transportation Alternatives arranged monthly bicycle rides where we bikers would take over city streets and bike down to the World Trade Centre -- to show support for car-free streets. These events were very innocuous; we had never had any trouble. That year, I watched horrified as our bike convoy got stopped, again at Times Square, and police started grabbing the leaders and shoving them into vans. Arrested for riding a bike, no one got believe it! Infuriated riders started head butting the police, inflaming the crowd further. Shouts of "Shame, Shame" filled the air.
Everything was volatile in New York. Mayor Giuliani managed to infuriate people no matter what he did. The Brooklyn Museum showed England's "Sensation" art exhibit. Giuliani tried to block the show, claiming it was anti-church. People lined up around the block to get in, their way of giving the middle finger to "Herr Giuliani". When more cases of police brutality happened, the Mayor tried to talk about falling crime rates (which, to give the devil his due, were true)-- but no one was listening.
Then came September 11. Overnight, the whole city changed. The once-hated NYPD police became heroes (deservedly), as did the Fire Department. With a huge death toll, they earned our respect. Young kids, who were once so hostile to the police, now nodded in grudging respect. Mayor Giuliani garnered many positive reviews by speaking out against attacks on immigrants, and putting convoys of police in front of Arab stores in Brooklyn. TIME magazine put him on the cover as "Man Of The Year" and even my activist friends did not complain. These were different times now.
But after September 11 came the new anti-immigrant backlash. Not so much Muslim-phobia, as it was phobia of the new and different. In America's recent past, the Irish, Italian, Spanish, Jews, Blacks and East Asians were being called "Mick", "Wop", "Spic", "Kike", "Nigger" and "Chink". I once saw a restaurant sign from the 1930s that read "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs". Arabs and Muslims were just the newest group to receive the baton of hatred that had been passed down through generations.
But there are some bright spots as well. The average American is not as xenophobic as 10 years ago; there are many more open-minded people. Some of the strongest voices for immigrant rights come from white Americans who have lived here for generations. The Jewish community, which was refused permission to immigrate during the Holocaust, has come out against INS Registrations. The Japanese-American community, remembering their own forced internments in 1940, has organized their own rallies. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is a strong voice for civil liberties, and their membership has jumped since 9/11. But there is also a deadly combination of a powerful White House, and a Republican-controlled Senate, Congress, and Supreme Court. What is to be feared are the draconian immigration and surveillance laws that they will pass in these moments. The activist fight is now against passage of those laws.
To quote the over-used Dickens line: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The unprecedented attack on civil liberties, the immigration crackdown and the impending war on Iraq have mobilised many thousands of activists. At the October 26th Washington DC rally, 200,000 people showed up. I was stunned at the sheer size of the rally and the enthusiasm of the crowd. A friend and I started doing a Bengali chant "Mani Na, Manbo Na." Three teenagers came over and asked us what it meant. Then they tried to imitate us, mangling the words in their mid-western accents. Finally giving up, one of them gave me a "high five" and ran off to join a large group of high school students. There they resumed their previous chant: "Hell no we won't go/We won't kill for Texaco!" I stared at them amazed -- they were not even old enough to go to war, and here they were, protesting with gusto! Don't believe the hype about lazy, video game playing, apathetic teenagers. The truth is many shades of grey. There are thousands of young people who are filling the ranks of new organisations like Not In Our Name, United For Peace, Drum (Deshis Rising Up in Movement), SAPBR (South Asians against Police Brutality & Racism) and International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But you wouldn't know all this from watching CNN! The mainstream press is working overtime to hide these facts. But behind the scenes, on the streets, through the Internet and in alternative media outlets, a resistance movement is growing.
January 18th is the next big anti-war rally in Washington DC. Thousands make their voices heard again. They are taking the "Pledge Of Resistance" and saying:
"Not in our name
will you wage endless war
Not by our mouths
Will we let fear silence us
Another world is possible
and we pledge to make it real."
Naeem Mohaiemen runs Shobak.Org, a website for "Outsider Asian Voices".
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