• Illinois Green Party Series #14

Illinois Green Party Series: Palestine Experiences and Community Organizing with Guest Charla Burnett. Join Calvin and David as we talk with our guest about their experience in Palestine, their community organizing, and views on the democratization of technology.

Green Party National Co-Chair Ahmed Eltouny describes how the United States and the state of Israel's shared history of settler-colonialism reinforces U.S. military and political support for Israel's apartheid regime against Palestinians.

• The Green Party of California stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with their fight against the brutal apartheid regime of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

SAN FRANCISCO – June 8th, 2021 - The 11-day carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military from May 10 to May 21, 2021, killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, and injured over 1,700 people . More than 1,000 buildings, schools, hospitals, businesses and roads have been destroyed by devastating airstrikes leaving at least 6,000 residents homeless, displacing tens of thousands, and depriving almost half of the population of Gaza of access to water and electricity in the midst of a raging pandemic and without the protection of a vaccine.

PHILADELPHIA – In response to the Israeli killing spree in the Gaza Strip, many Green Party activists came forward to stand with Palestinians in their continued struggle for the right to exist. Members of the Green Party of Pennsylvania (GPPA)  joined in pro-Palestinian rallies that were held throughout the state on May 15. The Green Party joined other activist organizations such as Black Lives Matter; Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Coalition; Drexel Students for Justice in Palestine; New Afrikan Independence Party; Pittsburgh Anti-Imperialist League; and Jewish Voice for Peace, in solidarity to end the suffering of the Palestinian people.

SAN FRANCISCO – Today, May 15, is the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, the day that changed the Palestinian people's history forever. The Nakbah (al-Nakbah; "catastrophe") marks the forced expulsion, dispossession, and displacement of the majority of indigenous Christians and Muslims, over 750,000 people from Palestine during the 1948 war. In reality, the Nakba has since solidified into an Israeli campaign of terror, ethnic segregation, land confiscations, and destruction of villages for Jewish settlement leading to a vanishing Palestine with over 7 million Palestinians living as refugees today.

• Despite The Quickening Decline Of The "West," The US And Its Junior Partners In Imperialism Are Determined To Hold Humanity Hostage To Terminal Capitalist Greed And Violence.

• "Biden labels himself an 'Atlanticist' — shorthand for a white supremacist."

The world is shocked by the image of an eleven-story residential building in Gaza collapsing from a bomb dropped by the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most advanced armies in the world thanks to U.S. support. But in the U.S., Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate and now candidate for mayor of New York, proudly proclaims that he stands with the heroic people of Israel who are under attack from the vicious, occupied Palestinians who have no army, no rights, and no state.

• Progressives furious at Secretary of State Blinken for 'Palestinian situation' tweet

• Antony Blinken expressed US support for Israel after International Criminal Court said it is investigating alleged war crimes

Progressives are upset with Secretary of State Antony Blinken over a tweet in which Blinken proclaimed a continued "strong commitment to Israel" in light of the International Criminal Court's announcement of an investigation into events that transpired between the Jewish state and Palestinians.

The exploitation of fear fuels Islamophobia and drives reactionary activists to promote propaganda and messaging to keep the narrative alive. A network of bloggers, think tanks and propaganda mills have raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2001 to propagate misinformation about muslims and Islam.

Islamophobia manifests in this country in the form of:

• police-state surveillance, infiltration and entrapment;
  
  
• a Clinton crime-bill statute criminalizing 'material support of terrorism' used to prosecute and incarcerate a volunteer board seeking to send humanitarian relief to the people of occupied Palestine;
  
  
• a chilling impact on political discourse to rival COINTELPRO, the Red Scare, the HUAC, the Palmer Raids;
  
  
• hate crimes including assaults, murders, mass shootings, graffiti, vandalism and arson targeting mosques and community centers, muslims and those mistaken for muslims;
  
  
• the promotion of mis-information and false narratives which justify the dehumanization and the othering of a quarter of our global neighbors and 1-2% of our neighbors here in the United States;
  
  
• public fear and public policy shaped by folks whose Arabic vocabulary seems limited to the pejorative misuse of two words expressing key concepts of the Islamic faith: jihad and sharia.

As Green Party candidates and activists, we have a role as an opposition party to educate ourselves and our communities on issues related to Islamophobia, racism, sexism and gender-identity and to prioritize work to support the struggles of the most vulnerable and marginalized in our communities. We must make an active contribution to the work of defending the human rights of our neighbors. We can build enduring alliances by engaging with the political crisis now present in this country.

On this page we will collect resources useful to our work to engage effectively in challenging the Islamophobia we encounter in the world around us.

Green Party Resources

Islamophobia: Another Social Construction of Racism
Imperialism Justified, Fear Manufactured, Fascism Enabled
A Briefing Paper for Green Party Activists, published April 15, 2017 (13 pages)
Excerpts from "A Green Party Briefing Paper", published April 15, 2017 (trifold)

Other resources 

Kundnani Deconstructs US Anti-Terrorism Policy, video 82 minutes, author of the Muslims are Coming speaks at Charis Books and More, Atlanta Georgia, March 31, 2017.

• Both in Israel and the US, conversations about reparations and the Palestinian right of return are stifled by arguments explaining why injustice must go on and a yearning for the status quo.

The calls “Black Lives Matter” and “Free, Free Palestine,” serve to remind us that Palestine is not free and that if the lives of Black people mattered, there would be no need for the call. In both cases, people are in the grips of a cruel, racist system that refuses to let go. In both cases, people are being hunted down, caged, strangled, and shot to death, and the root cause of their suffering is rarely addressed.

FLANDERS, NJ – "The so-called Peace Plan announced by Trump/Netanyahu legitimizes the illegal actions of the Israeli government and reinforces the system of apartheid that already existed," said Madelyn Hoffman, the Green Party of New Jersey's candidate for US Senate in 2020. "As if to add an exclamation point, the IDF once again took aim at Gaza and started bombing on 1/29/20."

As ethnic conflict specialist Sheena Anne Arackal's Mondoweiss piece noted in its title, "The 'Deal' of the Century is Apartheid."