International Women’s Day                                                                            March 2002 

Statement by the Internationalist Group and the Revolutionary Reconstruction Club (Bronx Community College) 

Last week, a young woman student at City College became one of the latest victims of the government’s anti-immigrant dragnet.  Her name is Reem Khalil; her only “crime” is being one of the thousands targeted by the racist onslaught against undocumented immigrants, especially those of Arab descent. Reem, 23, is in her last semester after five years at CCNY as a biochemistry major. CUNY students, labor, immigrant rights groups and defenders of the most fundamental democratic rights must mobilize massively to demand: Free Reem Khalil and her family! Free all the detainees now!

At 6 a.m. on February 27, twenty FBI agents raided the Khalil home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They seized Reem, her father – a Manhattan restaurant owner – and mother, together with three of her siblings. The family was shackled hand and foot. Two younger siblings, having witnessed their family dragged away in manacles, were left by the feds because they were born in the U.S. Family members were not allowed to speak with each other.

The Khalils were reportedly taken to the Federal Building for questioning. When the FBI could find nothing whatsoever against them, they were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for deportation. The family, originally from Syria, has been here for years, but in 1996 a deportation order was issued after Mr. Khalil’s request for asylum was turned down.

After the February 27 raid, the family was separated. Reem, her mother and sister were locked up in separate cells in Hudson County jail in New Jersey. Her father and one brother are being held in Bergen County jail. A 16-year-old brother was sent to a juvenile detention center in Pennsylvania. A close friend reports that Reem is severely traumatized by the brutal raid, by being ripped away from her studies and family, being slated for deportation for the “crime” of being born in the “wrong” place.

Today, Reem Khalil, her parents, brothers and sisters are among those targeted by a new “initiative by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to crack down” on the “more than 300,000 foreign nationals” who have remained in the U.S. after being ordered deported (New York Times, 5 January). They join the estimated 2,000 people of Arab and South Asian background detained as victims of the government’s racial profiling since September 11, whose names the government refuses to release.

We demand that the INS release the names of all those detained; we demand the immediate freedom of all the detainees – whom the government seeks to keep nameless and faceless. Reem Khalil puts a name and face to the hundreds and thousands of victims of this racist onslaught. Mass protest must be mobilized against the vicious detentions and deportations. This must be linked to the fight to smash CUNY’s anti-immigrant “war purge” and the escalating attack on all working-class and minority students. It must draw in thousands of CUNY students, and crucially it must draw in key sectors of the powerful working class of New York City.

Immigrants in this city are not powerless victims – they work in many of the most important sectors of the economy, from transport (subways, buses, taxis) to the hospitals, factories, greengrocer delis (undergoing a unionization drive) and service industries. Together with the rest of the multiethnic, multiracial working class – particularly black workers and others outraged by the grotesque ruling freeing three of the racist cops involved in the torture of Abner Louima – this gives them the power that must be mobilized to defeat the wave of racist attacks.

First the CUNY administration targeted immigrant students, more than doubling their tuition in a blatant attempt to drive them out. This served as a wedge for escalating attacks on all CUNY students through slashing the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) and slapping other fees on the overwhelmingly working-class and poor students – and that’s just the beginning. City University officials and their big brothers in the FBI and INS think CUNY students are going to sit by and watch our classmates and friends seized in Gestapo-style dawn raids to be dragged away and deported. We will not let them turn New York City into a new Manzanar and Tule Lake (camps where Japanese Americans were locked up during WWII). And we demand to know what the CUNY administration’s role has been, when and where it has been visited by the FBI and INS, and exactly what it told them.

Make no mistake: despite the pious hypocrisy pumped out by Bush, Giuliani, Bloomberg and their Democratic partners in crime, the government’s round-up of Arabs and those who “look like them” is encouraging violent attacks by racist hoodlums and nightriders. On Staten Island, a series of attacks on Arab-owned delis included the highly suspicious murder of Yemeni immigrant Hamoud Muharram on January 23. Meanwhile, as reported in the Staten Island Advance (14 February), 14 people, most of them Arabs, were arrested in coordinated police raids on delis on the island. And now there is the fire that has destroyed much of a Sikh temple in Queens, coming after many attacks against Sikhs, particularly cab drivers, in recent months.

The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Reconstruction Club took the lead in initiating the united-front demonstration of several hundred students, workers and others at Hunter College on November 28 against the anti-immigrant “war purge.” We have stressed that the imperialist war abroad is at the same time a war against the working class, oppressed minorities, democratic rights and civil liberties within the U.S. We link the fight against the purge of immigrant students and deportations to the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. We fight to mobilize the working class to defeat U.S. imperialism and defend the countries targeted by its war abroad – which the U.S. rulers are spreading from Afghanistan to the Philippines while revving up for a possible new assault on Iraq – and those targeted by its racist war “at home.”

In the fight against CUNY’s anti-immigrant purge, we stress the need for mass, militant mobilization bringing in the power of the working class, and oppose all attempts to corral protest into powerless lobbying of the capitalist politicians who are the enemies of the working people. While liberal Democrats like Pedro Rivera and Adrian Espaillat put forward bills in the state legislature, which in the guise of “less” discrimination would actually mean excluding large numbers of immigrants from CUNY, we demand: no discrimination, complete and total elimination of anti-immigrant tuition hikes, open admission and free tuition. While these are simply the expression of the basic democratic right to education, a consistent fight for this is possible only as part of a program for a society based on human needs instead of capitalist profit – a program for socialist revolution, led by a revolutionary workers party that mobilizes workers power to put an end to all forms of discrimination and social oppression.

“First they came for the immigrants…” The anti-immigrant purge has gone from a sneak attack by tuition hike last November to dragging students out of their beds, shackling them, jailing them and preparing to deport them as in the case of Reem Khalil today. An injury to one is an injury to all! Hands off our fellow students and our fellow workers – Mobilize now in mass, militant protest! Free Reem, her family, and all the detainees! 
 

Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! On International Women’s Day 2002, in the midst of the terrorist “war against terrorism” launched by U.S. imperialism and its NATO allies, women around the world are under attack. U.S. war propagandists use the hideous oppression of women under the Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban regime to justify the Pentagon’s indiscriminate bombing which has killed more than 4,000 civilians in Afghanistan. Yet the Islamic-fundamentalist regime installed by Washington and led by the same bloody warlords who were the CIA’s terrorist “holy warriors” against the Soviet-backed Kabul government in the 1980s continues to violently enforce the oppression of women. Afghan women are still imprisoned in the veil (the head-to-toe burqa), excluded from education, excluded from social labor, deprived of any rights and condemned to domestic seclusion. And when courageous women dare to demonstrate for their freedom, as they did in Kabul last November, they are brutally repressed by the new “democratic” rulers in imperialist-occupied Afghanistan.  In the 1980s, Trotskyists hailed the intervention of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan against the U.S.-recruited, financed, trained and armed terrorists who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women and shot down a planeload of children traveling to school in the Soviet Union. Today, Trotskyists call on the international working class to defend Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries on Washington’s hit list and to defeat imperialism through international proletarian revolution. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

Over the last several years, there has been an upsurge of Islamic fundamentalist and other reactionary religious mobilizations in Nigeria. The seething discontent of the impoverished masses of the largest country in Africa is being diverted into religious and ethnic strife, provoking riots that have left hundreds dead since last September. In the midst of the communal bloodletting encouraged by the competing cliques of military and “civilian” strongmen, in mid-October a 35-year-old woman and nursing mother, Safiya Hussain, was sentenced by an Islamic court in the state of Sokoto to death by stoning for the supposed “crime” of adultery. The only proof against Safiya is that she is unmarried and pregnant. “As for a woman who doesn’t have a husband, but found to be pregnant, this shows she must have committed adultery,” said state governor, Alhaji Bafarawa, who declared her death sentence “irreversible.” 

Safiya Hussain (Photo: New York Times Magazine) 

The death penalty exposes the fraudulent “democratic” pretenses of the most “advanced” capitalist countries. In the United States, the state murder machine threatens to execute former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, one of more than 3,000 prisoners on death row, the overwhelming majority black and Hispanic. The racist death penalty in the U.S. is legal lynching, and is in fact a product of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. In Nigeria the court which decreed the death of Safiya Hussain did so on the basis of the Sharia, the medieval Islamic legal code. At the same time, Nigeria’s bloody military rulers have murdered hundreds who have protested the depredations of the giant U.S. oil companies Texaco, Chevron and others in the last decade, as well as slaughtering thousands in the Biafra rebellion of the 1960s. Whether wearing military epaulets or civilian dress, the post-independence capitalist governments continue to bloodily suppress minorities, workers, women and any challenge to their rule under the old colonial laws. 

Various “human rights” groups have made mild protests over the horrendous sentence against Safiya. But their priorities are dictated by the interests of imperialism. When the U.S. decides to attack Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Iraq, only then will these outfits raise a hue and cry – in order to justify even more massacres by the U.S. and NATO. Trotskyists look instead to the working class, the social force that can sweep away the whole oppressive apparatus of capitalist justice, and to smash the death penalty. The Nigerian workers movement has the power. On January 16 and 17, tens of thousands of workers streamed into the streets of cities throughout the country to protest the government’s anti-working-class price rises and privatization policies. Hundreds were arrested, including numerous labor leaders and leftists such as supporters of the Democratic Socialist Movement. We demand the immediate release and dropping of all charges against those arrested in the general strike! 

But what the Nigerian working people lack is a revolutionary workers party, a Trotskyist party that can lead the struggle for socialist revolution. From South Africa, where Nelson Mandela and his successor Mbeki are now running a neo-apartheid regime on behalf of the racist mining bosses, to Nigeria where a succession of military rulers have suppressed the impoverished masses in the interests of the oil companies, black bourgeois rulers are only puppets of the racist imperialists. Trotskyists declare that “adultery” is not a crime. We defend women’s right to consensual sexual relations, to free abortion on demand, to education, full participation in social labor with equal pay for equal work, at the same time as we defend homosexuals against discrimination and attack. Reactionary Islamic family codes in Africa and murderous attacks on abortion providers by Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. will only be abolished through international socialist revolution, led by a reforged Fourth International.

The court hearing of Safiya Hussain’s appeal against the death penalty is scheduled for March 18. We call on workers, students, women and all defenders of democratic rights to protest against the outrageous injustice that is being perpetrated and demand that she be freed now!