While the plight of children of asylum seekers separated from their parents fades from the news, hundreds remain incarcerated and still not reunited. Of these, some 400 are children of parents already deported. There is little chance these families will be reunited soon. Possibly they never will be.
Others are children of parents arbitrarily deemed “unfit”. A typical example is Juan Hernandez, who sought asylum with his three-year-old daughter Maria. The government kept her in detention and wouldn’t let her be reunited with her father because of two alcohol-related offences that occurred more than 12 years ago.
Hernandez was then tricked into signing deportation papers he couldn’t read, after officials lied saying that by signing he would be reunited with Maria. He was deported and she remains in detention.
Hernandez first came to the US from El Salvador in 1999 after he was repeatedly attacked by gangs. He was 17 and found work picking lettuce for agribusiness. In 2001, he obtained temporary protected status, granted to Salvadorans at the time because of devastation caused by an earthquake.
He was convicted in 2005 of carrying an open container with an alcoholic beverage in his car. He got another conviction for driving while intoxicated in 2006. When he failed to renew his temporary status in 2006, he was deported.
Feeling unsafe in El Salvador he moved his family to Chiapas, Mexico. There is an increasingly violent situation in that state, and last March he sought asylum with his daughter, hoping that, if successful, he could bring his entire family. Instead, he was swept up in Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. 
The government claims that any criminal offence and unspecified “red flags” are sufficient to declare a parent unfit. Immigrant rights groups say that usually the crimes are minor and do not affect the parents’ ability to care for their child. Few cases would cause an American parent to be ruled unfit.
While children asylum seekers continue to be separated, mass incarceration has ballooned. The New York Times reports that in May 2017 there were 2,400 children locked up. The number has now increased more than fivefold to 12,800. Most came across the border alone. 
“The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors”, reporter Caitlin Dickerson writes.
“Zero tolerance” was only one policy designed to bar immigrants. Another was adopted last June. Authorities announced that potential sponsors and all adult members of their household would have to submit fingerprints and that data would be shared with immigration authorities.
Traditionally, most sponsors have been undocumented themselves, or someone in their home has been. Many are obviously wary of submitting their fingerprints. Those who do have to wait months to be vetted. The result is a sharp reduction in the number of immigrant children being released into homes.
The Trump administration’s answer isn’t to get rid of the whole anti-immigrant project and act humanely – it is to build more detention facilities. One of these is an outdoor tent concentration camp called “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, scheduled to be tripled in size to accommodate the rapidly growing number of immigrant children destined to be inmates.
The Obama administration initiated this dreadful program, but Trump has put it on steroids. Under Obama, most inmates were released in fewer than 20 days, the lawful limit by court order. Trump thumbs his nose at such restrictions and is demanding Congress remove them while he violates them.
Detaining children for months in these detention centres has produced severe depression, violence and other ill health. Younger children are especially susceptible to being traumatised by such a situation. Experts predict long lasting impairments and personality disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder.
Prior to hurricane Florence hitting the east coast, wreaking great destruction, the administration took $10 million from the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Authority, which is supposed to help victims of the hurricane, and put it into the funds for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, one of the spearheads of the anti-immigrant drive.
Florence resulted in a deluge of rain in many areas, causing mass flooding. Many have been forced to evacuate, homes have been destroyed and people have died. As in other cases, especially hard hit are the poorest sections of the working class, including Blacks and Latinos.
The undocumented have to undergo more hardship. Many express concern they will encounter ICE if they seek help. A mother in the coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina, which has been isolated by surrounding flood waters, told NBC News she feared being separated from her children by ICE if they evacuated to a shelter.
“My smallest daughter, the little one, asked me, ‘Mom, I’m afraid that our home is going to be destroyed, and I don’t want to go to a shelter because I don’t want to be separated from you. I would rather die first than be separated from you’”, she said.
Even small children have heard the news about separation.

Barry Sheppard

Trump ratchets up attack on immigrant children 

Prisoners in many states in the US began a national strike on 21 August, the anniversary of the murder of Black Panther member George Jackson by guards in 1971 at San Quentin prison, California. 
The strike will end on 9 September, the anniversary of the great prison uprising at Attica, New York, also in 1971. The rebellion was crushed in blood, in a massive attack ordered by governor Nelson Rockefeller, billionaire scion of the oil industry family. 
The central demand of the current actions – which range from work stoppages, hunger strikes and sit-downs to boycotts of prison stores – is an end to prison slave labour.
Most people do not know that the US Constitution allows for slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865 after the Civil War, abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”.
Almost immediately, states, especially in the former Confederacy, passed vagrancy laws to round up ex-slaves and sell their labour. The Jim Crow system of white rule in the South created a huge economic sector based on unfree Black labour, as in the prison chain gangs at institutions such as the notorious Parchman Farm in Mississippi, and in contract labour, private firms working Black prisoners into the grave.
The Black movement in the 1960s and 1970s overthrew the Jim Crow system, but prison slave labour has continued throughout the country. Much work by prisoners isn’t paid. Sometimes the slavery is barely covered up by pitiful “wages”. Here are what some prisoners report, as related in interviews with progressive news site Democracy Now!:
Anthony Forest: “Because I know how to strip floors, wax them, take the gum up off floor, I started doing that. At 16 cents an hour”.
Darryl Aikens: “I started out as a line server, serving food for breakfast and dinner. Then I became a dishwasher and maintenance in the kitchen. It paid 13 cents an hour. I worked and made $20 a month, and they [prison authorities] took 55 percent of that for restitution [for food etc.]”.
Cole Dorsey: “It’s kind of like a modern-day plantation situation, specifically targeting poor people, and most especially the most marginalised communities, Black and Brown”.
The action by prisoners is a movement of part of the working class, whose employment as slaves lowers the wages and conditions of the whole working class.
While white prisoners are employed as slaves in work inside the prisons and in contract work for outside firms, 60 percent of prisoners are African American or Latino. Given the history of unfree Black labour from chattel slavery up to the present, it isn’t surprising that reports reaching support organisations on the outside say that Blacks have taken the lead in these multiracial actions.
There are nine other demands prisoners are raising. One of these is the right to vote. Only two states, Vermont and Maine, allow this. In the remaining 48 they cannot – disenfranchising 2.8 million prisoners. Four states – Iowa, Florida, Kentucky and Virginia – permanently deny felons the vote after being released from prison. Six others do the same for some felons. Others deny parolees the franchise.
It is difficult to obtain full information about the strike, as the authorities have denied that anything is happening in their prisons, or punish leaders in ways that make it hard to communicate with the outside.
Amani Sawari, an African American woman, is a spokesperson for Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a network of prisoners helping to organise the strike. She is now on the outside and reports on the retaliation against strike leaders.
“Comrade Malik hasn’t been allowed to take showers. They are hunger-striking there”, she told Democracy Now!. “Jason Walker hasn’t been allowed to have toilet paper, towels or have access to taking a shower or having clean clothes, in retaliation to his organising of the strike in Texas.”
She explained that Comrade Malik was put in solitary confinement, an internationally recognised form of torture, in a pre-emptive move on 15 August. “He’s in a concrete cell that’s over 100 degrees Fahrenheit … He’s only escorted out in handcuffs. He’s not allowed to have easy communications with the outside.”
Jason Walker wrote an article about the conditions in Texas prisons. “After that … he was moved to solitary confinement. But even in groups, like in South Carolina, prisoners in McCormick [prison] have been having daily strip searches done on them since 20 August, the day before the strike began.
“Also, David Easley and James Ward, they are in Ohio, Toledo’s correctional facility, and they have no contact with the outside. And they’re also in solitary confinement.
“So we can see that retaliation is happening against individual organisers in the beginning. And now we’re seeing when inmates are standing up and choosing to strike, they are moved to solitary to try to keep prisoners from joining. But this is spreading the fire. Prisoners know that this is a climate where they can actually stand up and feel supported. There have been solidarity marches and rallies in at least 21 cities across the country.”
These brave men and women taking action in the face of retaliation deserve our support. We must educate the labour movement and all workers that prisoners are part of the working class, and it is in the interests of all workers to come to their defence.

US prisoners strike against slave labour

It is now abundantly clear that the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy towards parents with children seeking asylum in the US aimed to separate the children from their parents, keep the children in the US and deport the parents.
Early on, White House chief of staff John Kelly said that the children would be placed in “foster care or whatever”.
Under Federal Court order, the administration reversed course and said it would reunite the children with their parents. But it soon became clear that no records had been kept of which children belonged to which parents.
Before Trump ordered the reunifications, many parents were already deported while their children remained in the US. The government admits that 463 parents fell into this category. (But the government figures are suspect, because it tries to cover up the reality.)
Many deported parents had fled from extreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Where they are in those countries is a mystery, because they must hide to avoid the violence they fled from. Obviously, it is very difficult to reunite these families.
Trivialising this situation with a sick joke, Trump proposed that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) find the parents. The ACLU is legally challenging the whole evil and cruel “zero tolerance” policy.
Immigration lawyers report that new asylum seekers are being summarily denied asylum at the border. In June, attorney general Jeff Sessions announced that fleeing from gang and domestic violence – which most cite as their reason for seeking asylum – would no longer be a valid reason for seeking asylum.
The ACLU has now filed a suit in Federal Court, arguing that the policy violates due process “in numerous aspects”.
The ACLU filed an earlier suit arguing that many parents were coerced or misled into signing “voluntary” deportation forms. The ACLU charges that many could not read the forms and were confused about what they were agreeing to.
The forms contained three choices. One was, “Do you agree to be deported and reunited with your child outside?” Those who checked that box were then deported and their children left behind.
Another was, “Do you agree to be deported but reunited with your child before?” Those who checked that box were reunited with their children, if they could be matched up (hundreds of children have yet to be matched with their parents). These families are reunited – in jail.
The third alternative was, “Do you want to speak with your lawyer?” One immigration lawyer reported that a client who checked that box was accosted by an officer who said to her, “Don’t you want to be with your child? Don’t you want to be reunited with your child?” 
According to administration figures, 105 of the approximately 3,000 children separated from their parents are under the age of five. Some of these were still breast feeding. The government claims to have reunited 57. The remaining children won’t be reunited with their parents, because the government claims the parents are criminals or otherwise unfit. It gives no information backing up its determination. The 46 will now presumably be placed in Kelly’s “foster homes or whatever”.
Hundreds of parents with children over five years old have been similarly ruled unfit to be reunited with their children.
More information has been uncovered by investigative reporters, lawyers for the parents and their children and even observant bystanders.
One of the latter was Lianna Dunlap in Phoenix, Arizona. She noticed white vans loaded with children pulling up to a vacant office building behind her house in June. The next day, she videotaped more children being led into the building. She didn’t see children leave or go outside for three weeks, when she and her neighbours saw up to 80 children being led out. 
The windows were blacked out, so sunlight never entered the building. She contacted local media, which is how immigration reporters discovered it.
They discovered that the site had been leased in March for five years by a private contractor, MVM, a company contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). MVM admitted that the building had no kitchen and few toilets. It turns out that ICE has been using private contractors to use whatever buildings they operate as detention centres.
Immigrant advocates report that some children have been released from ICE contractor sites with scabies and lice. A Chicago contractor, Heartland Alliance, is being investigated for abuse and neglect of immigrant children. 
The Washington Post reported that, at one Heartland Alliance site, a boy was repeatedly injected with a drug that made him drowsy; another boy was denied medication for weeks after injuring his arm. It also reported that children were surveilled with hidden cameras and prevented from hugging their brothers and sisters.
An article from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that $1.5 billion has been paid by the federal government in the last four years to companies operating immigrant youth detention centres that faced accusations of serious lapses in care. 
Children held at the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas were restrained and injected with powerful anti-psychotic drugs against their will, making them dizzy, listless, obese, even incapacitated.
Human rights group Dream Defenders held a national day of action at offices of the GEO Group across the country in early August. The GEO Group is ICE’s biggest contractor. In retaliation, GEO Group has threatened to sue Dream Defenders. 
Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy has had the effect that Trump aimed for: frightening would be asylum seekers from even trying.
But his sights are also set on reducing legal immigration, as his blocking of asylum seekers and his ban on Muslim immigrants indicates.
In a recent tweet, Trump wrote, “I would be willing to ‘shut down’ government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall! Must get rid of Lottery, Catch and Release etc. and finally go to a system of Immigration based on MERIT! We need great people coming into our country!”
The “Lottery” refers to a policy originally set up to give applicants from certain countries Green Cards that allow them to come and work in the US, to increase diversity. Only a few applicants are chosen by lottery. “Catch and release” refers to the previous practice of allowing people to be released into the population while waiting immigration courts to adjudicate their claims.
One aspect of his idea of “merit” was expressed a few months ago, when Trump said he didn’t want people from “shithole countries” to immigrate, but people from countries such as Norway were fine. That is, white people.

New revelations about children separated from parents

In response to a massive public outcry against his policy of separating asylum seekers from their children, president Trump issued an executive order on 20 June to stop the practice.
A victory? Not so fast.
Trump’s order reaffirmed his “zero tolerance” policy requiring asylum seekers crossing the border with Mexico to immediately turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents. 
Many refugees are fleeing situations of extreme danger in Central America. They did not “sneak” across the border with their children. For example, coming across the Rio Grande (the border between Mexico and Texas) on rubber tyres and other homemade rafts in full view of the Border Patrol agents to turn themselves in to those agents is hardly a subterfuge.
It is “zero tolerance” that has resulted in children being torn from their parents. Under this policy, anyone who crosses the border without papers is labelled a “criminal” and arrested and jailed with no possibility of posting bail. Those with children are immediately separated from them, since the children are not charged with a crime.
But the children are sent to different jails, called “detention centres”, across the country, often far from where their parents are held. Some have been flown to New York City, others to Seattle and God knows what other places between.
The Trump administration says that these “lawbreakers” should have applied for asylum at sites inside the US just over the border. But the Border Patrol doesn’t allow them to reach those sites because they don’t have papers allowing them entry to the country. To obtain visas at US embassies in their home countries is almost impossible for working class and peasant families, and possibly dangerous to do so. 
So there is a contradiction between “zero tolerance” and Trump’s statement that the children should be reunited with their parents. No wonder that officials charged with doing both are flailing around, saying contradictory things, while the situation on the ground has hardly changed.
The few instances in which children and parents have been reunited have largely resulted from a growing group of lawyers fighting for these victims of US “justice”.
Trump’s executive order proposes a solution to the contradiction. As two lawyers, Brad Karp and Gary Wingens, explained in a 25 June New York Times op-ed, his solution involves “prolonging the detention of families seeking asylum”. 
Trump proposes scrapping a 1997 court ruling that children cannot be detained longer than 20 days. The only way to square this with stopping the separation of the children would be to keep the children with their parents in jail indefinitely.
Less than a week after the order, he proposed another solution: “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came”.
Many have pointed out that both “solutions” are unconstitutional and violate due process. Trump, who doesn’t give a rat’s arse about the Constitution or due process, is pressing ahead.
His position has been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court. This was in a ruling on another aspect of Trump’s immigration policy, his Muslim ban. In a five to four decision, the court upheld the ban.
The reason the court gave for doing so directly relates to family separations. The court ruled that the president has unbounded authority in deciding how to control the borders. That is now the law. If Trump moves immediately to send asylum seekers and their children back to their home countries with no judicial review, that would now be constitutional.
The Supreme Court ruling codifies a big step forward for Trump’s drive to consolidate an authoritarian government, with the trappings of bourgeois democracy, like the present Hungarian government under Victor Orban, also a racist hater of immigrants. No wonder he hails it as a great victory for himself. 
If the first Trump solution is adopted, it has been planned for: Trump has ordered the armed forces to prepare to set up detention centres to hold 20,000 people on military bases. These could house immigrant families and their children. More ominously, Trump could ignore his own ruling and prepare to house children separated from their parents in those facilities while deporting their parents. 
Whatever steps Trump takes, the children remain locked up and separated from their parents. Some parents have already been deported while their children remain in the US.
Despite White House claims that the authorities kept careful records of which child belonged to whom, this is, with good justification, widely disbelieved – except among Trump’s white racist base. 
It is highly unlikely that any such records were ever kept, because the administration stated that its goal of separating the children was meant to discourage asylum seekers. It hoped eventually to place the children in foster homes – in the US.
Since his 20 June order, Trump has intensified his racist rhetoric, saying that immigrants are “invading” the US, are “infesting” the country, are killers, rapists and dope dealers. To drive home his point, he staged a media event with people he said were victims of crimes committed by immigrants.
Meanwhile, the wider attack on immigrants by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has accelerated, with raids on workplaces and other sites sweeping up immigrants without papers. 
Protests in the past two weeks have been held in many cities across the country at ICE offices. They are becoming bigger and more militant. There have been ongoing “Occupy ICE” encampments blockading ICE facilities in New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Tacoma.
There was a demonstration at a tent city in Tornilla, Texas, housing migrant children. Thousands marched in San Diego, California, near the Mexican border. In McAllen, Texas, protesters temporarily blocked a bus carrying migrant children off to no-one knows where, chanting, “Set the children free!”. 
A demand not widely heard before, for eliminating ICE, is becoming more popular, even being embraced by some Democrats, to the consternation of the Democratic establishment, whose members in Congress have regularly voted to fund the agency.
Another manifestation of the growing anger has been spontaneous mass shamings of administration officials when they appear in public. Another New York Times report noted: 
“In recent days, as institutional Democrats wring their hands … [furious activists] and citizens have taken matters into their own hands beyond the corridors of power.
“Progressives have heckled the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, and the White House aide Stephen Miller at Washington restaurants. They have ejected the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, from a Lexington, Virginia, eatery. And they have screamed at one of Mr Trump’s leading cable news surrogates, Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, at a Tampa movie theater.
“‘Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up’, representative Maxine Walters, Democrat of California, said … at a rally in Los Angeles. ‘And if you see anybody from [Trump’s] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome any more, anywhere.’”
The road forward is not to look to the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties for a solution to this crisis – they have none. The task is to keep the protests going, and extend and enlarge them. Join the shouts of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” levelled at the Trump surrogates for what has been a cruel and evil attack on asylum seekers and their children.

Trump’s ‘fake order’ exposed as protests grow

Washington has a long history of using deportations to strike fear among undocumented workers. In recent years deportations have increased – former president Barack Obama became known as “deporter in chief”.
But Trump has greatly stepped up the drive, mainly against undocumented Latinos, unleashing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to carry out indiscriminate raids where Latinos congregate.
An especially cruel policy has been adopted: tearing children out of the arms of mothers and fathers for the “crime” of crossing the border, deporting the adults and sending the children into US detention centres often hundreds of miles away from their parents or to distant foster homes.
“I have put in place a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry on our south-west border”, attorney general Jeff Sessions said in late April. “If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. It’s that simple. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child may be separated from you, as required by law.” 
What law justifying such separations? It doesn’t exist. Sessions is the criminal, ordering kidnappings.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, director for the Americas at Amnesty International, said this was “a flagrant violation of … human rights. Doing so in order to push asylum seekers back into dangerous situations where they may face persecution is also a violation of US obligations under refugee law”.
Writing in the New York Times on 11 June, Michelle Goldberg noted: “There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. 
“This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he had gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers.” 
From October to April, more than 700 children were seized from their parents and sent away. But since Sessions’ “zero tolerance” illegal decree, child snatching has increased. In the two weeks after his announcement, 650 were torn from their mothers’ and fathers’ arms and sent to detention centres.
The Times’ immigration correspondent, Miriam Jordan, on 7 June related the story of a five-year-old Honduran boy separated from his father, who cried himself to sleep at night with a stick-figure drawing of his family under his pillow. 
The Washington Post reported that 39-year-old Marco Antonio Munoz, also from Honduras, killed himself in a padded cell after his three-year-old was wrenched from his arms.
“We will never know what torments besieged Munoz when he took his own life. But Pramila Jaypal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington state, recently met with migrant women being held in a federal prison, many of whom, she said, were forcibly separated from children as young as one. Some had their kids physically torn from them. Others were told that they had to go have their photograph taken; when they returned, their children were gone.”
What happens to these children in detention centres is kept secret, even from US senators. Early in June, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley travelled to Brownsville, Texas, to visit one centre in an old Walmart store to see what was happening inside, and was turned away with a police escort. 
He tweeted, “I was barred entry. Asked repeatedly to speak to a supervisor – he finally came out and said he can’t tell us anything. Police were called on us”.
On 12 June, Sessions turned the screw further, announcing that asylum seekers could no longer base their appeal on the dangers they face in their home countries – effectively ending almost all such appeals of those crossing the Mexican border. 
Debbie Nathan, an investigative reporter writing at the Intercept, noted that since Sessions’ proclamation, so many parents have been charged that their cases are all lumped together and tried en masse. The result is so grotesque it can only be described as Orwellian. 
“I’ve been to several of these trials in Brownsville, Laredo and El Paso [all in Texas]”, Nathan told Democracy Now!. “What you see is somewhere between 20 and 40-something people … their hands in handcuffs chained to their waists, and their feet shackled.
“They clunk and clang into court … They go through these mass processes in less than an hour, usually. They are instructed to answer [in unison]. So you’ll hear 40 people being asked a question, and they’ll say, ‘Si’ or ‘No’ all at once. It’s really uncanny. It’s shocking. It doesn’t feel like due process.
“One after one after one after one, with only one lawyer [for all of them] they plead guilty: ‘Culpable’, ‘culpable’, ‘culpable’, ‘culpable’. I mean it feels like something out of Abu Ghraib, except that it is completely legal in this country to do this to people.”
In her article, Nathan reported that one judge, Ronald Morgan, asked many of his questions en masse. “This had the astounding effect of eliciting, from otherwise mute and downcast defendants, thundering group responses.
“‘Are each of you satisfied with the help of the lawyer?’ the judge asked the huddled people. ‘Si!’ they roared in unison. ‘Has anyone offered you anything or threatened you?’ Another roar: ‘No!’”
These lawyers, who are public defenders, see each defendant for only one or two minutes.
Then judge Morgan asked individual defendants questions about why they were seeking asylum. They told him about being separated from their children. Nathan reports Morgan himself becoming disturbed by what he heard. 
“It was Thursday, the fourth day of ‘Zero Tolerance’ in his court, and defendants were telling their stories. The judge had just asked Holly D’Andrea, the assistant US attorney handling illegal entry prosecutions that day, if it were true that families were being reunited in detention. D’Andrea sounded uncertain, but she answered she thought it was true.
“‘Tell you what’, the judge said slowly, with a hard edge in his voice, ‘if it’s not, then there are a lot of folks that have some answering to do. Because, what you’ve done, in effect, by separating these children is you’re putting them in some place without their parents. If you can imagine there’s a hell, that’s probably what it looks like’.”

Trump’s new immigration cruelty

At the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem in May, two pastors were present to make the opening and closing prayers.
They come from extreme right, white Christian evangelical traditions. Both are well known for their outspoken anti-Semitism and their support for Israel. It might be thought that Trump sent them to shore up his base among white evangelicals, and that Netanyahu accepted their presence while silently disapproving of their anti-Semitism.
Not so. 
These pastors represent one sector not only of Trump’s base, but also of Netanyahu’s base in the US. The support of right wing white evangelicals has become more important to the Israeli establishment than the support of US Jews.
An article by Moshe Machover, an anti-Zionist Israeli Jew living in Britain, published in the Weekly Worker, argues that the relationship between US Jews and Israel is becoming increasingly strained.
This tension has been increasing under the Netanyahu government. 
There has always been a range of views among US Jews regarding Israel. Left wing Jews, especially socialists, have long been opposed to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. But, for many decades, the majority opinion had been largely uncritical support to Israel’s policies.
In the past decade, new organisations defending the rights of Palestinians, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have rapidly grown and become more vocal. After the 14 May massacre in Gaza, JVP, with Arab organisations and others, organised 75 demonstrations in cities across the US.
On the other end of the spectrum have been the hardline supporters of Israel. But, Machover notes, there has been “a growing rift – more like a schism – that has been developing within that portion of the Jewish community that up to now has been pro-Zionist and very ardent in its support of Israel”.
Machover notes a recent piece by Jane Eisner, “the editor of the most important Jewish American newspaper”, Forward. 
“Because of her position, she writes very discreetly and diplomatically. The title of her article is: ‘It’s time for Israel to recognize that diaspora Jews are already home’ – something that the Zionists do not want to hear.”
Machover quotes another article by a member of the Forward editorial board, titled “My Zionism is fading – one expulsion at a time”. The writer is referring to the expulsion of human rights activists from Israel.
Machover adds, “Another article I have read recently is headed ‘Ashamed to be Jewish’. I do not think they mean it, but Israel’s actions are certainly having their effect on American Jews”.
Another factor is that most Jews in the US do not like Trump and his racism, and the anti-Semitism of his alt-right supporters. Remember the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, when demonstrators chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” Trump said there were “good people” among them. The anti-Semitism of the pro-Trump evangelicals also is rightly feared by US Jews. 
Machover also notes a religious dimension to the split. 
“The overwhelming majority of practicing US Jews are aligned with the reform, liberal or conservative forms of Judaism.
“By contrast, in Israel, the strictly orthodox rabbinate has a monopoly on all Jewish religious issues. They often insult American Jews who visit Israel and who want to pray at the western wall of Temple Mount … 
“To cap it all, the Israeli government is now proposing a bill that will give Israel’s rabbinical courts power over non-Israeli Jews. This will not go down too well among US Jews.”
With these ties weakening, the Israeli establishment increasingly looks to the evangelicals as an enthusiastic base of support in the US population, and this is reflected in Netanyahu’s embrace of their representatives at the opening of the US embassy. The number of US evangelicals is many times larger than the number of US Jews.
US policy for decades has been military, financial and political support to Israel as an outpost of imperialism in the Middle East. While the Zionism of the evangelicals is expressed in their belief that the return of Jews to Palestine and the creation of Israel are fulfilling a biblical prophecy necessary to Armageddon, it also dovetails with US policy.
The evangelicals’ anti-Semitism does not conflict with their Zionism, since they want all Jews, including US Jews, to leave for Israel. After Armageddon, all Jews gathered in Israel who haven’t converted to the evangelical version of Christianity will, they believe, burn in hell.
This evangelical anti-Semitism, and the anti-Semitism in office under Trump’s presidency, is “something that Jews detest”, says Machover. 
“However, Netanyahu does not care about such anti-Semitism in America – or anywhere. That is all the better for Israel, since it encourages more Jews to ‘return’ to Israel.”

The strained relationship between US Jews and Israel

The world saw two starkly opposed moral cultures on 14 May. On one side were unarmed protesters in the Gaza Strip calling for the right of Palestinians to return to the homes and lands they were driven from by the creation of Israel 70 years ago. Palestinians call that the Nakba (“catastrophe”).
On the other side were Israeli snipers at the eastern perimeter of this “open air prison” of 2 million Palestinian inmates. To the west is the Mediterranean Sea, part of Israel’s border. To the south is the crossing from Gaza to Egypt. Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a traitor to all the Arab people, keeps that virtually closed, under orders from Israel. 
The snipers on this one day shot dead 62 Palestinians and wounded 2,000 others, many severely. The bullets the sharpshooters used to pick off demonstrators fracture inside the body, tearing more tissue and creating fist-sized exit wounds.
There were no casualties among the Israelis. It was a massacre, an evil criminal action by an oppressor nation against its oppressed people.
This was the largest of the demonstrations in Gaza that began on 30 March to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. Great March of Return participants each Friday walked to near the barbed wire prison fence to shout their demand, and were met with deadly sniper fire. The total murdered is at least 109, with 12,000 wounded.
The US press characterised the situation as “violence” or “clashes”, giving the false impression that there were two opposed armed forces in battle. Only slowly did the truth dribble out. The right of return was hardly mentioned, if at all.
One had to turn to the small alternative press, such as Democracy Now!, with a reporter, Sharif Kouddous, on the scene in Gaza on 14 May.
“There’s a simply massive protest all along the eastern [barbed wire fence] of Gaza, throughout the entire length of the Strip, from the north in Beit Hanoun, to the south in Rafah”, he reported. 
“I was at the biggest protest site, just east of Gaza City. There are thousands of people converging on the site – men, women and children. And it’s a really surreal scene. There are people gathering, mostly young men and boys, up near the [fence] of three sets of barbed wire.
“And you can see, just a couple of hundred yards away, Israeli soldiers, under canopies, on mounds of sand, sometimes in jeeps, and they are picking people off. I’ve seen people who weren’t even close to the fence being shot. Most of the people are being shot in the lower extremities, in their legs. I saw one person shot in the throat. The latest number of killed keeps going up, including a paramedic and a disabled person …
“No one is carrying weapons here … People insist that this is peaceful. There are no military uniforms allowed [among the protesters]. There are no weapons allowed. Despite the fact that there are very heavily armed groups in Gaza, this was a decision made by the committees that are running this movement …
“Hamas is involved, but so is Fatah, so is PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], so is Islamic Jihad, all those political parties. But more than that, there are women’s committees, civil society committees, legal advocates. All of them are taking part and making these decisions …
“There are no party flags allowed. Only the Palestinian flag. And in the back of the protest just a couple hundred yards away, there’s a festive atmosphere. There’s art. There’s music. There’s celebrations of Palestinian heritage. So, this is really a broad-based, grassroots movement. I don’t think even if Hamas wanted this to stop, it could stop it. 
“What most people are doing is just walking to the fence. Some people place the Palestinian flag on the barbed wire. Some cut the wire and try to cross, saying they are implementing the right of return themselves. We have to remember that people are trapped in Gaza. There is really no way out. Most have never left the Strip. So this is a way of pushing their bodies up against their confinement.
“This is happening in a buffer zone. Israel imposed a buffer zone a couple of hundred meters inside Gaza from the fence. And so, over the years, farmers and people living on that side of the Gaza Strip have been regularly shot at by Israeli troops. And so, even reclaiming this space in Gaza itself is an achievement.”
Israel has laid siege to Gaza since 1991. Nothing can go in or out without Israeli approval, which is slowly squeezing Gaza to death while the Israeli military intermittently invades, inflicting huge casualties and destruction. A UN agency says that Gaza could soon become unlivable. 
About targeting protesters’ legs, Kouddous said, “It reminds me of the first intifada. Israelis would break the arms of Palestinians who were throwing stones. Now it’s Palestinians walking, and so they are taking out their legs”.
He visited a hospital where many of the wounded were being treated. “There was a wailing of pain in the orthopaedic wards and young men and boys walking around on crutches, many lying in beds, their legs bandaged up with rods and pins protruding”.
While this was going on, 40 miles away in Jerusalem, Israelis were celebrating the founding of Israel. Britain and the United States enabled its creation, supported by the other imperialist powers. The objective was to establish a pro-imperialist beachhead in the Arab world. This imperialist support has maintained Israel ever since. 
So it was fitting that the centre of the celebration in Jerusalem was the symbolic opening of the US embassy. The move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was a provocation against the Palestinians, who view Jerusalem as their capital. It also clarified, for even the most dim-witted, that the “two-state solution” is dead.
Israeli prime mister Netanyahu was at the embassy opening, heaping praise on US president Donald Trump for making the move, and declaring that Jerusalem has been “the capital of the Jewish people for millennia, and the capital of our state from its inception”. This comes close to declaring that Israel is the state of all Jews everywhere – something he would like to say, but right now it is impolitic to do so.
Among the dignitaries present from the White House were Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka, who heaped praise on Netanyahu. Kushner is supposed to release the White House plan for “peace”, which is reported to reject the right of return for Palestinians and back Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Prayers were said by two extreme right US preachers, Robert Jeffress and John Hagee. The later is a prominent “end of times” Christian, who once said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to what became Israel. The ideology of both includes that the Jews had to return to the ancient land of Israel because they had to be there for Armageddon to occur.
That anti-Semites can be pro-Israel is nothing new. Both positions are held by many fascists in the US and Europe. It is odd that Trump would invite these two to Jerusalem – or is it?
Some of Jeffress’ other statements: “Here is the deep, dark secret of Islam. It is a religion that promotes paedophilia, sex with children”; “Islam is wrong! It is heresy from the pit of hell. Mormonism is wrong. It is a heresy from the pit of Hell. Judaism, you know, can’t be saved”; Catholicism “represents the genius of Satan”.
He has equally nice things to say about Buddhists, Hindus, LGBT people and so on.
Trump and Netanyahu both blame the Palestinian deaths and wounding on the Palestinians themselves and defend the Israeli killings. The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, repeated this at a meeting of the Security Council.
As Malcolm X said, the oppressors turn the criminals into the victims and the victims into the criminals. Much of the mainstream press in the US follow suit.
An exception was one writer in the New York Times, who wrote: “The juxtaposition of images of dead and wounded Palestinians and Ivanka Trump smiling in Jerusalem like a Zionist Marie Antoinette tells us a lot about America’s relationship to Israel right now”.

Palestinian morality and Israeli-US immorality

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.
The murder of one of the great Black leaders of the time by white racists with the complicity of the US government, most likely the FBI, stunned African Americans in the country. 
Immediately, violent uprisings broke out in hundreds of cities and towns, the most widespread of uprisings that had marked the era of the civil rights movement and Black Power. The African American singer Nina Simone swiftly wrote a song titled “Why? The King of Love Is Dead”:
What’s gonna happen now, in all of our cities? 
My people are rising, they’re living in lies 
Even if they have to die, even if they have to die 
At the moment they know what life is
Even at that one moment that ya know what life is 
If you have to die, it’s all right 
’Cause you know what life is 
You know what freedom is for one moment of your life
Scenes of the uprisings were broadcast on TV. One captured the national impact: in largely Black Washington, DC, the Capitol building was partially obscured by rising smoke from the burning city. The sentiment was that if “they” – in the parlance of the time, the white power structure – could kill Dr King, the advocate of non-violence, they could do it to any Black person. 
The police could not contain the massive upsurge, and everywhere the National Guard was called out, 40,000-strong, to suppress it. Forty African Americans were killed, hundreds wounded and many more arrested.
One of those arrested was a young man named Andrew Pulley, whom I later got to know. He was told by the judge that he had two options: prison or the army. He chose the latter. 
Once enlisted, he met at his base, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, with a group of antiwar soldiers organised by socialist GIs. He became an antiwar fighter and socialist, and once out of the military joined the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party, becoming a national leader of both.
Gunning for King
The racist, anti-communist head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, targeted King after the 1956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Hoover then set up a secret program called COINTEL to counter the new Black movement with illegal surveillance, disinformation, arrests on trumped-up charges and other dirty tricks. 
In a later memo, Hoover ordered the agency to prevent the emergence of “a Black messiah”, singling out King and Malcolm X (who was assassinated in 1965).
Government attention on King became more pronounced when he came out against the Vietnam War in 1967. In doing so, he had to break with the rest of the civil rights establishment. They didn’t want to offend Democratic president Lyndon Johnson, who was now leading the war. 
Recent memoirs by King supporters tell of how he was shunned. By coming out against the war, he lined up with the more militant youth wing led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and militant Black nationalists such as Malcolm X.
In explaining his position, he said that the United States government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.
It’s hard today, when King’s name is invoked by capitalist politicians of all stripes – even racists who twist King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech to boast they “have a dream” of ending affirmative action (which King strongly supported) – to recall the anti-King statements at the time in the press, by federal and local law enforcement authorities and in Congress after he had spoken against the war.
The FBI was further alarmed when King sought to broaden the struggle. From the beginning of his entry onto the national stage in the Montgomery bus boycott against segregation on public transport, he raised deeper questions about the oppression of Blacks.
After the victories of the civil rights movement – winning Black voting rights in the south and the beginnings of the dismantling of legal segregation – King realised that the economic super-exploitation of Blacks would be a more difficult problem to solve.
He began to see the struggle for racial equality as an economic struggle, and the capitalist system as the problem. In 1967, in a speech titled “The Other America”, he talked about “work-starved men searching for jobs that do not exist”.
He described the Black population as living on a “lonely island of poverty surrounded by an ocean of material prosperity” and in a “triple ghetto of race, poverty and human misery”.
“The movement must address itself to the restructuring of the whole of American society. There are 40 million poor people here”, he said.
“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there 40 million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.
“When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy … We’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society …
“It means questions must be raised. ‘Who owns the oil?’ ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?’”
In 1968, King called for a “revitalised labour movement” to place “economic issues on the highest agenda”.
“The coalition of an energised section of labour, Negroes, unemployed, and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”
In an earlier speech, King said, “You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums.
“You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folks then. You are messing with captains of industry … 
“Now this means we are treading difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism … There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while there to support striking sanitation workers. The largely Black workforce became famous for holding signs reading “I Am A Man”.
The US is still the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. It has been at war overtly or covertly since 1941. The anti-capitalist alliance of the workers and all the oppressed that King outlined (and today we can add other sectors) is still the road forward.

The assassination of Martin Luther King

The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), James Comey, is on a tour promoting his new book, which attacks Trump. He is being given the kid gloves treatment.
The Democrats, their supporters in the mass media and most self-styled “progressives” are on a drive to whitewash the FBI in its squabble with Trump over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
All wings of the Democratic Party have fallen in line behind this campaign, with even senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren going along with it, if quietly.
To the Democrats and their followers, former FBI director Robert Mueller, who is heading up the collusion investigation, and James Comey are above any criticism – straight arrows endowed with sterling characters.
The FBI itself is the “greatest law enforcement agency in the world”, according to one commentator.
The reality is that the FBI is one of the most important of the array of political police agencies in the US government, and has been from its beginning.
Dirty business
The FBI’s origins are in early 20th century agencies formed to investigate federal crimes under the Department of Justice. In 1909, it was named the Bureau of Investigation. 
With the entry of the US into World War One, the bureau investigated draft resisters, violators of the Espionage Act of 1917 and immigrants suspected of socialist or anarchist views. Organisations such as the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party were also included.
During the war, the radical press was largely suppressed, and there were arrests of radical leaders.
The Socialist Party did not support the war. This was especially true of its left wing, whose best known spokesperson was Eugene Debs. 
In June 1918, Debs gave a fiery speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he blasted the war and supported the Russian Revolution. He was arrested under the Espionage Act, convicted and, after appeals were denied, imprisoned. The Espionage Act is still used as a tool against radical dissent.
While in jail, Debs was nominated as the SP presidential candidate in 1920, despite his sharp criticisms of the right wing of the party, including its attacks on Communists. He received 1 million votes – 3.4 percent.
After the war, the man who moulded it for the next half a century, J. Edgar Hoover, joined the FBI.
Deeply opposed to socialism, Hoover set up a card index system listing every radical leader, organisation and publication in the United States. By 1921, he had amassed 450,000 files. More than 10,000 suspected Communists were arrested, and many immigrant radicals were deported.
Hoover became bureau director in 1924, a post he held until his death in 1972. In that period, the bureau (renamed the FBI in the 1930s) was the main anti-communist, anti-Black, anti-union witch-hunting tool of the government. 
In the 1930s, Hoover was instructed by president Franklin Roosevelt to keep tabs on Communist organisations and “suspect” individuals. He was zealous in carrying out this directive, listing even Roosevelt’s own wife, Eleanor, and other liberals.
Also under surveillance were militant leaders of the great labour upsurge of the 1930s that created the Congress of Industrial Organizations. 
The FBI was instrumental in the Roosevelt administration using the 1940 Smith Act to indict and convict leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party for “conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the US government”. Among the defendants were leaders of the Teamsters’ union. This was part of taming the union movement to prepare for US entrance into World War Two. 
During the war, the FBI expanded its arsenal of wiretaps and other electronic surveillance of “subversives”. After the war, it helped to carry out the anti-communist witch-hunt begun by the Democratic Truman administration in 1947.
The FBI worked closely with the witch-hunting committees in Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee and in the Senate under the chairmanship of Joseph McCarthy. Thousands in the union movement, the government, churches and Hollywood were purged, prosecuted and persecuted. The right wing of the labour bureaucracy was only too pleased to join in and remove militants in the unions.
As part of the witch-hunt, Hoover established a special anti-gay unit. McCarthy charged that gays and Communists had taken over parts of the government and the Democratic Party.
McCarthyism, as the campaign became known, grew to include grassroots committees across the country. It represented an incipient fascist movement, but was eventually shut down by alarmed sections of the ruling class.
When a new stage in the Black rights movement began with the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott challenging racist apartheid in the south, Hoover established a secret program called COINTEL (counter-intelligence) to combat Black activists, Communists, socialists and believers in democracy who supported Black rights.
As the radicalisation of the 1960s and early 1970s developed, spearheaded by the civil rights and Black liberation movements and the youth radicalisation centred on the anti-Vietnam-war movement, COINTEL expanded. All Black and anti-war (and later women’s and gay and lesbian liberation) groups were targeted in addition to the socialist organisations already in the FBI’s sights.
One result of the radicalisation was the exposure of the secret COINTEL program in the 1970s, when activists broke into an FBI office and found the documents. 
A lawsuit brought by the Socialist Workers Party, supported by the entire left except the Stalinist groups, against government spying, break-ins and other illegal activities directed against the SWP, exposed the same dirty tricks against many other groups. Others also brought actions that revealed FBI crimes.
In the reaction against “the ’60s” that has developed since, the FBI and other political police agencies have regained their former role. The FBI spearheaded the anti-Muslim witch-hunt, including frame-ups and entrapments, after the 11 September 2001 attacks. This campaign was headed by then FBI director Robert Mueller – now the Democrats’ darling.
Democrats aid authoritarianism
The “intelligence community” – all the political police agencies – is extolled by the Democrats, who hope Mueller can get rid of Trump. This “community” has released statements that it has proof of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections (all countries meddle in the affairs of others if they can, with the US being meddler in chief).
They hope to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the “intelligence community” says it can’t give its “proof” because to do so would betray “national security”. They all swear their present secret facts are much better than the secret facts they asserted in the lead-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq about Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, facts that turned out not to exist.
The Democrats also extol the virtues of “national security”, which means the security of US imperialism. A case in point was the conviction of Chelsea Manning under the Espionage Act for releasing “classified” information about US war crimes in Iraq.
The act was used infrequently before 2008, but Obama used it nine times, convicting whistleblowers of revealing government crimes, not of conveying any information to a foreign government or organisation. It now hangs over the head of Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Who were these people spying for? I guess the people of the US and the world.
A high-ranking aide in Trump’s White House, Robert Porter, has recently been exposed as a wife beater, and was forced to resign. The Democrats correctly brought Trump to task for defending Porter. But they are more and more focusing on Porter’s having access to “classified” material, and are demanding better background checks before people can see such government secrets.
Hundreds of millions of documents are hidden by the US government under the “classified” label. They are secret for a good reason. Most would reveal information about US crimes or other embarrassing material that would harm US capitalist and imperialist interests if the US people and the rest of the world knew about them.
The Democrats and their apologists, by whitewashing the sordid record of the FBI, by defending the Espionage Act and by hiding US crimes under “national security” and “classified” labels, do not further the struggle against Trump’s real crimes of war, racism, misogyny, homophobia, massive attacks on workers’ living standards etc. 
They do the opposite. They further the increasing consolidation of the national security state, which furthers the development of authoritarian government.

Comey given the kid gloves while the FBI is exalted

About 500,000 people, largely youth, demonstrated in Washington, DC, in late March, against the continued mass shootings at schools across the country. 
There were solidarity mobilisations with this “March for Our Lives”, totalling hundreds of thousands more in some 800 cities and towns. In New York, 150,000 took to the streets, 85,000 in Chicago and 55,000 in Los Angeles. 
The spark that lit the tinder of anger and outrage against such shootings – since January there have been 18 school shootings, and many more before – was the response to the 4 February massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 were killed.
Survivors of the Parkland shooting planned national actions and sounded the tocsin. The call was picked up in a short while. The first actions were walkouts in schools across the country on 14 March, followed by the March for Our Lives.
The overwhelmingly young speakers in the capital included many Parkland survivors, from 13 to 18 years old, who were universally acclaimed as angry, determined, articulate and ready to “fight”, as one of them said. 
Parkland survivors were also featured at a rally of 20,000 in southern Florida, a short distance from Trump’s Palm Beach resort (his home away from the White House), where he was playing golf. 
The Parkland survivors understood that they had to reach out to Black and Latino youth, who are victims of gun violence in their communities, including by police. One, Jaclyn Corin, said:
“Parkland is the heart of this movement. But just as a heart needs blood to pump, my hometown needs the alliance of other communities to properly spread this message. We openly recognise that we are privileged individuals who would not have received as much attention if it weren’t for the affluence of our city.
“Because of that, however, we share the stage, today and forever, with those who have always stared down the barrel of a gun.”
She then introduced nine-year-old Yolanda King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. Yolanda said:
“My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world, period!”
Edna Lizbeth Chávez, another speaker, said, “Hola, buenas tardes. I am from South Los Angeles, California, el sur de Los Ángeles. I am a 17-year-old senior at Manual Arts High School. I am a youth leader. I am a survivor. I have lived in South LA my entire life and have lost many loved ones to gun violence …
“For decades, my community … has become accustomed to this violence. It is normal to see candles, it is normal to see posters, it is normal to see balloons, it is normal to see flowers honouring the lives of Black and Brown youth who have lost their lives to a bullet.
“How can we cope with it, when our school district has its own police department? Instead of making Black and Brown students feel safe, they continue to profile and criminalise us. Instead, we should have a department specialising in restorative justice. We need to tackle the root causes of the issues we face, and come to an understanding of how to resolve them.”
NRA
This issue of cops in schools is one of many the speakers took on, as well as opposition to Trump’s proposal to arm teachers. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has in the past proposed that even students be armed, ostensibly to kill a student shooter first. But who would know who was shooting whom? It would turn into a circular firing squad.
There was fierce opposition to the NRA. This outfit presents itself an organisation of hunters, target shooters and others who have guns only for self-defence. In reality, it is the lobby representing gun manufacturers, and opposes all restrictions on guns. It has great sway over Republican politicians and most Democrats.
One sign at the south Florida rally depicted Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the NRA, with the label “TERRORIST”. The extreme right politics of the NRA leaders was expressed in a speech by LaPierre at a gathering of conservatives after the Parkland shootings.
He focused on what he considers the imminent danger of socialism and communism taking over the country, and only tangentially on guns. He bemoaned that colleges and universities include discussion of the Communist Manifesto and Marxist economics. 
He sounded the alarm that the Democratic Socialists of America have chapters in hundreds cities and campuses, and so forth. He charged that the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists – something we haven’t heard from a major figure since the days of Joe McCarthy. And LaPierre said that he wasn’t referring just to Bernie Sanders, but to the whole Democratic Party.
He tied this into the question of guns by asserting that the socialists and communists want to take away the Second Amendment right to bear arms as a first step to taking away “all our freedoms”. He was interrupted with applause at points, indicating that many “conservatives” have become the far right.
Debate
As is always true in new movements, in the many rallies across the country there were different viewpoints about what to do. Besides opposition to the NRA and guns in schools, there were other common themes.
One was the demand that assault rifles be banned. In the Parkland shootings, an AR-15 assault rifle was used. Assault rifle were used in other mass shootings in schools and in other venues. Such rifles are quick-firing semi-automatic weapons that can be easily transformed into automatic machine guns. 
As the name implies, they are offensive weapons used by armies, having nothing to do with self-defence. They are useless for hunting animals for food because they would blow them apart. Their only use is to kill people.
Another theme was closing loopholes through which practically anyone can buy a gun at guns shows or through second hand sales, and adopting other common sense gun control measures. Any laws passed by Congress about guns can and have been used to victimise Blacks and be used for other reactionary purposes, so any such laws should be carefully reviewed.
Empire of violence
The background to these school shootings is that the US is a very violent country. The US has been at war since 1941, continues to be so in the present, and there are threats of new wars. 
The US has more guns per capita than any other country in the world. People here are 10 times more likely to die from guns than in other “first world” countries. The figure jumps to 25 times for gun-related homicides.
Also, the so-called War on Drugs has created a huge illicit trade to meet the growing demand for drugs, which is caused by economic despair. The drug cartels use guns to counter police forces – in the instances when they aren’t working hand in glove with them.
Each drug enterprise also uses guns to protect its turf against competitors. The foot soldiers on the ground, often drawn from the exploited and oppressed who see no other way to survive, are the enforcers and another source of gun violence in many communities.
An example of official violence in the United States is the number of police killings. In 2014, for example, police in the US killed 1,100 people. In the same year, police killed 14 people in Canada, one in the United Kingdom, 12 in China and zero in Germany. 
In these and other ways, including TV cop shows, the lesson is taught that guns are needed by “good guys” to kill the “bad guys”. No wonder deranged individuals carry out mass shootings and feel justified – they see the lesson all around them that killing for “good causes” like theirs is OK.
The protesting teenagers, while fighting for their own lives, are seeing the connections with racism and reactionary institutions such as the NRA. Socialists can help them see the connection with what is wrong with the whole of capitalist society.
Another aspect of these demonstrations was the Democratic Party trying to corral all this energy into election campaigning. Democratic operatives were at the demonstrations signing up youth to register to vote. There is growing pressure on this and all other social movements to get behind the Democrats as the non-Trump party in the November Congressional mid-term elections.
Socialists can play a role here too: explaining that the Democrats are no answer to Trump and the rightist Republicans, and fighting for the movement to keep pushing ahead with mass actions of all types.
There are indications that some of our arguments can find support among these youth. A spirit was evident in all the actions that young people would not be told what to do.
One electoral slogan speakers advanced was not to support any candidate who accepts support from the NRA. We will see how this holds up when it comes to Democrats who accept such support. In any case, we want to be there when the Democrats fail to deliver much.

Trump ratchets up attack on immigrant children

US prisoners strike against slave labour

New revelations about children separated from parents

Trump’s ‘fake order’ exposed as protests grow

Trump’s new immigration cruelty

The strained relationship between US Jews and Israel

Palestinian morality and Israeli-US immorality

The assassination of Martin Luther King

Comey given the kid gloves while the FBI is exalted

1 million march against gun violence

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