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Workers Vanguard No. 1151 |
22 March 2019
The closing date for news in this issue is 19 March.
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Down With U.S. Imperialist Aid to Israel! Democrats, Zionists and the Witchhunt of Ilhan Omar For the past month, American politics has been dominated by a smear campaign targeting freshman Democratic Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for supposedly “anti-Semitic” remarks. Omar said absolutely nothing anti-Jewish. The witchhunt against her whipped up by Republicans and Democrats alike is premised on the fiction that any criticism of Israel equals anti-Jewish bigotry. In the U.S. and beyond, attacks cut from the same poisonous cloth have become standard operating procedure to hound, harass and criminalize defenders of the Palestinian people against Israeli state terror.
Since her appointment to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January, Omar, one of the first Muslim women in Congress and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), has attracted the attention of powerful enemies. The hammer came down when she violated what has become a sacrosanct rule in U.S. politics: never question U.S. support to Israel. In response to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s warning of a political crusade against Omar and her fellow Muslim Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for their criticism of Israel, Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” The statement, taken from Puff Daddy’s classic 1997 song, was a commentary on the role of money and the reactionary pro-Israel lobby in U.S. politics, specifically the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The lying distortion of Omar’s remarks as “anti-Semitic tropes” got its full blessing from the Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom Omar just promoted by posing with her on the cover of Rolling Stone under the headline, “Women Shaping the Future.” Under pressure, Omar apologized for her remarks only to be slammed again for questioning why it is acceptable for the U.S. government to “push for allegiance to a foreign country,” i.e., why Americans (such as herself) are obliged to support Israel. For this she was absurdly accused of claiming American Jews had “dual loyalty.” Allegiance to Israel, i.e., a state power, is not synonymous with Jewish culture or religion. In fact, it’s the Zionists who equate them, demanding loyalty from Jews throughout the world to the racist, semi-theocratic Israeli state. (read on)
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The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
