Political Prisoner Malik Muhammad on Palestine Action, Islam, and Anti-Imperialism: Vox Ummah Interview

Introduction

The publication of this interview on December 19th marks day 48 of the historic Prisoners for Palestine hunger strike—the largest prisoner hunger strike in the u.k since 1981, when prisoners from the Irish Republican Army undertook a prolonged and militant refusal of food in protest of the british government’s withdrawal of their special status as prisoners of war.

The eight Prisoners for Palestine hunger strikers—Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, Kamran Ahmed, Teuta “T” Hoxha, Lewie Chiaramello, and Umer Khalid—have taken up their predecessors’ same weapon of the body, declaring their refusal to eat until all five of their audacious demands have been met. Many of them have been held on “remand” (pre-trial detention) for over a year for alleged direct actions taken against Elbit Systems, the weapons manufacturer in britain which makes 80-85% of the zionist entity’s land weaponry and drones. These weapons are currently being used in the holocaust of Gaza, to lay waste to Palestinian lives.

The hunger strikers’ demands are as follows: end all communications censorship; release them on immediate bail while awaiting trial; a fair and transparent trial with all records related to Elbit released in full; the deproscription of Palestine Action; and lastly, the permanent closure of every Elbit facility on british soil.

The strike has been met with a wave of international support: Italian prisoner Stecco has chosen to expand the strike across Europe; federal defendant Jakhi in the so-called u.s. declared his solidarity with the hunger strikers and undertook a 10-day solidarity fast; recently liberated Lebanese political prisoner Georges Abdallah released a statement of admiration and solidarity, along with Abdel-Nasser and Ammar, Palestinian prisoners who were liberated by the resistance earlier this year in the Al-Ahrar Flood exchange.

Earlier this year, in August of 2025, T. Hoxha —who is currently on hunger strike again—was the first of the Palestine Action prisoners to initiate a solo hunger strike when the prison officials at HMP Peterborough revoked her job in the prison library, withheld her mail, and represented her as a danger to the other prisoners because of her political beliefs. Hoxha’s strike gained international attention when Casey Goonan—at that time the only federal defendant from the 2024 Student Intifada—announced they were joining the strike in solidarity with her, refusing to eat until her demands had been won. A week later, Malik Muhammad—the subject of this interview—also joined the strike in support of Hoxha’s demands.

This historic act of internationalist solidarity undertaken by political prisoners across multiple geographies directly paved the way for Palestine Action’s current larger hunger strike, serving as a model of militant anti-imperialist solidarity in the service of Palestine from those facing the brunt of the state’s repression.

It is necessary for us to maintain internationalist solidarity because ‘that’ isn’t happening ‘over there’ to ‘them’ but oppression is ‘HERE’ and happening to ‘US’ all. Our movements are stronger together. The people are stronger together. Don’t let them separate us. And remember as Palestinians starve in Gaza, so do the unjustly held 12,000 Palestinian prisoners, and the ones in US prisons and ‘detention’ (death) centers, prisons in the UK, Australia — they are all the same. The prisoners are living under forced displacement, oppression, occupation.

— Malik’s response to Hoxha’s August 2025 hunger strike

Malik introduces themself as an “anti-fascist, anarchist, a revolutionary, a writer of everything creative.” They are a Black and Palestinian direct actionist serving an absurd ten-year sentence in Oregon for their legitimate actions during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020. In retaliation for their organizing behind bars, they’ve spent the majority of the past two years in solitary confinement, in a battle against mail censorship — the same mail censorship that is being waged against our Palestine Action comrades in britain.

Reading their many writings and interviews is an exercise in frustration. Here is a serious militant and revolutionary who is burning to engage with the larger struggle, but has been trammelled at every turn. James Yaki Sayles defines political prisoners as “conscious and active servants of the people”, but how can our prisoners remain conscious and active elements when the people allow them to languish and die alone behind bars? Georges Abdallah, liberated after 41 years in a French prison, attributes his ability to remain a part of the wider movement to his comrades on the outside. By constantly supplying him with news of the resistance in the outside world they gave him the necessaries of political development; by publicizing his voice they made it into a weapon of theory in the service of resistance.

I was surrounded by men and women dedicated to the cause who allowed me to keep resisting, by making my resistance part of the struggle against the genocide in Gaza. They gave me a permanent voice on the outside, allowing me to speak about the struggles of various peoples and other political prisoners. So, I wasn’t just a prisoner. I was a fighter who was in prison.

— Georges Abdallah

For those of us who consider ourselves supporters, sisters, and defenders of political prisoners, our primary responsibility is to serve as intermediaries between them and the international war against imperialism. Hundreds and thousands of revolutionaries and potential comrades are crying out to be seriously engaged with in this struggle on every level. This interview aims to be a bridge into this war for our sibling Malik, who calls on those of us on the outside to transmit their call to action to our political prisoners in the u.s.—the only way that international hunger strikes are possible.

Interview with Malik Muhammad

How do you see the Prisoners for Palestine hunger strike as part of a broader, international struggle against imperialism?

Imperialism is upheld through state-sanctioned violence, and part of that violence involves the systemic kidnapping of people they call prisoners. To recognize freedom as a collective struggle is to know that none of us are free until all of us are—including and especially those who have been stolen from us under the guise of “public safety.” They want to silence and lock away the fighters and their voices. What I see in the case of my Pal Action siblings is a settler colonial state trying to distract from the sins of its past — namely, Britain’s complicity in zionism and the Nakba. A state that at once “decries” a genocide it won’t even acknowledge is happening, all the while violently repressing those who object to it. The state’s only tool is a hammer, the only language it speaks is violence. But the perpetual struggle for freedom transcends generations.

When you were organizing in 2020, did you see yourself and the Black liberation movement as part of that war against imperialism? How have your politics developed since then, especially in the two years since the Toufan Al-Aqsa?

Afrikan liberation is the struggle against imperialism and settler colonialism. First Nation liberation and sovereignty and Palestinian liberation are one struggle, and cannot be separated from each other. They exist in an interconnected and interwoven web of oppression and resistance. What affects one directly affects the other. As my dear sibling Lisa says, “that” isn’t happening “over there.” No. We are told to believe so but that’s not the case.

I feel that resistance against this unique fascist state is important because of its central role in the exploitation of land, lives, and cultures at such rapid rates, all while destroying the planet. So while my direct actions [in 2020] were taken against this [u.s. settler] state, they didn’t happen in a vacuum–just like the actions of the Palestinian resistance. The oppressed are never the ones who initiate violence. How could we be, when the state is the one who constantly perpetuates violence against us?

My politics haven’t changed much. I’ve been an anarchist ever since I was a kid and discovered radical blogs on Tumblr. [In regard to Palestine], I would say that in spite of my anti-state beliefs, for a time I held onto hope for a two-state solution. It’s hard to tell a people to “fuck the state” when they don’t even have one to call their own to begin with, when they’re still fighting and struggling for their right to exist at all. It was the same with Afrikans here [in the so-called u.s.], which is why the Black Power movement often had statist ideals.

But [the events of] October 7th reinforced for me that “resistance is essence”, and under occupation, it is a right. It reminded me that perhaps the freest we can ever be is in the moments when we are resisting, when the people take fate and destiny into their own hands and take action. As Jonathan and George, Assata and Mutulu, Oso, Hanson, Peltier, Xinachtli, Tyler and Luigi, the IRA and my Pal Action siblings, all faithful resisters within the death kamps, the ones we don’t hear about, and the slave rebellions lost to history.

Like John Brown meeting the hangman’s noose, we do only what we feel called to do by our creator. The genocidal campaign the zionist entity has waged against the Palestinians after they were forced to hear the cries of the unheard on October 7, that barbaric, internationally-sponsored terror, that all reaffirmed to me that my hope will always be in the people, not the state. The mutual aid, the resistance in the face of genocide, people pulling bodies from rubble, the fighters and the martyrs–all that carnage mixed with all that resilience. Beautiful resistance and faith. That reminded me of my core belief that resistance is essence.

One of the demands of the prisoners in the UK hunger strike is to be able to “send and receive communications without restriction, surveillance, or interference.” Shine White, Xinachtli, and almost every political prisoner reports censored and withheld mail. Why is freedom of mail such an indispensable thing for a prisoner?

Letters and communications are a lifeline for us. The state wants to break us by locking us away. They want us disappeared and forgotten about. And even if we aren’t forgotten about, they want us to feel like we are anyway. I’ve had mail withheld for so long. I know guys who have gotten garbage bags full of mail after a whole year.

They try to break your spirit, make you feel like there’s nothing to fight for, and that you should just give up. That’s why it’s imperative to always correspond, even more so when the mail is withheld. They can hide a few parcels from their higher-ups and deny there ever was any, but if you flood their inboxes it helps pressure the [prison officials.] And when the prisoner does eventually get that huge stack of mail, it’s a beautiful reminder that they’re loved, and their strength can be renewed.

The oppressor’s only tactic is to intensify their repression, to wait us out. So our memory must be longer than the state’s. That’s why we should never forget [the prisoners.]

How should the outside movement be working to bring political prisoners into the anti-imperialist struggle?

Any way you can. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution. Like anarchy, it’s fluid, and there’s room for a diversity of tactics. Never be afraid to dream or think bigger than the established box. Do what has been working and leave behind what hasn’t, and try things you never have. Our imagination must also be bigger than the state’s. They only know one use for a hammer, while an anarchist recognizes the versatility of that tool.

Writing to and communicating with a political prisoner is the bare minimum. Building and platforming their voice, strategizing in ways that would directly aid those inside, making sure they know that they’re part of a movement that transcends the bars and gates and walls, that they’re only on a different front but still fighting the same fight. More than that though, making sure they know that they’ll be free by any means. See, Assata was [freed]. So they should know that they’ll be freed by any means. And that they’ll be supported in any actions they take.

What makes a hunger strike effective or ineffective? How much of its power comes from public pressure vs the will of the strikers themselves?

Hunger strikes are most effective when you know your ‘why.’ The will must be there, but it’s all in the ‘why.’ The power is always within the people. Under repression, to refuse to eat, to starve yourself purposefully, is powerful in itself. The power is with you the second you refuse. The state threatens violence to coerce and control. So we say, “You can beat me, deprive me, but my intent is to still not eat. I’m the one with the power. And you just pretend.”

Public pressure is imperative too: You [on the outside] have power too. It’s imperative to keep the striker alive with that public pressure. Because when you go down that path, you know why. And you’re prepared to die for it. You know your red lines, the demands that you will accept instead—but you are still prepared to die for it. The public’s job is to not let you go that way.

That’s where pressure is imperative. You support in all the ways you can, apply pressure in all the ways you can, and you also accept that the power is with that person, too. That they must be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves, even if that means it meets an disagreeable end. They eat only at their own will. You hope to expedite that, spread their message, even if they go.

A hunger strike is never ineffective. As revolutionaries, we never die. We just spread, and multiply. Like our ideas, they’re always here. Because [as Fred Hampton said], you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can kill a revolutionary son, but you’ll only martyr another one. You can steal a revolutionary daughter, but you’ll only add water for the revolution to drink from. So–we have the power, you have the power. The state has none.

Are there any verses from the Quran you reflect on most in regards to the struggle you are waging?

“Beat back the oppressors wherever you find them.”

Are there any Islamic figures you think about most during this period of struggle?

The prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) and his refusal of riches to renounce Allah. He said, “You can give me the moon in my left hand, and all the stars in my right hand. And still I would never renounce the teachings of Allah.” It’s that resistance, that steadfast dedication that inspires me.

How does the struggle for Palestine in the global north become re-ignited in a meaningful way? How does the global north escalate?

International solidarity. Radical direct action, autonomous groups acting together, sabotaging systems to directly hinder the genocidal IOF. The global north needs to hear us now, or be us later. Militancy and direct action is imperative. Resistance is essence, and under occupation, it’s a right.

The world is occupied, and whether you live in a prison, or an open-air minimum like the so-called u.s. or u.k, or a harsher maximum open-air prison like gaza, the state occupies land, lives and people. Do we play at revolution, or do we make it? October 7th should be a rallying cry for radical direct action everywhere. Palestinians have managed to resist one of the world’s most powerful and best-equipped militaries. As George Jackson said, “Their reliance on their technology will be their downfall.” The system is fragile, and can be brought down. A stone thrown can crumble a nation. The system must be raged against because none are free until we all are free.

Is there anything you’d like to say directly to the hunger strikers or any of the prisoners associated with Palestine Action?

Resistance is essence, siblings. You’re never forgotten. Know your “why” and the “how” will come. We are not separated by these man-made monstrous constructs. We are connected in spite of them—and in some ways, because of them. The state creates its own monster, so be Frankenstein’s monster and destroy him. Refine yourself inside—plot, plan, rally, foment, organize and resist. Prison is only another front of the struggle. Until we all are free, none are. So remember: resistance is essence; under occupation it’s a right. I love you siblings. Love, rage, and solidarity.

Conclusion

During the hunger strike led by T. Hoxha in the summer of 2025, people called for international protests at british embassies, press and media, and direct pressure on the prisons and the government through continuous phone calls and emails.

Prisoners for Palestine is calling on us to take these actions once again. But the hunger strikers’ demands have a right to be enforced through greater measures. Again and again, the u.s. left has shouted down calls to direct action & basic property damage in the name of “a diversity of tactics”. The effect of this, ironically, is a impotent political movement almost entirely reduced to legal parades and useless finger-wagging at politicians. A hunger strike is a last-ditch tactic taken up by prisoners who have no weapons left but their own bodies. It throws the movement at large into sharp relief: while our imprisoned comrades scrape away at the concrete with broken spoons, we put our jackhammers and our pipes into some backyard shed and close the door.

Aren’t our comrades’ lives worth the same as Bobby Sands’, or Assata Shakur’s, or Abdel-Nassar and Ammar’s? When will it seriously be time for a diversity of tactics? Who will bring out the tools? Two years after the Toufan Al Aqsa, Palestine Action remains one of the few examples of genuinely effective solidarity. And now its prisoners, who took up the crowbar and the hammer, are left to starve by their imperialist government, their bodies degrading alone in concrete cells.

The strikers’ demand for bail can be answered by the british public. Self-liberated Sean “Shibby” Middlebrough, of the Filton 24, answered it on his own behalf. But the call to shut Elbit down must be answered by the general public, and it must be answered in defense of not only the lives of these hunger strikers, but the lives of every Palestinian left to be killed in winter floods — in lines to buy rotten food — in bombed out hospitals — in the tunnels of Rafah, the most honorable men of our time — in “israeli” torture chambers — and, for Malik Muhammad and his comrades, in the heart of the empire, the british-amerikan prison cell.

TAKE ACTION NOW

Toolkit (u.s. version)

Contact script for political prisoners

british embassy locations (worldwide)

Elbit locations (u.s.)

STAY UPDATED

Prisoners for Palestine website and Instagram

Free Malik Now website and Instagram

This interview was conducted in collaboration with Malik Muhammad’s representative team. Vox Ummah has not edited any of the content. We hope you take the time to read this interview, and after digesting its content, renew your struggle for the Palestinian cause and stand in solidarity with those facing state repression because of their principled stand against Imperialism.

If you want to get involved, here are 8 different ways to stand in solidarity with the hunger strikers.

source: Vox Ummah

5th Pan-African Congress Commemoration 2025: Dhoruba Bin-Wahad

On the 18th and 19th of November, over 250 delegates from across Africa and African communities in the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe gathered at the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Ghana’s capital, Accra, to commemorate the 5th Pan-African Congress held in 1945 at Manchester, England.

Delegates from Algeria, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, and China, met not only to remember the 1945 convention but to reaffirm the Pan-African vision declared at that historic Pan-African Congress.

At the original 5th Pan-African Congress, attendees W.E.B. Dubois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, and other Pan-African luminaries, who would later become anti-colonial freedom fighters, collectively called for a complete end to European colonial occupation and economic exploitation of Africa.

Ghana’s recently elected President John Mahama gave the conference keynote presentation. Not only did he pay tribute to earlier pioneers of Pan-Africanism, but he asserted “the inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent to full reparations” for “slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and systemic exploitation.” President Mahaha also announced the Accra Declaration of Reparatory Justice.

The Accra Declaration mandating the establishment of a “Pan-African Reparatory Justice Coordinating Committee” is currently being heralded as a new era of coordinated global action on reparatory justice,” said the Pan-African Progressive Front (PPF), the conveners of the conference.

Speaking later at the plenary session, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, former Black political prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, and well-known revolutionary Pan-African activist, provided a historical perspective of the current geopolitical state of affairs. Reminding attendees, that history never repeats itself – pointing out both the “historical rhyme of histories, and the contemporary reasons for today’s desperate attempts to keep Africans under the thumb of white supremacist nation-states and their neo-colonial allies in Africa and Western Asia.  Baba Dhoruba pointed out the differences between 1945 and 2025.

Baba Bin-Wahad noted that when the 5th Pan-African Congress was convened in 1945, Western Europe lay in utter ruin, devastated by the greatest conflagration humankind had ever experienced,

Baba Bin-Wahad had previously highlighted that even though World War II can be defined as the second fully industrialized war, it was nonetheless an unprecedented opportunity for American industrialists, military contractors, and finance capital’s most wealthy families to recycle the debts of WWI into unimagined profits for America’s elite and enhance U.S. military power.

The U.S. and its European Allies, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and most significantly, the  Soviet Union, (which lost over 25 million people in the fight against Nazis Germany and its Axis allies) emerged the victors of WWII with a geo-economic carte blanche to rewrite a new post-war global order, Bin-Wahad noted. The very global architecture we are subjected to today is a byproduct of the post-WWII concocted East–West rivalry, global trade manipulation by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and monetary subjugation by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. All these institutions were established after the end of the Second World War.

It was the U.S. Marshall Plan, America’s strategic economic, corporate, and industrial setup to revitalize a devastated Western Europe and amplify the West as a citadel of global financial capitalism that laid the legal framework for today’s global order. Monetizing the debts of worn-torn nations into enormous profits for America’s companies and industries, ushering in the rise of what Eisenhower called the “Military Industrial Complex”, and the “American Century” of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down cold war prosperity, were all major contributors to the 20th-century rise of the American Empire.

Re-Counting The Cost

General George C. Marshall, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff of the Army, whose name the Marshal Plan bears, laid the foundation for the rise of the modern Military Industrial Complex, which would emerge under president Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, would follow up with the moral bombast of virtuous Western democracy, and free market macro-capitalist ingenuity as the basis for political freedom and personal wealth, while demonizing fascist “crimes against humanity” and Soviet Communism in the same breath. Taking full advantage of the universal repugnance of fascism’s industrialized slaughter of millions of their fellow Europeans, the U.S. and its allies were able to camouflage their revitalization of European neo-colonialism in glowing moral and humanitarian terms of “ democratic freedom” and “universal human rights.”  Even going so far as creating an International Military Tribunal in the wake of the Nuremberg trials of Germany’s wartime Nazis Leaders. It’s worth noting that the German industrialists who backed the Nazis and built the German war machine were never prosecuted at Nuremberg and would later play a central role in Germany’s post-war economic growth as Europe’s strongest economy.

When America created the United Nations, it did so partly to ensure that the ‘New World Order’ would remain subject to European political contextualization and effectively ensure not just European post-war economic revitalization but also translate into a U.S.-dominated Western military alliance that could challenge Russian Communism while simultaneously abetting Europe’s reacquisition of its former colonial territories. Toward these perverse ends, the U.S. and its allies created the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, both were created to monetize the debts of poor developing nations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Europe’s military Alliance created ostensibly at the end of WWII to protect Europe from Soviet invasion, would become militarily involved in backing U.S. military interventions in Asia, Africa, and the Middle-East during the entire period of the so-called “Cold War.”

But the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) however, was another scheme altogether. It was established to regulate Global Trade between the “have and have not” nations of the world. The WTO mandate was shrewdly started to protect Western capitalist manufacturing monopolies, which favored developed manufacturing nations over underdeveloped mineral-producing nations. It was never intended to regulate genuine “free trade” between equally sovereign nations. Ultimately, all of these institutions were underwritten with the maneuver of the Bretton Woods Agreement linking the U.S. dollar to gold, making the dollar the de facto global reserve currency, a fitting tribute for the most powerful nation to emerge from the ashes of WWII. But history wasn’t just repeating events of post-WWI when a Europe, laid waste by war established the League of Nations, and Germany was made to pay reparations to its adversaries. No.

Baba Dhoruba reminded the dozens of Pan-Africans, Muslims and Christians alike, Socialists and Communists, from dozens of ethnic backgrounds gathered in Accra, to not just commemorate the historic 5th Pan-African Congress, but to understand that today we are witnessing the collapse of the world order fabricated in the 1940s. Except today, with climate change and increased consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, the self-destruction of humanity is closer at hand than ever before and the light for humanity at the end of the long dark tunnel of endless capitalist wars, debt and industrial pollution is a United States of Africa.

President Mahama also unveiled a plan for visa-free travel between African countries in his keynote address. Proposing a practical step toward continental unity, Ghana’s President Mahama used his keynote address to unveil the plan for the establishment of the “League of African Free Movement” along with seven other African nations that would abolish visa requirements between them, and he urged other African nations to join in this new visa-free protocol.

Delegate organizations from the Ivory Coast and Cameroon, spoke of solidarity with the Youth and Student uprising in Malagasy, Tanzania, Kenya, and solidarity with the Palestinian People. While African delegates from the diaspora were present, It was Black Power Media in the U.S. that commissioned Dhoruba Bin-Wahad as an official observer for the network who described the Rise of Fascism, Islamophobia, racist anti-migrant popularism in the Metropoles of Europe as Ethnic and Racial cleansing of Latin Populations, indigenous populations and all non-European. Making America Great Again, Keeping Europe Safe from 3rd World Migrants, demonizing Islam as ‘Terroristic” are all revivals of century old European Christian jingoistic White Nationalism.

Clearly, we are witnessing, in the age of global communications, how effectively Western democracy has deluded its constituents into a false sense of superiority that’s completely at odds with Europe’s historical track record of plunder, greed, and genocide visited upon the Global South, which is the primary cause for the current global migratory crisis to begin with. This delusion has inspired racist populism across the Western World.

The Euro-Christian white supremacist global order created after WWII we euphemistically call “globalization” today is rotting from within as European Union NATO puppets of American led jingoistic entanglements against Russia unravels in the Ukraine, stressing European economies while simultaneously, the Euro-Zionist Settler State in Western Asia (Palestine) has shredded the credibility of the American-European Global “rules based order” so pragmatically reformed and defended from 1945 to the present. Today is vastly different from 1945 and the mid to late 20th century.

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad

Dateline November 22, 2025

Accra, Ghana

____________________________________________

Additional Reading:

“Inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent to full reparations for slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and systemic exploitation”, an international Pan-African conference held on November 18 and 19, 2025 adopted the Accra Declaration on Reparatory Justice.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/11/23/inalienable-right-of-africans-and-people-of-african-descent-to-full-reparations-asserts-accra-declaration/

Dhoruba bin-Wahad is a former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He was a leading member of the New York chapter of the BPP, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21.

source: Black Agenda Report

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=24807

#africa #antiColonialism #antiImperialism #blackLiberation #dhorubaBinWahad #ghana

Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Presente!

To speak of Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) is to speak of a life lived in courageous chapters. As the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), his voice, sharp as a scalpel and uncompromising as truth, cut through the illusions of a nation in denial. He was, as he famously declared, “a revolutionary,” and his very existence was a challenge to the violent architecture of white supremacy. His leadership was a clear call that moved from the plea for rights to the demand for power. He did so in a 1965 meeting with President Lyndon Johnson, demanding protection for voting rights workers in Selma, Alabama, while other “leaders” present were just happy to be at the white house.

His legacy, however, extends far beyond the powerful oratory of the 1960s and his written word in his autobiography, Die Nigger Die!. His transformation into Imam Jamil Al-Amin represented a deep, spiritual journey and a continuation of his revolutionary work through the disciplines of faith, community building, and moral clarity. In West Atlanta, he was not just a leader but a pillar, working to create a self-sufficient Black community grounded in Islamic principles and social justice. It was here that the full depth of his political vision matured, most critically in what he termed “the politics of education.”

Imam Jamil’s “politics of education” was a radical framework for intellectual and spiritual liberation. He invited a clear, unflinching introspection into the use of U.S. propaganda as a primary weapon to deplete and dismantle the revolutionary fervor of the Black masses. He understood that after the open brutality of fire hoses and police dogs came another insidious assault: a media and cultural narrative designed to confuse, co-opt, and corrupt our understanding of our own condition and our own power. He taught that to truly be free, we must first decolonize our minds, to see through the manufactured reality that justifies our oppression and sows internal division. This message remains a critical, urgent tool in our ongoing struggle in the battle of ideas.

It is precisely this unwavering clarity that made him a permanent target of the state. He was under COINTELPRO surveillance and was listed by name in the 1967 FBI memo which established the plan to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of Brown and others in the liberation movement.  His 2002 conviction for the alleged murder of a sheriff’s deputy was a vendetta realized, a judicial lynching designed to silence a voice that could not be co-opted. The facts scream of its injustice: the confession of another man; evidence that should have exonerated  him; a gag order to silence his defense; and the unprecedented, punitive measure of holding a state prisoner in a federal supermax prison, exiled from his attorneys, his family, and his community. For over twenty years, he endured the slow violence of medical neglect while incarcerated — a passive death sentence hoping nature would finish what the courts began, a state execution by another name.

His body was caged, but his spirit remained free. Rest in power, Imam Jamil Al-Amin.

Free All Political Prisoners!

source: Black Alliance for Peace

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=24033

#blackAllianceForPeace #blackLiberation #blackRevolution #hRapBrown #imamJamilAmin #repression #rip

Black Revolutionary Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin Dies at 82

His death, at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, was confirmed by Kristie Breshears, the director of communications for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which operates the hospital. His health was known to have rapidly deteriorated.

Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Al-Amin was one of the most prolific orators among the Black Power revolutionaries who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and bourgeious strategy of the civil rights movement.

An admirer of the Cuban revolution, he ardently advocated for armed resistance declaring: “Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”

Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1967, he made an immediate mark by getting the word “nonviolent” removed from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.

That summer, as riots erupted in the Black colonies in more than 100 American cities, Mr. Al-Amin made himself known to a wider audience through speeches that gave voice to Black anger and righteous indignation over a century of unfulfilled expectations since the end of slavery.

“Black folk built America, and if it don’t come around, we’re gonna burn America down,” he would say, a call-to-arms he delivered hundreds of times from 1967 to 1969 on street corners and college campuses and in meeting halls across the country. “You’ve got to arm yourself,” he said. “If you’re going to loot, loot yourself a gun store.

After five days of rioting in Detroit that left 43 people dead and some 2,000 buildings destroyed in July 1967, Mr. Al-Amin declared that violence would be the new language of race relations. “I don’t think you could articulate the sentiments of Black people any better than they just did in Detroit,” he said.

The rhetoric gave him a high profile in the news media, made him the target of F.B.I. fascist surveillance and led to his repeated arrest on gun-related, arson and conspiracy charges. His actions also helped insure passage in 1968 of the first law in the nation’s history to make it illegal “to incite, organize, promote or encourage” a riot.

Conservatives in Congress attached the provision to the landmark 1968 fair housing law as a condition of their support. Though they were reacting to riots in Detroit, Newark and the Watts section of Los Angeles, in which Mr. Al-Amin had played no known role, they called the measure the “H. Rap Brown Federal Anti-Riot Act.”

Mr. Al-Amin told reporters who sought his reaction: “We don’t control anybody. The Black people are rebelling. You don’t organize rebellions.”

Enmeshed in court proceedings resulting from federal and state charges he faced in five cities, Mr. Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970 and spent 18 months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He resurfaced in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, in dramatic fashion — wounded in a shootout with the New York City police. The police said he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern and exchanged gunfire with officers who were pursuing them.

Mr. Brown, who denied the charges, was convicted on charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the Attica state prison in upstate New York.

By the time he was released on parole in 1976, he had converted to the Muslim Sunni sect known as Dar-ul Islam.

He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karina, had established a law practice. Al-Amin founded a mosque, called the Community Masjid, opened a small general store selling groceries, incense and Korans, and for the next quarter century was known to his neighbors as a local businessman and spiritual leader.

He organized summer youth games and led efforts to curb street crime and drug trafficking in the city’s West End, where he lived. He and his wife had two children — a boy, Ali, and a girl, Kairi. The head of an Islamic civic group in Atlanta called him “a pillar of the Muslim community.”

State authorities continued their persistent white supremacist harassment. Beginning shortly after the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, local and federal authorities began a series of investigations into Mr. Al-Amin’s activities, according to police files uncovered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000.

Quoting from F.B.I. documents and local law enforcement officials, the newspaper said that the F.B.I. had sent paid informants to infiltrate Mr. Al-Amin’s mosque and helped local police investigate possible links between Mr. Al-Amin and a variety of criminal activities, including terrorist plots, a gunrunning syndicate, a series of Atlanta bank robberies, an explosives-making ring and 14 murders in the city between 1990 and 1996.

In 1995, a neighborhood resident who was shot near his store named Mr. Al-Amin as the assailant but later recanted, saying the police had pressured him into making a false accusation. (He said he did not really know who shot him.) Mr. Al-Amin’s lawyer said at the time that the police were looking for any excuse to put Mr. Al-Amin in jail.

But he remained out of jail, and relatively out of the public eye, until March 2000.

His re-emergence — like his resurfacing in 1971 — was announced by a hail of gunfire exchanged with the police.

A Deputy Sheriff Dead

While approaching Mr. Al-Amin’s store on the night of March 16 to serve Mr. Al-Amin with an arrest warrant for missing a court appearance on a minor traffic case, the Fulton County, Ga., deputy sheriff Richard Kinchen and his partner, Aldranon English, were both shot by a heavily armed man standing on the street outside. In an ensuing shootout, Mr. Kinchen was fatally shot in the abdomen. Mr. English was struck by four bullets but survived.

That night, in a hospital, Mr. English identified Mr. Al-Amin as the assailant through a photograph and told investigators that he was pretty sure he had shot the man. His account was supported by a trail of blood leading from the spot where the gunman had stood.

Mr. Al-Amin was arrested four days later at a friend’s home in rural Alabama. He showed no sign of a gunshot wound or injury to explain the blood at the scene, as his lawyers later pointed out at his murder trial. The police and prosecutors later said that the blood had proved to be a false lead, unrelated to the March 16 shootings.

Mr. Al-Amin denied being the gunman and characterized his arrest as the latest in a series of secret government efforts to frame him.

“The F.B.I. has a file on me containing 44,000 documents,” he told The New York Times in 2002, speaking from a pay phone at the Fulton County jail on the eve of the trial. “At some point they had to make something happen to justify all the investigations and all the money they’ve spent.

“More than anything else,” he added, “they still fear a personality, a character coming up among African Americans who could galvanize support among all the different elements of the African-American community.”

A jury — nine of whose members were Black — convicted him after a three-week trial. The chief witness against him was Mr. English, who testified that on the night of the shootings, he and his partner approached Mr. Al-Amin on the street, told him they had a warrant and asked him to show his hands. “He said, ‘Yeah,’ frowned and swung up an assault rifle and started shooting,’’ Mr. English said in court.

In a death penalty hearing, a parade of witnesses testified on Mr. Al-Amin’s behalf, asking that his life be spared. One was Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations, who said that Mr. Al-Amin had helped reduce crime and improve conditions for many people in the city’s impoverished West End.

Louisiana-Born

Hubert Gerold Brown (Rap was a nickname from his youth) was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 4, 1943, the youngest of three children of Eddie and Thelma Brown. His father, who was serving in the Army when Hubert was born, worked for the Standard Oil company for 30 years. His mother worked two jobs — as a domestic and as a teacher at an orphanage for Black children — and was partial toward Hubert “because I was lighter,” he wrote in his 1969 autobiography, “Die, Nigger, Die!”

Light-skinned Black people, he wrote, were considered more likely to gain a foothold in white society, according to the hierarchy of skin color observed by his mother and her generation in the early 20th-century South. “Because I was lighter, it meant that I was supposed to get ahead,” he wrote, adding that the favor she showed him created tension between him and his two siblings, especially his older brother, Ed.

“Ed and I are very close now, and that color thing doesn’t come between us anymore,” he wrote. “But it’s a thing which could really damage the Black community if people don’t begin to understand it. Black is not a color but the way you think.”

After graduating from a private school affiliated with Southern University, a historically Black institution in Baton Rouge (his mother insisted that all her children attend it), Mr. Al-Amin spent two years at Southern, then left for Washington to work in the civil rights movement with his brother. Ed Brown, a student at Howard University, had become active in organizing lunch-counter sit-ins for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Mr. Al-Amin participated in voter registration drives in Mississippi and Alabama and in rural Lowndes County, Ga., where only a handful of Black citizens were registered to vote, even though 85 percent of its population was Black. He became friendly with Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), who was a veteran of the early 1960s Freedom Rides and one of S.N.C.C.’s rising stars.

In 1965, when Mr. Al-Amin was named head of the Washington, D.C., chapter of S.N.C.C., he joined a faction led by Mr. Carmichael, and calling itself the Young Turks, in urging the organization to take a more aggressive posture. Outmaneuvering moderate leaders like the S.N.C.C. chairman, John Lewis, the future Georgia congressman, and Julian Bond, who went on to become a Georgia state senator, the militant faction elected Mr. Carmichael chairman in 1966.

Mr. Carmichael made the first of his many “Black power” speeches shortly afterward, warning that until Black people achieved the necessary economic, political and firearm power — as was their right under the Second Amendment — there would never be racial harmony in America.

By the time Mr. Al-Amin succeeded Mr. Carmichael as chairman in May 1967, S.N.C.C. had adopted a Black separatist agenda, a policy barring white people from leadership roles and the stated goal of achieving freedom, in the words of Malcolm X, the nationalist leader assassinated in 1965, “by any means necessary.”

The beginning of Mr. Al-Amin’s tenure coincided with the urban riots that swept the county in what came to be known as the Long Hot Summer of 1967.

Mr. Al-Amin visited Cincinnati in June to show support for the young Black men who had rioted for three nights running, then gave a speech the next day to several hundred youths in Dayton that the Dayton police said incited a window-breaking rampage covering 12 square blocks.

On July 24, after addressing a crowd of several thousand at a rally in Cambridge, Md. (“If Cambridge doesn’t come around, burn it down!” he told them. “Take your violence to the honkies!”), Mr. Al-Amin suffered a superficial gunshot wound in the forehead when the police fired their weapons to disperse the crowd, setting off a riot there, too.

Under Surveillance

In memos later made public, the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, ordered his agents to begin arresting Mr. Al-Amin and other S.N.C.C. leaders “on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail.”

Informants were dispatched to infiltrate S.N.C.C. and other groups referred to by Hoover as “nationalist hate-type organizations” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them.

Mr. Al-Amin continued to hopscotch the country as indictments, subpoenas and extradition orders began raining down. He was under surveillance around the clock. But the pressure did not change his rhetoric.

“If President Johnson is worried about my rifle,” he told reporters after being released on bail for federal weapons charges in New York in 1967, “wait until I get my atom bomb.”

Mr. Al-Amin’s brother, Ed, who became president and chief executive of the Southern Agriculture Corp., a nonprofit organization helping Black farmers obtain federal subsidies and other benefits historically denied them, died in 2011.

Mr. Al-Amin twice appealed his murder conviction, in 2004 and 2019, and was denied each time. But as recently as 2020, his supporters had sought a new trial on the grounds that exculpatory evidence — including a prison inmate’s confession to having shot Deputies Kinchen and English — was withheld from his defense lawyers.

From the time of his arrival in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado, Mr. Al-Amin was held for long periods in solitary confinement, which his family members contended was a violation of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Al-Amin will be remembered as a Black revolutionary icon, and another figure who was murdered through the state system for standing firmly against oppression.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=23802

#blackLiberation #blackPower #hRapBrown #jamilAmin #northAmerica #us

«#Toronto city hall will fly #Palestinian flag 4 1st time nxt Monday 2 commemorate State of #PalestineIndependenceDay, gesture long sought by advocates that city says it has now agreed 2 bcuz #Canada recognizd #Palestine in Sept

City hall hoists svrl dozn flags a yr. In 2024, raised more than 60. Most were national flags but abt ⅓ were 4 sports teams or various causes, including #EndPolioNow Flag, #BlackLiberation Flag & #PeriodPurse Flag on #MenstrualHealthDay in May»

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/toronto-city-hall-agrees-to-fly-palestinian-flag-this-month-for-the-first-time/article_733f3d26-0e43-404c-9d41-776be3eff922.html

Memorializing a Neo-Nazi: The Commemoration of Charlie Kirk

For weeks now, the mainstream U.S. media has been awash with coverage and accolades about Charlie Kirk, a racist ultra-right young fascist who was shot to death on Sept 10, 2025. In this era of MAGA glorification and promotion of traditional Nazi ideals, and shaming those who dare oppose them, Kirk is being hailed as a martyred young hero of the mainstream Right, euphemistically called a “conservative activist” instead of the Neo-Nazi that he was. There have been calls from modern conservatives for violent retaliation and repression of their political critics and opponents, whom they blame for creating the social climate that incited Kirk’s killer.

Top U.S. officials attended and spoke at his memorial service, including president Donald Trump. He’s being lionized as a hero of the Republicans, which reveals the true racist character of these U.S. power holders that they have hidden for decades behind a thin veil of ‘tolerance.’ Republican Virginia governor Glenn Younkin attended a gathering in memory of Kirk on Sept 25th where he expressed that Kirk left a “blueprint” for young conservatives to follow, and pledged $100K to Kirk’s Neo-Nazi Turning Point USA organization to set up chapters in Va.

Kirk was the sanitized political version of Dylann Roof, the young white loner who shot nine Black parishioners to death in 2015 during a Bible study class in Charleston, SC’s Mother Emanuel Church. In Kirk was, and is now in death, FAR more dangerous than Roof, because his agenda was and is being used to revitalized a culture from not so long ago where the MAJORITY of white Amerika were people just like Dylann Roof. Where Amerika was a society where Blacks weren’t just murdered in their churches and homes, but entire white communities routinely gathered to carry out festive gruesome murders (lynchings) of Blacks and distributed their body parts – with especial emphasis on genitalia – as mementos, and white mobs invaded and burned entire Black communities to the ground while gang raping Black girls and women and randomly killing Blacks.

This is the history that MAGA proponents and the Charlie Kirks are driving a movement to erase and remove from schools and libraries, in furtherance of their agendas to revive this history. Indeed ,THIS is the very meaning of MAGA (“Make Amerika Great Again”). Meaning, bring back that old openly racist, sexist, white male supremacist Amerika, where no one except the dominant white male class had a voice and power, and openly repressed and murdered those who even breathed a whisper of defiance. This is the “great” Amerika they want to see “again.”

The whole anti-DEI movement is blatant white male supremacy writ large. This is only a new euphemism (in times past they called it “Manifest Destiny” and “Mission Civilastrace”), that allows it to be promoted openly and to attack its critics as racists – the typical dysfunctional defense mechanism of ‘deflection’ is now a conservative political strategy. In this moment of heroizing the slain Neo-Nazi Kirk, not a word of criticism is being allowed to be uttered about him. Those who have simply posted or pointed to his own racist and sexist utterings and views have been fired from jobs, ridiculed in the press and social media, faced pressure from top power holders in the government, and have been used as heads on spikes dotting the landscape to warn others to keep quiet lest they suffer the same attacks for expressing free and honest speech.

Yet these conservatives claim that Kirk embodied the ideals of free and open political debate and expression and holding his views up against those of his opponents, so he should be emulated. His death is also being denounced by them as an evil act of political violence which they claim to oppose. Yet, they are openly repressing his critics. Wow! One wonders then, why I am now sitting and suffering abuses in the SC prison system, including being held incommunicado, in the IMMEDIATE wake of and response to publishing articles exposing abuses in Va prisons and its high level administrators lying to the public to conceal those conditions?

Not only was my transfer to SC in retaliation for those articles and what is supposed to be protected free expression, but SC prison officials have retaliated each time I’ve written anything critical about them, and they’ve been trying to murder me by medical/dental neglect, refusing and delaying me treatment for an abscessed tooth for several months now, and lying to cover up their actions. I’ve been a recognized political activist for decades, and was profiled as a domestic terrorist by federal and Va agencies in 2009, BECAUSE of their own statement that my written views and articles have often proven persuasive in educating the public and leading them to criticize the U.S. law enforcement and prison system, and “promoting a brotherhood of the oppressed philosophy.”

So, a Neo-Nazi is a hero for espousing his views and challenging opponents, but I am designated a terrorist and face continued retaliation and censorship, including being targeted by the state with violence (political violence), for espousing my views, and simply reporting the truth about the abuses suffered by America’s imprisoned and holding my UNIFYING political views up against the existing standards of the status quo, which has a tiny group of predatory rich exploiting everyone else.

Clearly a racial and political double standard. How many of our independent Black leaders have suffered political persecution and violence, and were murdered BY THE AMERIKAN GOVERNMENT for using their tongues? – Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr, and the list goes on. NONE of them were memorialized as with Kirk, because they weren’t white Nazis. In fact they were opponents of Nazism, and were murdered for challenging America’s white racist capitalist status quo. Indeed, the formal commemoration of their memories many years after their deaths, which the MAGA movement is trying to erase today, were the results of Black folks fighting for decades to have them remembered.

In this period of the resurgence of open and unapologetic white supremacy and the Nazification of America, they must invent heroes like Kirk, shielding and hiding his deviant views, and pretending he was an innocent victim of some sinister killer.

Kirk and his Turning Point USA group embodied, propagated and united to revive everything everything hateful that Amerika was built upon and has stood for (genocide, white male supremacy, sexism, lynching, slavery, racial mass imprisonment, capitalism and every form of divisiveness and discrimination devisable to target and playing them against each other), while trying to hide behind lies, red herrings and mudslinging. This is the history of hate that the MAGA movement wants to erase while promoting a new generation of Neo-Nazis like Kirk and Turning Point USA. We must expose them for what they are, fearlessly counter them, and stop their grabs for power.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!
Kevin Rashid Johnson

source: Kevin Rashid Johnson

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=22555

#blackLiberation #charlieKirk #kevinRashidJohnson #newAfrikanPantherParty #northAmerica #politicizedPrisoner #us

#BlackLiberation Activist Assata Shakur Dies in Cuba ['Cuba in Context' - weekly newsletter]

[from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the #BellyOfTheBeast news/video collective]

#AntiRacist icon #AssataShakur, who lived in exile in Cuba for decades, has died at the age of 78. We hear from three #AfroCuban women who knew her and were inspired by her life and legacy.

Also in this week's newsletter:

• Watch how #Cuba's organic urban gardens feed neighborhoods
• Miami artists targeted over Cuba trip
• Inside our latest film screening in New York City
• Cuba wins second straight Youth "Baseball5" World Championship
• #US says blockade is a lie – while it ramps up sanctions
• #Trump to send more money for regime change in Cuba?

https://groups.io/g/cubanews/message/44385

#VivaCuba #LetCubaLive #CubaSi
#EndTheBlockadeEmbargo
#CubaSolidarity #AntiRacist
#EndSanctionsAgainstCuba #OffTheList
#LatinAmerica #Caribbean #sports
#news #politics #USpol #BlackMastodon

https://blackagendareport.com/no-one-can-stop-rain

#AssataShakur #BlackPantherParty #BlackLiberationArmy #BlackRadicalism #BlackRevolutionary #BlackLiberation #Marxism #Communism #BlackMastodon

https://blackagendareport.com/letter-my-people-assata-shakur-1973

#AssataShakur #BlackPantherParty #BlackLiberationArmy #BlackRadicalism #BlackRevolutionary #BlackLiberation #Marxism #Communism #BlackMastodon