'It's a war about who is going to rule the world.?

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1990 Minister Don Muhammed is a leader of the Nation of Islam, Mosque No. 11 in Roxbury, Mass.

There are times in our lives when we really don't like to do some of the things that we have to do. Such a time is now. The future of the world may very well be at stake. And it's quite possible that it could be in our hands.

I have to speak to you from a scriptural point of view. If we care anything about our loved ones, our children, if we care anything about the future of this world, we will be cognizant of what is going on in the Middle East. This is really not a war about oil. It's a war about who is going to rule this world.

And the sham that is being placed before the American people, that somehow we're in the Middle East because the interests of the United States are at stake, is the biggest game that has ever been played on anybody since time began.

The bodies of our youngsters are going to line up like you've never seen bodies before. And those of you in the Arlington Street Church, if you have the will to stand up to this mighty, awesome machine that wants to control the world, you have a chance to stop it, because God is on our side.

The scriptures say that "I will gather all nations to come together in the valley of Jehasaphat." All nations are involved in this war, and every nation on earth is going to feel the impact of this war, because this is not like the first one, it's not like the second one, this is the war of Armageddon.

I'm asking you to reflect. The word "Armageddon" means "a war of arms," and Sharkur Ali is a veteran of three tours of combat duty in Vietnam and Executive Director of "He's Not Heavy, He's My Brother/She's Not Heavy, She's My Sister," a youth services agency in Roxbury, Mass.

I'm here to talk about my experience as a combat veteran in Vietnam, in the United States Marine Corps, in the early '60s, and how my experience and how that war is affecting my community today, almost 20 years later.

More than 50,000 died in Vietnam. Three or four times more than that died after returning to the United States. They died from drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and violence, and I've seen it. I now work with a number of children that live in Roxbury, and it astonishes me to find that 60 percent to 80 percent of those children come from single-parent households, where the mother is the single parent and where the father is absent. And damn near 90 percent of those absentee fathers are Vietnam vets.

What the Vietnam war did to my community, indeed your community, I do not want to see repeated. I do not want anyone else to have to work with the kids I work with. I do David Roy Schervish Minister Don Muhammed "mageddon" means "a place in the Middle East." And the suffix of that word is "do." And if we don't want to go through scriptures, where they say "blood will flow to the horse's mouth," we had better make a move in America, because there is no more war after this one.

This war is not over might; this war is over right. And those of us who stand with God, we're coming out the winner on this They've got the nerve to send Black boys to line up on the border of Saudi Arabia. Why don't we send Bush's son; he knows Vietnam vet Shakur Ali: not want to see any other soldier go to East Africa-and let's call a spade a spade, it's East Africa-and put their fellow soldiers in body bags, as I have done.

I returned from Vietnam a junkie. I was addicted to opium, and because opium wasn't available to me on 125th Street and Lenox, where I'm from, heroin became my drug of choice. I went to the Veterans Administration and asked for help. They said sure, we have a room for you.

I went into the VA hospital on 23rd Street in New York City, and the room that they had for me was in the psychiatric ward. I wasn't insane; I was a drug addict. So, of course I never went in. I asked them to help me go into a rehabilitation center, and they

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Rev. Graylan Ellis Hagler Rev. Graylan Ellis-Hagler: David Roy Schervish That's what we're seeing right now. That's what we will see.

We've got to understand that we are not there for democracy, even though we really don't know what democracy is about as a country. That's a word that we throw around. Kuwait is not a democracy. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy. We're not there for democracy. We're not there for freedom.

We are there for the same reason that we're everywhere else: There is some money to be made, and there's some non-white people to exploit, and there's some new territory to be grabbed. That is the reason that we are there. We are there because there is oil in that country. We are there for Texaco, we are there for Mobil, we are there for Royal Dutch Shell. We are there for big business. We are not there for any principled reason.

Don't we go everywhere for big business? Big business is the nature of America. You know, white politicians will send young people to die for oil profits, even while for young Blacks and Hispanics there are no jobs at home that will pay the rent or put enough money in their pocket to allow them to raise a family. Roger Sheppard:

Roger Sheppard is a leader of the Committee Against a Vietnam War in the Middle East in Boston.

The U.S. plans have been revealed in L'Express [a weekly French magazine]. They want a four-day mission, costing 20,000 U.S. lives, with commandos sent in, and we'll have carpet-bombing of Baghdad. They have difficulty swallowing their hypocrisy around the 19 Palestinians killed last week and the hundreds of others.

How do you think the world is going to react to the carpet-bombing of Iraq? Who does Bush think he is, that he can raise and

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