Labor’s stake in fighting racism, immigrant bashing

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Socialist Action SEPTEMBER 2010 5 A handful of construction workers have announced they are organizing a boycott of construction jobs at the Islamic Center site in Manhattan. (The developers have pledged to use union labor.) But the dangers of falling into such racist traps is seen most dramatically in the building trades themselves.

In recent years the number of union construction jobs has dramatically shrunk, while nonunion subcontractors thrive by employing Latin@ and other immigrant workers at wages half or less of union scale (and no safety protections). This happened not because of “illegal” immigration, but because conservative union officials signed on to the bosses’ “collaboration” program. They agreed to wage and benefit cuts allegedly to save jobs, but in the end saw those jobs go to nonunion firms, often set up by former “partners” in collaboration.

But in the meantime, construction workers’ attention was diverted by politician, boss, and media rhetoric about “illegals.” Now the bosses have a new diversionary tactic, that of Islamophobia—at the same time that they refuse to compensate Ground Zero first responders and cleanup crews dying every day from cancer!

Such tactics have been used every time the U.S. has been in economic crisis. The day after the Aug. 22 New York City anti-Islamic Center rally happened to be the anniversary of the execution of anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti, whose murders were the low point of a post-World War I wave of detention, surveillance, and deportations affecting hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers—mostly Eastern and Southern European. This wave was paralleled by murderous attacks on Black workers who had come north during the war to take jobs in expanding industries, and was soon followed by the mass deportations of workers of Mexican origin (including U.S. citizens).

By coincidence, on the anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Califor(continued from page 4: “Stop racist attacks on Muslims!”) ing education, and was done in close collaboration with the local Arab and Muslim communities.

In July, 800 people meeting at the UNAC national antiwar conference in Albany, N.Y., took a strong stand against the attacks. A prominent plenary session was devoted to them and to the preemptive prosecutions of Muslims by the government. The conference ended with a march to a local masjid, cosponsored with Albany’s Project Salam and Muslim Solidarity Committee, where accounts of harassment and frame-ups were shared.

Witnesses at the Aug. 22 racist rally in Manhattan reported being stunned and even scared by the expressions of hatred. A Black union carpenter who works at Ground Zero was surrounded and threatened by the crowd, which assumed him to be a Muslim because of his cap (apparently a soft painters’ cap). Taunts included “he musta voted for Obama,” and “Mohammed’s a pig.”

Days later, a man yelling insults about Islam slashed the throat of a Muslim cab driver. The next day a drunk entered a masjid in Queens and urinated on prayer rugs, shouting anti-Muslim epithets and calling worshippers terrorists.

We can expect more such attacks, whether by individual thugs or even actual lynch mobs, as long as the racists feel emboldened to act with impunity. Asked Glenn Greenwald of Salon. com, “Does anyone believe that their [the protesters’] real agenda is simply to have Park51 move a few blocks away to less Sacred ground?”

nia legislature had passed a resolution expressing its “deepest regret” for another episode of persecution of Italian immigrants: the internment, curfews, confiscations and other indignities suffered during World War II by 600,000 Italian-Americans (a fate suffered by German-Americans as well, and exceeded in scale and criminality only by the detention of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps).

Note the motivation of the bill’s sponsor, State Senator Joe Simitian, who said he saw “contemporary importance” in the effort: “We’re at war on the other Greenwald concluded: “If Park51 ends up moving or if opponents otherwise succeed in defeating it, it will seriously bolster and validate the ugly premises at the heart of this campaign: that Muslims generally are responsible for 9/11, terrorism justifies and even compels our restricting the equals rights and access of Americans Muslims. … If the project does fail, the message that will be sent is that bigotry and fear of Muslims is not just permitted, it is effective.”

Leaders of SIOA and other Islamophobic groups have been among the most explicitly racist in their support for Zionism. Israel has from its founding relied on anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to garner support for its ethnic cleansing, land theft, and discrimination. Palestine solidarity activists, seeing these connections, have been at the center of today’s fight against Islamophobia.

Stepping up the fight for Palestinian and Arab rights, here and abroad, is an integral part of fighting anti-Islamic bigotry.

The link was made tragically clear in the Aug. 26 attack by Zionist settlers on a masjid in Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood. Such attacks have become increasingly common in recent years. Of course, they are just the continuation of the wholesale destruction of masjids that was part of the ethnic cleansing and land theft leading to the creation of Israel in 1948. This followed the centuries-old tradition of Western powers using anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism as an excuse to seize Arab lands. n side of the world, and I think it’s important to remember that there are millions of Americans who are ethnic Arabs or Muslim by faith, and that they’re good Americans.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has made the economic connection as well, citing the “millions in this nation living below poverty guidelines, many of them homeless” and calling for “a sustained effort to create jobs.”

An alliance with the bosses predicated on echoing their scapegoating rhetoric will not bring back jobs. By the same to... Iraq troops (continued from page 1: “Momentum builds for the One Nation rally on Oct. 2”) tractors employed by the government in Iraq, where since the 2003 U.S. invasion private security firms have often been accused of acting above the law,’ according to Reuters.”

Moreover, there is no reason to assume that the U.S. strategic turn to more covert war (see back-page article on Afghanistan) is not going to apply to Iraq. How much of a role will assassination teams, killer drones, and special ops play in the continuing pursuit of U.S. aims in a war without borders?

The U.S. invasion and occupation has left Iraq in chaos. Up to 50 percent of the economically active population is unemployed. According to a recently released report on the state of world cities by UNHabitat, the percentage of the population living in slums has increased from 20 percent before the war to 53 percent today.

Nearly a decade after the U.S. occupation, and after billions of dollars were poured into the pockets of American corporations charged with “reconstructing” the country, an adequate supply of electricity and potable water remains lacking. The country is seething with bitterness and discontent.

The most genuine U.S. withdrawal, in fact, is the withdrawal of American corporations that are taking the money and running. An AP analysis posted Aug. 28 pointed out: “A $165 million children’s hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in ken, jobs will not be found by “reducing dependence on foreign oil,”—a slogan which reinforces Islamophobia—nor in “eliminating unfair competition from auto and steel imports,” or other protectionist “solutions” relying on racist logic that separates workers here and abroad. Instead, we need a united fight for public works jobs in expanded education, housing, child and health care programs, etc.—as well as aid and reparations to workers whose countries have been devastated by U.S. aggression.

Some of the most eloquent arguments for unity, for seeing the connection between the struggles of Arabs and Muslims and workers everywhere, were made by Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad in interviews about the new film in which she stars, “Salt of This Sea”: “Did you see in the paper about the riot that happened yesterday in Atlanta where people shows up for federal housing assistance? ... Thousands of people came out for federal assistance because they hadn’t offered this assistance since 2002.”

Linking their cause with the struggle of Palestinians to reclaim their homes in all of historic Palestine—a theme of the film—Hammad said, “No matter who takes your home away … when a home is foreclosed on or an occupation occurs, if you have no access to your ancestral home, there’s something we can all relate to.”

In this period when, she said, “people are more and more trying to figure out how to get what is theirs,” they need to look for inspiration to struggles like that of Republic Windows in Chicago, when “workers not only struck, but they took over their factory.”

In response to a question about the racist and sexist portrayal of Arab women by Hollywood, Hammad answered that to portray the “ferocity, determination, and individuality” of Soraya, her character in the film, she drew on her awareness of “the economic reality so many working women face in the U.S.”

That’s the spirit we need to defeat Islamophobia and forge a unified, worldwide workers’ fightback! n Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets.

“As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted—more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency. That amount is likely an underestimate, based on an analysis of more than 300 reports by auditors with the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. And it does not take into account security costs, which have run almost 17 percent for some projects.”

This accounting makes clear who really profited from a war and occupation that has already cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars and over 4000 deaths. But it is also an indication of what is necessary for a genuine disengagement from Iraq. It has to be a large-scale operation involving the removal of all U.S. forces, covert and overt, and reparations for the ruin the U.S. military and U.S. corporate pirates inflicted on the Iraqi people.

In order to impose a change of direction on this scale, there needs to be a vast movement of the American people condemning the war. People in the United States will continue to lose more and more if they let the Obama administration confuse the issue by tactical retreats. The American people need to be as ruthless in condemning this war and its effects as the warmakers and profiteers were in waging it. The October demonstrations must be a starting place for such a campaign. n