Fight Government Repression

Fight Government Repression!
Free Mumia! Hands Off Shakur!
Hands Off Stewart!

Statement of the Partisan Defense Committee re: October 1 rally at Berkeley Public Library (see calendar for details)

The bloodthirsty U.S. government’s frontal assault on democratic rights is being carried out under the pretext of the bogus "war on terrorism.” Basic rights, won through the hard-fought struggles of the 1930s union organizing drives and the struggles of the 1950s through the early 1970s—in the civil movement, the Vietnam War protests, for women’s and gay rights—are being run through the shredder by the Bush administration with the full agreement of the Democratic Party. Political opponents face being imprisoned with no right to an attorney or a nor the very right to live. The government asserts the to disappear and torture its opponents—to lock them up throw away the key. From courageous anti-slavery fighter Brown to communists during the McCarthy era, to the Black Panther Party and up to the present, the racist rulers of this country have branded fighters for the oppressed as “terrorist.”
To fight against this assault on our rights, the Partisan Defense Committee is calling a rally of solidarity for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Shakur and Lynne Stewart. These cases must be rallying for labor, blacks and defenders of civil liberties. Two of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row political prisoner, and Shakur, forced into exile in Cuba, are former members of Black Panther Party. The third is Lynne Stewart, a leftist attorney with a decades-long résumé of defending those targeted by country’s racist rulers. We call on labor, blacks, students and defenders of civil liberties to join us in a united-front rally to demand: “Fight government repression! The ‘war on terror’ targets blacks, immigrants, labor and leftists! Free Mumia Abu-Hands off Lynne Stewart! Hands off Assata Shakur!” fight is a fight for us all.
The real terrorists are the U.S. capitalist rulers. Today’s repressive laws are intended to terrorize anyone who would stand way of the U.S. capitalist rulers’ relentless drive for profits their bloody imperialist adventures to secure markets, raw materials and cheap labor as well as to intimidate their rivals. the initial victims of the post-September 11 reaction were immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, these measures are also directed against leftists, antiwar protesters and those fighting against the racist oppression of black people that forms bedrock of American capitalism. The “anti-terror” laws will used to outlaw strikes and criminalize unions as they were in early 1900s.
• America’s foremost class-war prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man. He was a Black Panther Party spokesman at the age of 15. Thirty-eight Panthers were killed by the FBI and cops under the FBI’s deadly Counter-Intelligence Program COINTELPRO) of surveillance, disruption, provocation and terror against leftists and black activists. Hundreds more were up to rot in prison hells. An award-winning journalist, became a supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization, which was subjected to over a decade of murderous state terror. In a politically motivated and blatantly racist frame-up, was convicted on charges of killing Philadelphia Police Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981 and sentenced to death explicitly for his past membership in the Panthers. Court after court has refused to even consider the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed officer Faulkner. The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal symbolizes what the barbaric death penalty, a legacy of chattel slavery, is all about. From the White House to the courthouse to the Wall Street boardrooms, the capitalist rulers want Mumia dead because they see in this man known as the “voice of the voiceless” a symbol of defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. Free Mumia Now!
• Assata Shakur is a former Black Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army. On 2 May 1973, Shakur, Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Malik Shakur were ambushed by racist New Jersey state troopers. The troopers immediately opened fire, killing Zayd Shakur. One of the state’s hit-men was killed with a bullet from a police revolver. The two black militants who survived were convicted on charges of killing the cop and their own comrade! Sentenced to life in prison on frame-up charges of killing the state trooper, Assata escaped prison in 1979 and has been in Cuba since 1984. Acoli remains in prison hell over 30 years later. In her 1998 “Open Letter,” Shakur declared, “I am a 20th century escaped slave.” In May, the FBI added Shakur to its domestic terrorist list and increased the bounty on her head to $1 million, a bounty reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Hands off Assata Shakur! Free Sundiata Acoli!
• On October 21 Lynne Stewart, her translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar will be sentenced on frame-up charges of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism. They face decades behind bars. Stewart’s “crime”? Doing what lawyers are supposed to do, representing her client, in this case, blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. The real crime here was committed by the government—assault with intent to kill the Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel. Taking away the right to a lawyer or trial ultimately means no rights to free speech and assembly—no rights at all.
This united-front rally brings together, in defense of Jamal, Shakur and Stewart, speakers and organizations across a spectrum of political beliefs while assuring everyone’s right to have his own say. Within that framework, we seek to win activists to the understanding that defense of these targets of capitalist state repression must be based on a class-struggle perspective—organizing independently of the racist capitalist state that has framed them up. These frame-ups illustrate that there is no justice in the capitalist courts. The PDC, a class-struggle, legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League, is fighting to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement—those who create the wealth of this society and who can shut it down. It is the working people who have the class interest and social power to not only fight for Mumia’s freedom and in defense of Stewart and Shakur but to get rid of this barbaric and murderous capitalist system of hunger, imperialist war, poverty, racist cop terror and vicious attacks on workers, women, gays and immigrants.
—Partisan Defense Committee

contact us at pdcbayarea [at] sbcglobal.net
or call (510) 839-0851