‘Down with the neo-con war in Iraq!’

Monica Moorehead presents Mumia’s message to the March 18 protest in New York. Photo: Robert Mercado

From a March 5 audio commentary.

Ona move! Long live John Africa! Thanks for inviting me to join ya’ll in this international protest against this mad war in Iraq. I say mad ‘cause it was waged solely because neo-cons have been itching for this battle for years.

In a report put out by the Project for a New American Century, the group wrote that it needed a new Pearl Harbor to launch their plots. In an open letter of January 1998, to the former President Clinton, eighteen members of this project called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, saying it should be the aim of American foreign policy.

9-11 provided the pretext for war and by then eleven of those project members were at high levels of government. They forced this war on the American people to seize the rich oil reserves in Iraq and to dominate the region directly.

They brought this country and the Middle East to the brink of disaster for their own financial, corporate and imperial ends. The promises of freedom and democracy in Iraq were as empty and as meaningless as the promises to rebuild New Orleans or to bring help to those thousands who suffered in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

That wasn’t incompetence, and neither was Katrina. They both were acts of capitalism’s innate cruelty, where Iraqis can be bombed, invaded and occupied based on lies and where African Americans can be left alone to face the full fury of nature, and then left alone again to starve, to suffer, to drown, for days.

Yes, stop the war in Iraq but how about stopping the war against poor Black folks here at home, ‘cause both arrive from the same source: this system. Let’s build a movement against both wars.

From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of “We Want Freedom, a Life in the Black Panther Party”.

Go to prisonradio.org to hear more of Mumia’s audio commentaries. Go to leftbooks.com to order his “We Want Freedom...” book.