When Gaddafi Gave Military Training to Black Australians and Maori

 During the 1980s the Libyan regime worked over-time to recruit activists in Western countries, including Australia, to Gaddafi’s so-called Islamic Brigades and terrorist movements with whom Tripoli was in sympathy, including Arafat’s PLO. Advertisements included a two-part call in the 9 March 1984 issue of An-Nahar (Sydney) for volunteers for the PLO and the Libyan Army. The advertisement was directed to female graduates, encouraging them to join Libyan military academies. There were also several cases of attempted radicalisation of Australian Aborigines, with individuals receiving paramilitary training in Libya.

...

Libya was also active in this period in attempting to radicalise New Zealand’s Maoris and supporting the New People’s Army in the Philippines. Representatives of all these groups would show up periodically in Libya. Gaddafi also turned his attention to Fiji, inviting an anti-nuclear group for a conference.

...

 Libya was also active in this period in attempting to radicalise New Zealand’s Maoris and supporting the New People’s Army in the Philippines.

[source]

Ministry of African Propaganda interview the Malcolm X Movement

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism - Fri 28 July Housmans, 630pm N1 9DY

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism
630pm Fri 28 July
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

Libyan people from different parts of Libya will be speaking about terrorism in Libya and its roots and nature and how it reaches other parts of the world including Manchester. They will be speaking about the on-going persecution of darker skinned Libyan and non-Libyan African people, exposing the realities of the people smuggling and who is behind them. There will also be a person from Tawergha (pictured are internally displaced children from Tawergha), which was the ONLY Black African town in North Africa which has been totally wiped out by Nato proxy armed gangs.

public event: Elections, Islamophobia & Terrorism - This Fri 630pm Housmans Bookshop, N1 9DY

Elections, Islamophobia and terrorism
630pm Fri 09 June 2017
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

The political situation in Britain continues to worsen as the British Tory government and state continues to ramp-up racism particularly focused around the fallout of Brexit, in addition to that the three terrorist attacks in the three months that has raised the spectre of British state collusion with terrorism has enabled the Tory government to now signal to the country that they can be nearly racist as possible with calls for mass deportations and arrests of Muslims becoming louder and louder. This is event is an invnitation to a conversation led by some of the leading grassroots activists and advocates for the Muslim community, ant-racism, anti-imperialism and for socialism to discuss the results of the general election.

Speakers:

Arzu Merali - Co-founder and Head of Research at the Islamic Human Rights Commission, IHRC is the leading organisation fighting Islamophobia in this country for decades

Glenroy Watson - President of the RMT trade union's London Region the Secretary of Global Afrikan Congress uk a Pan Afrikan Reparatory campaigning group

Nargess Moballeghi - Independent journalist and documentary film maker. Formally head of news at Press TV UK, and has been working as a journalist for 12 years

more speakers TBC shortly.



Please note: this is an event oriented towards migrant and Black and Brown communities, not to be dominated in any way by the white left. This event will be filmed for public viewing online and attending this event means you give permission to be filmed, however please let the organisers know if you don't want your face on camera.

IFTAR: We will be going to the local Turkish/Kurdish restaurant Best Mangal where comrades can have their Iftar with us (some of whom are fasting) if you so wish, you have to buy your own food and drinks, apologies we can not provide that.

'We told British govt they were advancing terrorists in Libya'

The Malcolm X Movement are very concerned that it is being exposed in many media reports for example here, here and here that the British intelligence services seems to have much more knowledge of the recent history and movements of the Salman Adedi the Manchester attacker than they and the British government are owning-up to. The Malcolm X Movement are proudly connected to and support the struggle of the Libyan people to resist terrorism and Nato and to struggle to reunify and stabilise their country and once again socialise their wealth for the benefit of the many and the African continent. We work with the anti-imperialist Libyan community also in England, and have had events with them and will do including the event coming up Libyans Against Terrorism, Racism and Slavery and Colonialism in late July this year. Moussa Ibrahim is our comrade, he was the last English-language media spokesperson for the Libyan Jamahirya, the socialist Libyan state that was destroyed by Nato and terrorist forces in 2011. He recently commented to us about his attempts at trying to critically engage the British government about their collusion with violent supremacist political forces in Libya, we at the MXM thought we should share this with you, as this is an issue that the British public need to know about that can better inform them further, beyond the mass rejection of the manner in which the British government has cynically tried to use the tragedy and horror of the Manchester terrorist attack:

"We told them all, British government and British media, collectively and one on one, publicly and in confidential meetings, that they were funding, arming and advancing the cause of the terrorists. They refused to listen. They understood it all. they planned it, they envisioned it, they hoped for it. Western Capitalism cannot survive without global wars, international terrorism, foreign intervention, and chaos. It is all part of the profit-making, money-generating mechanisms to feed the Capitalist Monster. It is not about religion, human rights or democracy. It is an essential, long-practiced and well-established strategy of imperialism. The left are idiots who lost their way and are unable to use genuine analytical tools and critical thinking to see through the lies and misinformation. They are intellectually and emotionally enslaved by the oppressive forces they claim to fight against. They have the minds and hearts of sheep." (comment made to MXM on 27/05/17)

Moussa Ibrahim also delivered a talk to the Malcolm X Film Festival series of events that we delivered in spring 2015, including this event in West Belfast:

Salman Abedi: How David Cameron and Theresa May brought their Libyan Revolution to Manchester

Salman Abedi: How David Cameron and Theresa May brought their Libyan Revolution to Manchester

By James Stuart, a Malcolm X Movement Coordinator

If the Labour leadership had any guts at all they would go all guns blazing on the developing Abedi collusion scandal. This tory government was central to unleashing hell on Libya, it sent scores of British Libyan terrorist exiles it had given aid and shelter to, back to Libya as its boots on the ground in their 2011 war on Libya.

British born Salman Abedi was one of them. His father had been a member, in the 1980s and 90s, of the (proto-al Qaeda) Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a fanatical sectarian murder gang that brought terrorism to Libya and was sheltered and funded by the UK.

This is as clear cut a case of collusion as you will ever see. Even more so than the murky, but long proven and exposed, connections between British intelligence and sectarian loyalist paramilitary murder gangs in the six counties, this time the Prime Minister openly announced it.

As Home Secretary and in regular contact with the UK's intelligence services through the Joint

Intelligence Committees, Theresa May would have been central to greenlighting the recruitment of terrorists and sending them to Libya and elsewhere. And, crucially, in her role as boss of the UK Border Agency, in giving them entry to live in the UK and the British passports that allowed them to travel across borders unhindered.

That one of those terrorists, taking the training and contacts he had been granted only by the collusion of the British government's work in Libya, has come home and used his skills to bring the Libyan "revolution" back to the UK, should be hammered home by the opposition.

That 22 innocent people, many of them children, died in Manchester is intrinsically linked to the many thousands more innocents that died in Libya, and are still dying today, often washing up on Europe's beaches. It is a scandal of monumental proportions and needs to be brought fully to public attention

(Of course, it is pertinent to remember that large sections of the English Left fully supported this "revolution" and the terror and destruction it wrought, and still do support it as it continues in Syria)

To imagine that Salman Abedi, who was sixteen years old and still at school when he was first sent to fight in Libya in 2011, and was a frequent traveller to what is left of that country to engage in further acts of terrorism at will, up until just a few weeks ago, could do so without the full knowledge of the British intelligence services is beyond credibility.

Indeed they admit Salman Abedi was "known" to them, in actual fact he has to have been in direct contact with them. We also know that British intelligence and special forces are on the ground even now in Libya continuing to sow chaos and destruction, just as Salman Abedi and his father and brother were.

From Ireland to Afghanistan, to Libya and Syria, collusion between British intelligence services and the most ideologically reactionary and sectarian terrorist death squads has been standard operating procedure for British counter insurgency policy against states and movements it wished to overthrow for at least half a century or more.

There are so many questions that absolutely must be raised and demanded to be answered. Jeremy Corbyn should be calling for a full inquiry into what was known and by who. Who greenlighted Abedi, as a child, being recruited to fight in Libya? In fact we know the buck stops with Cameron, Hague and Theresa May. Now is the time to bring them to account.

#Collusion

event: Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism

Libyans against terrorism, slavery & colonialism
630pm Fri 28 July
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY

Facebook event page

Libyan people from different parts of Libya will be speaking about terrorism in Libya and its roots and nature and how it reaches other parts of the world including Manchester. They will be speaking about the on-going persecution of darker skinned Libyan and non-Libyan African people, exposing the realities of the people smuggling and who is behind them. There will also be a person from Tawergha (pictured are internally displaced children from Tawergha), which was the ONLY Black African town in North Africa which has been totally wiped out by Nato proxy armed gangs.

Launching new historic DVD and book on Libyan Popular Anti-Imperialist Resistance

Launching new historic DVD and book on Libyan Popular Anti-Imperialist Resistance

The Malcolm X Movement proudly hosts the premier of a hard-hitting, informative and inspiring look at African and Libyan popular anti-imperialist resistance entitled Nato War on Libya (53mins). We are also hosting at the same event a book launch of a collection of writings about the martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi entitled On the Martyrdom of Muammar Gaddafi: 21st Century Fascism and Resistance. One of our MXM coordinators - Sukant Chandan is the editor of the book and the filmmaker of the doc.

The event takes place this Sat 29th Oct at 6pm at Marx Memorial Library,  EC1R 0DU (£5 suggested entry). The Libyan community are kindly and generously providing free Libyan snacks and refreshments at this event.

Please find the Facebook event page HERE.

In solidarity
MXM Coordinators Team

Gaddafi’s Ghosts: Return of the Libyan Jamahiriya

Gaddafi’s Ghosts: Return of the Libyan Jamahiriya

By Malcolm X Movement Coordinator, Dan Glazebrook (this article first appeared on RT.com)

When NATO murdered Gaddafi and blitzed his country in 2011, they hoped the socialist ‘Jamahiriya’ movement he led would be dead and buried. Now his son has been released from prison to a hero’s welcome with his movement increasingly in the ascendancy.

There were various moments during NATO’s destruction of Libya that were supposed to symbolically crown Western supremacy over Libya and its institutions (and, by implication, over all African and Arab peoples): the ‘fall of Tripoli’ in August 2011; Cameron and Sarkozy’s victory speeches the following month; the lynch-mob execution of Muammar Gaddafi that came soon after. All of them were pyrrhic victories - but none more so than the death sentence handed down to Gaddafi’s son (and effective deputy leader) Saif al-Gaddafi in July 2015.

Saif had been captured by the Zintan militia shortly after his father and brother were killed by NATO’s death squads in late 2011. The ‘International’ Criminal Court – a neocolonial farce which has only ever indicted Africans – demanded he be handed over to them, but the Zintan – fiercely patriotic despite having fought with NATO against Gaddafi – refused. Over the next two years the country descended into the chaos and societal collapse that Gaddafi had predicted, sliding inexorably towards civil war.

By 2014, the country’s militias had coalesced around two main groupings – the Libyan National Army, composed of those who supported the newly elected, and mainly secular, House of Representatives; and the Libya Dawn coalition, composed of the militias who supported the Islamist parties that had dominated the country’s previous parliament but refused to recognize their defeat at the polls in 2014. After fierce fighting, the Libya Dawn faction took control of Tripoli. It was there that Saif, along with dozens of other officials of the Jamahiriya – the Libyan ‘People’s State’ which Gaddafi had led – were put on trial for their life. However, once again the Zintan militia – allied to the Libyan National Army - refused to hand him over. After a trial condemned by human rights groups as “riddled with legal flaws”, in a court system dominated by the Libya Dawn militias, an absent Saif was sentenced to death, along with eight other former government officials. The trial was never recognized by the elected government, by then relocated to Tobruk. A gloating Western media made sure to inform the world of the death sentence, which they hoped would extinguish forever the Libyan people’s hopes for a restoration of the independence, peace and prosperity his family name had come to represent.

It was a hope that would soon be dashed. Less than a year later, the France 24 news agency arranged an interview with Saif Al Gaddafi’s lawyer Karim Khan in which he revealed to the world that Saif had in fact, “been given his liberty on April 12, 2016", in accordance with the amnesty law passed by the Tobruk parliament the previous year. Given the crowing over Saif’s death sentence the previous year, and his indictment by the International Criminal Court, this was a major story. Yet, by and large, it was one the Western media chose to steadfastly ignore - indeed, the BBC did not breathe a single word about it.

What is so significant about his release, however, is what it represents: the recognition, by Libya’s elected authorities, that there is no future for Libya without the involvement of the Jamahiriya movement.

The truth is, this movement never went away. Rather, having been forced underground in 2011, it has been increasingly coming out into the open, building up its support amongst a population sick of the depravities and deprivations of the post-Gaddafi era.

Exactly five years ago, following the start of the NATO bombing campaign, Libyans came out onto the streets in massive demonstrations in support of their government in Tripoli, Sirte, Zlitan and elsewhere. Even the BBC admitted that “there is no discounting the genuine support that exists”, adding that "’Muammar is the love of millions’ was the message written on the hands of women in the square”.

Following the US-UK-Qatari invasion of Tripoli the following month, however, the reign of terror by NATO’s death squad militias ensured that public displays of such sentiments could end up costing one’s life. Tens of thousands of ‘suspected Gaddafi supporters’ were rounded up by the militias in makeshift ‘detention camps’ were torture and abuse was rife; around 7,000 are estimated to be there still to this day, and hundreds have been summarily executed.

Black people in particular were targeted, seen as symbolic of the pro-African policies pursued by Gaddafi but hated by the supremacist militias, with the black Libyan town of Tawergha turned into a ghost town overnight as Misratan militias made good on their promise to kill all those who refused to leave. Such activities were effectively legalised by the NATO-imposed ‘Transitional National Council’ whose Laws 37 and 38 decreed that public support for Gaddafi could be punished by life imprisonment and activities taken ‘in defence of the revolution’ would be exempt from prosecution.

Nevertheless, over the years that followed, as the militias turned on each other and the country rapidly fell apart, reports began to suggest that much of southern Libya was slowly coming under the control of Gaddafi’s supporters. On January 18th 2014, an air force base near the southern city of Sabha was taken by Gaddafi loyalists, frightening the new government enough to impose a state of emergency, ban Libya’s two pro-Gaddafi satellite stations, and embark on aerial bombing missions in the south of the country.

But it was, ironically, the passing of the death sentences themselves – intended to extinguish pro-Gaddafi sentiment for good - that triggered the most open and widespread demonstrations of support for the former government so far, with protests held in August 2015 across the country, and even in ISIS-held Sirte. Middle East Eye reported the following from the demonstration in Sabha (in which 7 were killed when militias opened fire on the protesters): “Previous modest pro-Gaddafi celebrations in the town had been overlooked by the Misratan-led Third Force, stationed in Sabha for over a year - originally to act as a peacekeeping force following local clashes.

‘This time, I think the Third Force saw the seriousness of the pro-Gaddafi movement because a demonstration this big has not been seen in the last four years,’ said Mohamed. ‘There were a lot of people, including women and children, and people were not afraid to show their faces … IS had threatened to shoot anyone who protested on Friday, so there were no green flags in towns they control, apart from Sirte, although there are some green flags flying in remote desert areas,’ he said. ‘But if these protests get stronger across the whole of Libya, people will become braver and we will see more green flags. I know many people who are just waiting for the right time to protest.’”

In Sirte, demonstrators were fired at by ISIS fighters, who dispersed the group and took away seven people, including four women. The same Middle East Eye report made the following comment: “The protests have been a public representation of a badly kept secret in Libya, that the pro-Gaddafi movement which has existed since the 2011 revolution has grown in strength, born out of dissatisfaction with the way life has worked out for many ordinary citizens in the last four years…[Mohamed] added that some people who had originally supported the 2011 revolution had joined the protests. Most Libyans just want a quiet life. They don’t care who takes over or who controls Libya’s money, they just want a comfortable life. That’s why Gaddafi stayed in power for 42 years. Salaries were paid on time, we had good subsidies on all the essentials and living was cheap.”

On the Attacks on Nice and the Catholic Priest

The “Nice Attack” and a beheaded Catholic priest! But,who are the terrorists?

By Malcolm X Movement coordinator, Dr Moustafa Troare

History with a capital H is written day by day. All big events on a time scale are the results of a series of small -and sometimes even individual- stories. 14th of July-as always,since the French Revolution-the preparations are on their way. Shopkeepers are making money, selling more matches in one day than during the rest of the year. Fireworks are seen in shops before disappearing in the hands of children, or on some occasions, into their parents’ bags. For every single shop selling gadgets and other items prized on the French Bastille Day, the scenario is the same; stocks are emptied quicker than French baguettes handed out for free at rush hour in front of the Gare du Nord tube station in Paris.

At night, in the city of Nice, located in the south of France, the exception reigns, though. No fireworks but the sound of vehicles; no cheerful cries of happiness and stupefaction, but tears and cries in front what will be remembered as the scene of horror that will definitely mark that Thursday night of July 2016. The word is dropped only a couple of hours after the scene of horror was violently put to an end. Terrorism! This is the fourth terrorist attack France is suffering in eighteen months. The connection is quickly made. As suggested in an ISIS recording released a couple of years ago, a vehicle -more precisely a truck- was used in the Nice attack that claimed the life of 84 people. What a sad and dark day is that French bastille day, 2016. Hundreds of people coming to watch the fireworks, celebrating the French national day, and tens of them eventually dying in a scenario that even William Shakespeare could not have better staged.

The culprit and murderer is killed, as is always the case in France in such circumstances. This leaves fewer details and information on why things unfolded as they did. Some things are not quite clear, though. The response of the government is heard in the following days. No Islamist terrorist group has clearly claimed the attack yet; but, France will intensify its bombardments in Iraq and Syria against the so-called Islamic state, the French President said. Many things are not clear and do not connect. We learn that the terrorist was a French Tunisian, not known at all as a practising or devout Muslim. Things are unclear again, when the French government, through its interior minister and some important civil servants, puts pressure on the police officer in charge of the CCTV that night. Sandra Bertin refuses to erase and get rid of the video as ordered by the French interior minister. Neither will she write a dishonest report on what happened on that night of July, when 84 people lost their lives and twelve others were seriously injured. Big up to her!

Things again are not clear, yet, when less than a week after the Nice attack, a Catholic priest is beheaded in a church, in the city of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, in the North-West of France. The responsibility for the crime will, this time, be quickly claimed by ISIS terrorist group.

In order to get to a better understanding of what is going on,and where the Hexagon as a whole is heading to, I decide to apply a very scholastic method. “Who, why, what, Where, and when” is the methodological approach that I decide to adopt in order to clear up the opacity surrounding the different attacks that have been going on, on a regular basis in France for a bit more than a couple of years now.

Who: The terrorists involved in the different attacks that took place on the French soil these last five years or so were, for the vast majority of them, French citizens or residents of Muslim cultural background. They all had some kind of experience or contact with the different war zones in the Arab World. These French citizens on the battlefield in Iraq, Libya and now Syria are also often used by the French secret services as information providers. Hence, also, the fact that quite a considerable number of them had the contact numbers and other details of some French secret service agents in their contact lists.  

Why: There is very little explanation as to why, once back home, these people decide to attack their mother land. Sociological and psychological analyses might, though, give us a clearer glimpse of what could be a possible explanation. France is clearly known and recognised by international organisations that are expert on the matter as a racist and Islamophobic country.

Youngsters of Black African and North African cultural backgrounds often have the feeling of being rejected and treated as second class citizens.  High unemployment and poor education characterise the life of these minorities put aside by the French political system and society as a whole. Resentment towards France is quite significant among the children of immigrants. This cocktail of animosity, rejection, violence, and the taste for blood experienced and developed in the war zones could explain their easy surrender to terrorist theories and activities.

What: Terrorism is seen, by those using it against their so-called “enemies”, as a war strategy aimed at terrorising and harming in order to win a fight or a battle. Because all those committing acts of terrorism in France have always been killed, it is also possible to say that it is a suicidal act. This, obviously, tells us that those committing acts of terrorism in France are sort of sacrificing their own life for what they think is right, in their own understanding of things.

Where: These terrorists have always perpetrated their mass massacres in Arab countries first, where helped and provided with weapons by the West, they tried to establish an Islamic State. That has clearly been the case in Iraq where with the help of the West they got organised to topple Saddam Hussein; in Libya, where again, with the help of the West and particularly France, they managed to get rid of Colonel Khadafy; or again in Syria, where, Al Nostra, the military branch of Isis, was doing -according to French former foreign minister, Laurent Fabius- an excellent job in Syria fighting against the Syrian government, and could therefore benefit from Western help involving money and weapons.

When: It is once back home in the Hexagon that the French warriors are finally recognised and labelled as “terrorists”. As if the execution of innocent people committed in the Middle East and other non-white populated regions was not enough for them to be awarded such status. Once in France, these French non official soldiers are now seen as potentially likely to commit crimes that will eventually make them worldwide terrorist figures. In Iraq, in Libya or in Syria, the French non official soldiers -who for a while served French interests-went, very often, through traumatising experiences that are not seriously dealt with when back in the Hexagon; and as we all know: “blood calls for blood” and “chickens always come home to the roost”.

To finish this article without pointing out any culprit for all what France is going through would be an insult to the reader. So, I ask the following question, in order to find out where the responsibility lies.

Had there not been any war in Iraq, had Khadafy not been executed, had the moderate rebels of Syria not been fuelled and provided with weapons against their own government, would we be discussing, debating, and talking about ISIS the way we do it here now?

It is sad to say it, but all attacks France suffered these past five years or so are nothing else but the perfect demonstration of the French “savoir faire”.

Saif al-Islam is Freed! / Nato War on Libya Based on Same Lies and Deceit as War on Iraq

On the day that the Chilcot Report in part illuminates the deep flaws of the war on Iraq, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been freed in Zintan, a development that relates directly to the Nato war on Libya that repeated many of the same apparent mistakes and crimes that were committed on Iraq by leading Western states. There were similar fundamental flaws in the Nato war of destruction against Libya in 2011 as there was against Iraq in 2003.

The Nato war against Libya was based several lies that have since been proven to be so, such as the lie that the Libyan government bombed peaceful protestors and that African mercenaries were being deployed when actually there was a pogrom of lynching of Black people from the outset of the rebellion, including the total eradication of the only Black African town in North Africa, Tawergha which had a population of 40,000 people.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has been released by the Zintan tribe in the city of Zintan in the west of Libya after being in detention for nearly five years. Since 2011 similarly to Iraq, Libya and the Libyan and African and Asian people there have been left in a collapsed society where abduction, rape, people smuggling, thousands of militias have proliferated and led directly to the fall out of terrorism in the region including links directly to terrorist attacks in Algeria, Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, Tunisia and other countries.

The 'refugee crisis' is also a direct fall out of the Nato war against Libya that has led and continues to lead to tens of thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Sahel and Sahara areas. Similar to Iraq, Libya was destroyed as it was a strategic unifier and uplifter of its own region in the African continent and had successes in that regard and was about to develop further Pan-African and South-South unity and development. Very similarly to UK and USA's plans for the war on Iraq, the same forces planned the same proxy militias to compliment the Nato's massive airstrikes campaign.

Saif al-Islam is a leading political figure in Libya both in the previous government of the Libyan Jamahirya and since. He is one of the most important national figures in Libya who has the capacity like other leading political prisoners and political figures active in Libya and in the Diaspora who is able to unite Libyans in the current plight they are in.

The Zintanis and most of the tribes and peoples in the Western Mountains are allied to the House of Representatives (HoR) based in Tobruk. The HoR has a legal process for reconciliation and forgiveness for political prisoners that includes Saif al-Islam. Zintan has completed this process in relation to Saif al-Islam and will be releasing him imminently. In stark contrast there was the massacre of over a dozen young men by militias in Tripoli last month, there was no due process, this was a illegal massacre motivated for purely narrow sectarian political interests. There needs to be justice and reconciliation for thousands of other similarly detained people in illegal detention across Libya, especially in Tripoli, Misrata, Sirte and other areas were Daesh or Daesh type forces have a presence.

However, there has been especially in the last year considerable moves by the social movements and patriotic tribes in developing a growing united Libyan process to healing the wounds of division and collapse between the Libyan people and their neighbours, and develop peaceful political processes in uniting the people towards an independence movement that reunifies and uses the God-given natural resources of Libya back to a socialised distribution for the benefit of all people of Libya and Africa. The freeing of Saif al-Islam is another historical development towards the reunification and independence of Libya, and many Libyans have welcomed this development.

Please get in touch with the Malcolm X Movement for Libyan and non-Libyan specialists who can speak to media on this issue.

[end]

500 African People Dead off the Libyan Coast

Malcolm X Movement: 500 martyred at one time! What's the context? Five years on, the African and Arab country of Libya that was thrown into death squad & people smuggling and torturing horror by Nato, its allied proxies and the near entire western left and radicals still has no campaign or voices raised for the struggle for justice for the Libyans, the people of Tawergha, Black Libyans in the hitherto only Black town in north Africa of which the entire population of 40,000 people are totally wiped out. Libyans are still fighting these criminals and these crimes, Black people in Libya and allied to all other shades of people in Libya are fighting for liberation. The fact that is all being totally ignored by radicals five years and continuing exposes all that needs to be known about western supposed radicals and lefties. The Malcolm X Movement will continue to raise our voices and efforts with them, and all additional voices and efforts are more than welcome.

MXM Coordinator on Chinese TV Speaking on Libya

Public event: Anti-Imperialist Prisoners - Palestine, Syria, Libya & Turkey, Fri 06 May

Anti-Imperialist Prisoners - Palestine, Syria, Libya & Turkey

Fri 06 May, Marx Memorial Library
37A Clerkenwell Green, Farringdon, EC1R 0DU
Doors open 6pm for a 630pm sharp start
£5 suggested entry

Facebook event page

THIS event seeks to bring together the situations and struggles of detainees and prisoners in the jails of Daesh and other death squads in Libya and Syria, in Turkey, and the colonial occupation force in Palestine.

Moussa Ibrahim - Libyan Peoples National Movement (Libyan Resistance). This will be the only speaker adressing the event via live internet link

Ashjan Ashour - On anti-colonial resistance amongst Palestinian prisoners

Steve Kaczynski - Former political prisoner held in Turkey

Issa Chaer - On the plight of detainees held by Daesh in Syria

Elif Sarican - Kurdish Students Union, speaking on Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey


Organised by the Malcolm X Movement:
FB: Malcolm X Movement
YouTube: Malcolm X Movement
Twitter: @mxmovement
W: mxmovement.blogspot.co.uk
E: 2015mxm@gmail.com

By attending this event you are giving permission that you might appear in the filming of the event which will be uploaded publicly onto social media

MXM Film Festival in Ireland: 'Translating Malcolm X Into Irish'

For some of the younger people of Northern Ireland, “it was the first time they heard Malcolm X’s own words speaking about ‘rejecting the white man,’ developing independence Black liberation organizations, rejecting the dehumanization from the white man, and being inspired by the ‘darker nations’ of Africa and Asia uniting against European colonialism.”

Translating Malcolm X into Irish: Malcolm X Film Festival’s First Historic Event in West Belfast
By Sukant Chandan, one of the MXM coordinators team

We arrived into Ireland on Friday 13th March 2015 as the latest political crisis was gripping this small section of the island of Ireland. Left-wing Irish Republican party Sinn Fein had blocked an austerity budget leading to the freezing of the budget for Northern Ireland. Directly related to this was a public workers one day strike the day our Malcolm X Movement delegation arrived at Belfast International airport, so we had to catch a taxi to West Belfast where we are staying with a local grassroots Irish republican socialist activist and friend. Sitting in the front of the taxi and chatting with the driver, I went through the usual careful and subtle probing as to where he stood in the British colonial-induced division in the six counties. Was he an Irish nationalist (who happen to be overwhelmingly Catholics) who united with the “third world” anti-imperialists, including the ANC, and supported the total end to British rule and the reunification of their country, colonized and partitioned by British colonialism? Or was he a Unionist (who happen to be overwhelmingly Protestants) who were historically planted into Ireland as colonial settlers and who more recently allied to Apartheid South Africa and are still largely allied to racist right-wing forces and the white settler state of Israel and want the six counties to remain eternally a part of the United Kingdom?

As we passed the beautiful hills of Cavehill and Black Mountain that immediately surround Belfast city we discussed the budget crisis at which point the taxi driver mentioned something along the lines of “those who have always held power here do not like to see that changing,” which clearly indicated to me that he was probably an Irish nationalist. It turned out he was and I felt more comfortable and we got into a big conversation whereby I mostly asked questions and he, like it seems so many people who lived through the “Troubles,” were more than happy to impart their usually insightful and sophisticated analysis informed by their experiencing of the horrors of the conflict there.

Towards the end of the conversation we discussed British covert operations in their dirty war in Ireland, with “the Brits” supporting the pro-Unionists “Loyalist” death squads, through what is infamously known as collusion, reminding me of the same covert operations and collusion with neo-colonial death squads in the Muslims world. Our journey came to an end, we bid farewell and he wished us a good stay in West Belfast.

“The murals reflected the Irish republicans’ affinity and solidarity with the people of Palestine and South Africa against white supremacy rule, but featured mostly their own revolutionary martyrs.”

It felt great to return to West Belfast, my second time there, and my fifth time in Ireland since 1999, every one of those visits I come to partake in political and cultural work with the Irish revolutionaries who are in Sinn Fein and independent Irish republican socialists and anti-imperialists. Belfast and Derry hold some of the most politicized anti-imperialist and socialist working class communities in the entire “West,” and as such is a primary example and inspiration of how a brutally colonized people (indeed the first colonized nation of English colonialism 800 years ago) can resist, organize and steadily build their politics in an inter-generational time frame.

We arrived to deliver the first of seven events in the First Annual Malcolm X Film Festival, taking place at the well-known cultural centre, Culturlann on the historic Falls Road in West Belfast. However, we had the full afternoon before the event day to have a walk around Falls Road and see the many revolutionary murals painted on gable ends of terraced homes and the famous rows of murals showing brightly and colorfully the recent and ancient history of the struggle of Irish freedom from colonial rule.

Leila Khaled speaking at the Malcolm X Film Festival

While West Belfast remains palpably politicized, one can still feel the Troubles rescinding into the background in the community with a new generation of young people and teenagers who were borne after the start of the peace process formally initiated by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998/1999. While social justice is a long way off there has been some increase of private investment. A shiny leisure center and a massive new shopping tower above the Milltown Cemetery where many of the martyrs for Irish freedom are buried.

We saw Palestinian revolutionary icon, leading PLO and PFLP member Leila Khaled, featured on a few murals. Khaled herself would be addressing the Malcolm X Film Festival the following day. The murals reflected the Irish republicans’ affinity and solidarity with the people of Palestine and South Africa against white supremacy rule, but featured mostly their own revolutionary martyrs, people like James Connolly and IRA prisoner of war and elected MP Bobby Sands whose mural has pride of place on the Falls.

While walking around the Falls our Irish host would greet and have a wee chat with people of the community who were all politically active in some way or another – either working with local youth, or whatever anti-imperialist and socialist activities they were committed to. This is a community that is pulsating with political discussion and activity, hardly spending any time on social media, but actually being socially embedded in real life and struggles with their community. We sat down for a snack and a tea with three young community activists and anti-imperialist socialists, two of them coming from solid revolutionary families with family members having served back in the conflict in the revolutionary national liberation armed movement of the Irish Republican Army, said by some to be unofficial armed wing of Sinn Fein.

Along with the great “craic,” hospitality and political discussions, the quick wit and charisma and intense discussions that seems to be nearly universal characteristics of the people, there were also instances of the trauma of living through a brutal war. Any working class community has its fair share of trauma, but add into the mix lots of shooting, massacres, torture and imprisonment, and it all adds up to a terrible mix that no humans should have to live through.

The Malcolm X Film Festival saw over 50 local activists attend the event the following day, which my revolutionary Basque Country comrade told me was a decent turn out in West Belfast considering the time and what was concurrently taking place. The event opened up with the first film montage of Malcolm X speaking on Civil Rights and Black Power in his last final years of speeches and interviews. There would be no one more fitting to speak on this panel than Bernadette MacAliskey, who became the most inspiring and audacious revolutionary at a very young age against the British Army’s occupation of the working class district of the Bogside in Derry. She took to the peoples barricades, helped to mobilize the youth and community against the British military police and army, got elected on a national liberation and socialist platform to parliament and remains to this day the youngest woman ever to have been elected. She was a leader of the Irish civil rights movement inspired by the Black civil rights movement in the USA and the undivided Indian peoples non-violent national liberation struggle. As with those historic examples, the oppressed Irish people’s struggle for non-violent change was met with brutality and massacres by the colonialists. The notorious Bloody Sunday Massacre was conducted in 1972 by the British state, killing 14 protestors and leadig to a further radicalization of the movement.

Bernadette MacAliskey speaking at the MXM Film Festival

Later in the evening, I was told by an Irish comrade that the event would have seen young activists hear for the first time people with English accents talking about anti-imperialism, socialism and the liberation of Ireland. It was the first time that they would hear someone non-white speaking about these things. And it was the first time they heard Malcolm X’s own words speaking about “rejecting the white man,” developing independence Black liberation organizations, rejecting the dehumanization from the white man, being inspired by the ‘darker nations’ of Africa and Asia uniting against European colonialism etc. Therefore Bernadette MacAliskey was the first of two Irish speakers at the event to ‘translate’ Malcolm X for the Irish audience. She recounted her experiences of going to the USA in the late 1960s and 1970s when she was a highly sort after speaker, invited by white feminists and relatively well-off Irish Americans who lived in houses that to MacAliskey “appeared like plush hotels” with “two toilets and three bathrooms” compared to the poor working class areas of Derry from where she came from, in which the struggle for better housing for Catholics and Irish nationalists was one of the primary issues in the civil rights struggle against the Irish apartheid system. She explained that the feminists in the USA had house servants who were Black or Brown, but she would find more common ground with those Black and Brown women than the white feminists and middle class Irish Americans. She said that she felt at home associating with the Black Panthers and the radical Puerto Rican anti-imperialist socialist group the Young Lords. Famously, MacAliskey was handed the keys to New York City that she instead gave to the Black Panthers. MacAliskey explained that she thought that one of the big problems of the Irish is that they think they are white and have white minds.

Dr Moussa Ibrahim speaks at the MXM Film Festival

Following MacAliskey was Dr. Moussa Ibrahim, the last media spokesperson for the Libyan Socialist Jamahirya government before NATO and its proxies destroyed it in 2011. Dr Ibrahim is still wanted by NATO who have put him on the red list on Interpol; he is still underground and a leading figure in the anti-NATO Libyan resistance. Dr Ibrahim eloquently explained that Malcolm X is a central figure for inspiration for the Libyan resistance. He continued to explain that part of the reason why Libya was destroyed was that like Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah and other African revolutionaries, Muammar Gaddafi was pioneering the capacity building of the African continent, and the African Union strategically aimed towards assisting in the liberation of Black people across the world. But the two things, Dr Ibrahim explained, that motivated NATO to destroy Libya was Gaddafi’s proposal for a gold-based African Dinar that would have ended the Dollar and Euro domination of Africa, and also the Global South military alliance that was being developed with Bolivia and Venezuela, a South Atlantic Treaty Organization to counter NATO. Dr. Ibrahim hoped that the Libyan and Irish people can reconnect to the unity that they previously developed, and many Irish activists attending were keen to nurture that unity once more. Dr Ibrahim also conveyed that Libya should be one of the most important Black Liberation struggles to give solidarity to on the planet as the general anti-NATO resistance in Libya is also united together with darker skinned or Black Libyans who have been systematically persecuted in acts of genocide by NATO’s proxies in Libya.

The second Irish speaker who translated Malcolm X for the Irish audience was former IRA prisoner of war and Sinn Fein member from Derry, Gerry MacLochlainn. MacLochlainn recounted how the Irish democrats of the 18th and 19th centuries mobilized to ensure that the Belfast port was not used in the genocidal industry of European slavery against African peoples. The most powerful thing MacLochlainn said and on which he finished was that the Irish people have to thank the British in a kind of way, thank them for ensuring that Ireland did not become a European colonizing power and instead because of the British colonial oppression of Ireland pushed the Irish into the camp of the global anti-imperialist movement against racism and colonialism.

I had to nearly pinch myself as I wondered if Ireland had ever seen such a discussion of white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism, resistance, liberation and Malcolm X with such an array of revolutionary speakers. Leila Khaled spoke about the importance of Malcolm X’s message of dignity and liberation of oppressed peoples, and emphasized that the death squads such as “Isis” are working for, and creations of, imperialism and Zionism to destroy the countries and communities in the region. Leila Khaled stressed that it was of primary urgent necessity that people must unite against these neo-colonial death squads. Leila Khaled and the whole room laughed when for the third time she could not understand the English of our Irish comrades and I had to “translate” the questions for her. I later commented and joked with Irish comrades that MacAliskey and MacLochlainn politically translated Malcolm X for the attendees, and I translated the contributions so Leila Khaled could understand. I suppose all of us who are resistant victims of colonialism have to make efforts to listen, learn and understand the differences in our accents and languages to better unite for our common liberation.

We completed our event and visit with discussions about how the Malcolm X Movement and the Irish activists and struggles will work closer together and build for the Second Annual Malcolm X Film Festival in 2016 which will be dedicated to, and working alongside, the Black Panthers to commemorate the 50th anniversary since the founding of another primary radical anti-imperialist and socialist movement from within the West. As the airplane pulled away from the land of Ireland and drifted back to the heart of colonialism and whiteness in London, the Malcolm X Movement delegation left Ireland satisfied that we had fulfilled part of our revolutionary duty to unite Malcolm X with the Irish in a common cause of anti-colonial liberation. There remains much uniting to be done.