We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s October 28, 2023 session on Henry Winston, Korea and Palestine, and the Struggle for Peace. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.
Just briefly, just to update us on the question of Gaza, the problem of war and peace, and the question of the American people. It is a very difficult week of course, to once again be witness to the genocide against the Gazan people and children in particular, of the now close to 8,000 people who have been massacred, half of them are children. And there would probably be more children, had their parents and the elders not decided that if the bombing starts, they will throw their bodies on the children to protect them.
In Islam, we’re familiar with people who die in this way being called martyrs, but there’s another word called the Shahid. And a Shahid is a person who dies for a great cause, a great religious cause. And for Muslims all around the world this struggle is very different than what it is portrayed in the West. You might remember that the Hamas offensive—and I want to clarify that again—the Hamas offensive was named “Al-Aqsa Storm.” Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam. The Zionists—and I want to separate the Zionists from the Jews—are claiming that Al-Aqsa Mosque was built on the very holy site of Judaism, the Temple Mount. However it was—if it ever existed, by the way—was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. or C.E., the current era. And there is very little archaeological evidence that there was ever a temple there. So this is part of the Zionist fiction. And I wish to make it very clear, as are the Jewish Voices for Peace and rabbis all across the country, that Zionism is not Judaism. And that Zionism which is a European political movement which separated itself from religion, although it did not say that religious people couldn’t be a part of it, but it was a nationalist movement, really begun before World War II and the Jewish Holocaust. So its ambitions were not rooted in the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis.
So what is happening, while not of the same magnitude in terms of numbers, is the moral equivalent of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews. This is an extermination project. In every respect it falls under the international legal definition of genocide; there is no two ways about it. But for the Muslim world in particular, and this goes beyond Arabs and it goes beyond the divisions of Shia and Sunni.
The Muslim world understands the offensive of Hamas as connected to the defense of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and that the attack upon the Palestinians, for these 75 years now, has also been tied up with the claim that Israel is a Jewish state, and hence a homeland for the Jews and where the Jews could freely practice their religion. That is a fiction, a fraud and a fake, for political reasons and the fraud has only gotten worse until up to today. And it kind of began to shift after the year 2000, some would say with the undoing of the Oslo Negotiations to find a settlement between Palestine and Israel which would have led to a Palestinian state perhaps. Those negotiations were in the end rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat, who were being asked to compromise too much. They were prepared to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist, which was a shift in the position of the PLO at that time. But they were not prepared to accept settlements on the West Bank, they were not prepared to compromise on what were the boundary lines before the 1967 war—this is very important to understand. That war was initiated by Israel. It was a war of aggression, and it was a victorious war for the Israeli Army which still occupies major parts of Arab nations including Jordan, Syria, no longer Israel—they had the Sinai for a while. But then the occupation of what would have been Palestine.
By the year 2000, the end of the Clinton administration, the Israelis were prepared to make a compromise and settle on something—now the question—was this going to be a Palestinian entity that would still be occupied by Israeli military forces, or would this be a full-blown state? You know, with all of the rights of a state, and such and such and so forth. And things broke down over that, and Yasser Arafat and those said “No, we can’t give up anything.” And Yasser Arafat at one point told Clinton—and [Ehud] Barak who was the Prime Minister of Israel at that time—he said, “If I sign this I’m signing my death warrant.” You know, in other words the Palestinian street would rise up against him, in spite of the fact that he had become the symbol of this long struggle. And he had done a tremendous job, I mean, he was an outstanding leader. And if you ask me I could tell you about the times I met him and was with him, the type of cat he was, you know.
But after that, Israel was moving gradually to the right, to where it is today. Today, it is—you talk about fascism and right-wing government—Israel might be the most right-wing regime on the planet today, where the government consists of members from parties that can only be called Nazi in their outlook. I want to make a very strong point here. That Nazism is not a nationality; it is not German. It was configured in Germany, but it could be anybody, including those who have been the victims of the Germans.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was the one who said in an interview; and he said it many times—by the way Lawrence Wilkerson was a major Defense Department person in the Bush administrations. I think Daddy Bush as they call him, and Baby Bush—he was in both of those administrations and was the advisor to Colin Powell. Famously, when Powell told that lie in the [U.N.] Security Council about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that ultimately led to that war.
So, when I say Lawrence Wilkerson I’m not talking about somebody, you know, a lower-ranking person. I’m talking about a person who’s been at the top of the American government and especially its foreign and military policies. And Lawrence Wilkerson is the one who I first got this political analysis from—that at least four of the parties in Netanyahu’s coalition are Nazis. And he used that language. It is clear that—I think the point that we have to be clear-eyed about—is what politics and ideology is. It’s not a religious or ethnic or racial thing; you can be a German Nazi, an Italian fascist, or a Jewish or an Israeli fascist.
I saw a podcast where Scott Ritter was talking. And by the way I don’t always agree with Scott Ritter; he talks too much, I think he’s over the top sometimes. But in his analysis of the current situation between Hamas, or the Palestinians, and Israel, he said kind of what we said here last week. That if you substitute “German” for Israeli, and “Palestinians” for Jews, what you literally have is the same logic, the same language, and the same tactics [of Nazism]. And what is all of this for? Is it to make Israel safer? No, that’s not what this is about. It is to carry out genocide and terror against the Palestinian people, to drive them out of Gaza, to drive them out of the West Bank, and to force them to concede all of the land which the Zionists claim is “Greater Israel” or “Ancient Israel.”
It is, as some have called it, a project of ethnic cleansing. It is genocide. And to retreat from this knowledge, this fact, demonstrates moral corruption.
I want to come back to the Biden administration, the Democratic Party. I really want to talk about Black folk and Jews but I want to talk about Black folk too. I want to talk about Black folk ‘cause I feel we should know better. Many of us do, and there are signs. But we have no reason as an oppressed people to make any compromise at any time with this kind of terror and genocide, given our history.
And so when what we think is going to be the next mayor Cherelle Parker wraps herself in the flag of Israel and says she stands with Israel—this is a moral crime against us. Not against anybody; against us. And for the City Council, with Black people in the majority—yeah, they’re bought and paid for but they’re moral cowards. And see, in the tradition of the Black struggle, of our great leaders who are the leaders of all of the American people, of humanity—for these cowards and hustlers to do what they’re doing is a crime against us more than anything else. But I want to come back to that.
Again I want to just say that this effort to remove all Palestinians from what is considered “Greater Israel” and to demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque. Al-Aqsa Mosque; not even the German Nazis would even ever consider destroying the Vatican. No one would. No one would. You know, in the name of security, you’re going to wage a war against civilization?
And again the Israeli regime is the enemy of human civilization. We have to accept that and say it and live by that truth. These wars are increasingly civilization wars. The fact that they’re killing children is a way, not only to terrorize the children, but their parents. You know, most parents and grandparents would say, “I want to die before my children.” But then there’s another thing most parents and grandparents say, “I hope they didn’t suffer.” You know, if your child dies, you know, you want to say, “Well, I hope they didn’t suffer. I hope it went quickly.”
I saw a video in a hospital in Gaza, where they were putting on a sheet or something; only the legs of a child. The Israelis are bombing hospitals. They’re bombing schools, they’re bombing mosques, they’re bombing churches. When you go at this, you’re waging a civilization war. This is a war of terror. I don’t believe that even the Americans’ bombing of Korea and of Vietnam—and you should know the U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs that were dropped in World War II.
This bombing is worse than that. Nothing is sacred. The Palestinians are being called animals, human animals by the Israelis. This Israeli regime is probably the most racist, white supremacist regime on the planet Earth. And no one, no one who has an ounce of moral integrity should try to find any way to excuse it. And unless the Israeli people, along with American Jews rise up, Jews—or Zionists—will forever be condemned by world humanity.
And let’s be clear. There are probably not more than 20, 25 million Jews in the whole world on a planet of close to eight billion. And you are going to defy humanity, and tell humanity to kiss your behind, to do what you need to do “because of the Holocaust”?
No. Nazism is Nazism. Genocide is genocide. War crimes are war crimes. Bombing of hospitals is bombing of hospitals. Killing children is the killing of children. And this is supposed to be a manifestation of their “justifiable rage.”
But we want to come back to that. It’s really a manifestation of a hateful people. And they’re going to have to come to terms with this. They’re going to have to come to terms with this. A people infused with such hatred. Such hatred.
But anyway, the children are viewed as Shahid, and are seen as such by the world. In the Christian Bible it’s said, “Death where is thy victory, death where is thy sting?” That’s in Corinthians, and what they’re saying is, a Shahid, a martyr does not concede a victory to death you know. Death is not the final word. Martyrdom is elevating.
And you know, we have Shahids in our own history. Martin Luther King was a Shahid. Malcolm X was a Shahid. For whom death had no victory, death had no sting.
The American people are at a moment of reckoning. All of the childishness of identity politics, of, you know, all of this superficial discourse about trans and all of that, and the superficiality of race discourse, where it’s all about identity and not about freedom or changing society—now we’re going to have to grow up. The American people—if we think this is a passing event, we’re going to find out differently. To the great moral credit of those rabbis and other Jewish people and Jewish Voice for Peace, who led thousands yesterday to take over Grand Central Station in New York, saying in essence what we are saying: Zionism is not a religion and it’s not our religion. The soul of the Jewish people is now on the line. The soul of an arrogant people, and I want to underline again, a hateful people.
And if you’re not a part of it, stand up and speak against it. If you disagree with it, say it publicly. There is nothing in Jewish history to justify this. Nothing. And the fiction that there is, is just that.
Let me just go back to the Temple Mount. They have not presented any archaeological evidence of a temple. And if it did exist it was destroyed by the Romans 600 years or more before Islam came into existence. So this is not about religion or Judaism, this is about imperialism, colonialism and racism. In fact in 1975 the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution saying that Zionism was racism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. manipulated to get that withdrawn. But Zionism is racism, and colonialism.
The American people must mount a new peace movement. The American people, in the name of humanity and our own humanity, must attack the war-makers, the warmongers, the military-industrial complex, and in the first instance—the Biden Administration. I know it is an inconvenient truth for many people because of the narrative that defines Trump as a neo-fascist. To which, you know, we always say, “Well do you understand what neo—well first of all, do you understand what fascism is?” And if he is a fascist, and like Cornel West would say—sadly—that Biden is a “milquetoast neoliberal,” and Trump is a “neo-fascist thug.”
Well, if that is the truth, then how do you explain Biden and the Biden administration egging on, and supporting and sending more arms towards an Israeli regime that is already super armed to attack defenseless children and women? I mean, if Trump is the fascist, then is this the “neoliberal milquetoast” person? And this is why, you know, we have to say the Cornel—Cornel, you got to listen to people. You got it wrong. I agreed with your stand for the Palestinians, but your understanding of what’s going on here—because if Trump is a neo-fascist thug, then what is Netanyahu? You know what I’m saying? So, American politics and discourse must align with world discourse on fascism and racism and Nazism. So a new peace movement must be built in our country, with a program that begins with the phrase, “We ain’t going to study war no more.”
Your generation has known nothing but war. My generation knew nothing but war except for a brief period after the defeat in Vietnam. The American public has been politically primed to think that all problems can be solved through military means—you crush the enemy, you make them so they never oppose you again.
You know, all of these crocodile tears about mass murders around the United States, the most recent one in Maine—there’s a history to all of this. You know, the American people were not always this armed. And certainly most people who had arms were hunters; some people had them because, you know, they wanted to “protect themselves.” But they had nothing like AR-15s and these other kinds of weapons for warfare.
When did all of this start, and when did it come about? It’s an interesting question. If people were not armed like this before, why are they armed like this today? Well, it began with the Black movement. And then with the Black Power movement and the Panthers saying, “We have a right to self-defense,” et cetera. A whole political narrative was developed, first by the Republicans and then by both parties which encouraged white people to move to the suburbs because the cities were dangerous, and dangerous for white people. That the potentiality for a Black uprising was there—and there had been Black uprisings and riots through the middle 60s, usually associated or triggered by a police murder or some form of police brutality. But, the anger associated with the inequality, the lack of schools and you know, the whole problem of oppression, just fueled these uprisings. Most of the people who were killed were Black people, by the police. And there were not that many killings, like it was just shocking, that for example, 30 people were killed in Newark. I mean, you know, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to today.
Under the slogan of Law and Order—and then certain sociological things that Winston talks about in the essay he wrote on the Kissinger-Moynihan thesis that Black people were culturally deprived, that our family structure was aberrant; that, in other words we’re not oppressed, but we were a unfit people. This goes back to the narrative right after the defeat of Reconstruction that they’re not qualified to vote because they are culturally and civilizationally barren and empty—but that narrative began to take place. And so the idea that white people should move to safe suburbs, but more than that, “arm yourselves.” And this would be the “answer” to a Black uprising that would kill white people. And this is where you get a whole narrative about the Nation of Islam, about Black Power.
One of the important books written at this time was written by Charles V. Hamilton, a professor at Lincoln, and Stokely Carmichael, called Black Power. And they defined Black Power as Black people using the power of the vote which we had just gotten in 1965, especially in the South, to assert power. There was never any mass outcry for killing white people. I don’t even know that anybody called for killing white people. In fact, the Panthers who were associated with guns called for a Rainbow Coalition of all races, you know, and were attacked by certain Neo-Pan-Africanists and cultural nationalists because of that, you know.
The point is that this hysteria, and then the gun makers making all of these guns available. If Black people were deprived of anything, it was of guns. We didn’t have all these guns; we only recently got some guns to use on each other. And we got the hand-me-downs, where the gun stores in the white suburbs—and that’s where they mainly are—have all of the most up-to-date weapons. You know what I’m saying?
Now, as they say, what goes around, comes around. And a race war never occurred in the United States. I think because neither Black people nor white people wanted a race war, certainly not Black people. We are not suicidal. We knew how armed these white people were, we knew about the neo-fascist and racist organizations that had developed throughout places like Pennsylvania and other states. And we knew we were outgunned, outmanned, outarmed, you know, the whole thing.
But what has now eventuated? The highly armed white population are turning their weapons not on Black folk, but on each other. The other danger is that the highly armed white population is against the ruling elite. The other side of it was—and just two other sides of this—arming the white population; very similar to what Israel has done. I think they learned what they’re doing in terms of arming the settlers and these thug organizations used against unarmed Palestinians—I think they learned that from the United States in the 1960s.
But two other things that they did. By the 80s, both parties are adopting this. And certainly by the Clinton administration, it added the criminalization of the entire population of Black folk. We had always dealt with being demeaned and called culturally empty, although we produced all of the great art, all the great music. But “We’re ignorant, we have low IQs” you know, academics would write prolifically on this. What the Clinton administration and think tanks associated with “the right,” what Democrats and Republicans came up with is criminalizing the Black community. Especially young men. And that’s where you get the Crime Bill of 1994, under the Clinton administration, which was supposedly to criminalize crack, but that was just the surface. It really criminalized the whole Black population, in particular young Black men. One-third of young Black men, until very recently, and maybe not much lower today, are either in jail or under the control of the criminal justice system. And the other thing is, to turn the police into an armed force in the Black community, and so on.
My point is that these crocodile tears of “Now we have to have gun control.” Well, you all are the ones that didn’t want gun control. The only time they wanted gun control in California, really, back then, was when the Panthers went to Sacramento, the state capital, holding up guns that didn’t have any ammunition in them, which was a symbolic thing to say, “We have a right to bear arms.” And then suddenly the state legislature wanted to pass a law for gun control.
But then going forward, state after state made it easier to buy weapons because they wanted to arm the white population against Black people. Now, that’s a lot of baggage in the American psychology, in the American culture, in the American nation.
How do you go from that, to a peace movement? A movement for positive peace. How do you create the psychology, and the culture, and the ideology for peace? And I’m not just talking about “a few Quakers” or “Unitarians” or even some wayward Episcopalians who are for peace, and you know, hold up signs, “Peace now,” without any connection to the great mass of people.
We’re talking about a nation, in the Martin Luther King sense, which has to be remade and reconfigured. This is necessary, because we now face new threats of world war. Again, I say to those people: if you’re hustling, if you’re a coward, get off of the stage of history. If you feel threatened by truth of any kind, leave those who seek to fight for justice and peace; leave us alone. Oh by the way, don’t think you can play us either.
There’s a thing going on where a lot of Democrats, liberals, and Black politicians are saying, “Well, we have to elect Biden in 2024.” Well by the way, there are growing numbers, especially of young Democratic voters who are saying, “I will never vote for Biden.” This is very positive. But don’t say, after the world is in some kind of conflagration, that “I didn’t know.” I will say, for most who are in the political arena, who have churches and synagogues and mosques—you do know. And if you don’t know everything, you know enough. And if you don’t know everything, try to find out. Not knowing is not an excuse.
Martin Luther King was right: A Time To Break Silence. And that speech should be read regularly, because all of the moral framing of it; it was not just Vietnam. He was talking about the American people and what war does to a nation. The United States has already deployed two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean and somewhere around the Persian Gulf. They are saying that they are preparing to deploy two more aircraft carrier groups. An aircraft carrier group is not just an aircraft carrier with ships that have fuel and food that assist it. An aircraft carrier group consists of cruisers, other battleships and submarines. All of these ships, especially the submarines and the aircraft carriers, and the planes on them, are equipped with nuclear weapons. Four of these groups, which obviously target the Asian continent—and here is what we must be aware of—this is preparation for war in Asia, against Iran. Against Hezbollah. You know, the British gave it the name the Middle East. It’s Western Asia. Against China, and against North Korea.
Gaza and Israel have become a secondary matter to the larger global war-fighting program of the United States. Including nuclear war. Now, decisions can be made to pull back. The world is saying pull back to the United States. There’s no place in the world that Biden can go outside of the white nations of the world. The American government is held in utter contempt, even hatred, by the people of the world. The neocons—which run the foreign policy; and the foreign policy runs the domestic policy of the country—don’t show any signs that they want to pull back.
The Israelis will not win in Gaza. It’s estimated that there’s something like 500, 400 and some miles of tunnels under Gaza, some dug down 70 meters deep into the ground. The tunnel system in Gaza is more extensive than the New York subway system. There are seven—it was not just Hamas or the al-Qassam regiment, which is the armed wing—there were at least six other military organizations that took part in the operation on October 7th. There are 40,000 of them.
Israel: they can bomb but they will not fight. And they cannot win in Gaza. They will not win in Gaza. They know it, the Biden administration knows it, they also know that if they go into Gaza and then carry out even more egregious killing and genocide, that they cannot hold Hezbollah back. They will get involved. And as you hear on the news and in the newspapers, “Iranian-backed.” Everything is Iranian-backed, as though it is Iranian-determined. As though the Palestinians don’t know that they are oppressed and are not fighting for their freedom.
Israel is a nuclear nation. One of the things that a lot of people have forgotten is that during the anti-apartheid struggle, when the white regime was still running South Africa, South Africa and Israel were involved jointly in developing nuclear weapons. They were preparing South Africa to be what Israel is in the Middle East, and to fight against potentially all of Africa with nuclear weapons. We know that the Israelis have nuclear weapons. They’ve never signed any treaty or have never acknowledged it, which is another question. And their idea is that they have a right to have them and to use them because of “the Holocaust.”
So you’re going to carry out, against humanity, something that even the Germans didn’t do. The other thing is the arrogance, that “we are the moral judge, the moral policeman of the whole world.” That “we have a right to morally judge everybody, but we don’t have to abide by any moral standard except our own,” that “we have every right to kill” because of “the Holocaust” and the “thousands of years of anti-semitism.” All fiction. All fiction.
The U.S. people have great challenges before us. The first thing in this 2024 election: Biden must be defeated. There cannot be any playing with this. We have to make it clear to the extent that we can, to Robert F. Kennedy; we have to definitely make it clear to Cornel. You know, there’s something that Black folk in the Black church, they always say; it’s a phrase that says Be still and know. They always follow it with Be still and know that you are not God.
And to these political, heavyweight talkers: be still and know. You need to shut up for a minute.
Thankfully, Trump has shut his mouth. You know, cut the performance, dog. Let’s keep it real.
Kennedy has made egregious statements. “Give them (Israel) whatever they need.” You need to withdraw that.
Cornel, you’ve been right in defending the Palestinian people. But you have to be morally and politically consistent. You can’t talk out of both sides of your mouth, you see what I’m saying? Just ‘cause they put a microphone in your face, you don’t have to say nothing. Sometimes you have to think. The state of politics in Philadelphia, and I’m very angry, I am deeply angry—can’t say disappointed. The reason I can’t is that I don’t expect anything from most of these cowards and hustlers. I don’t. The Black church has been turned out, it’s not the Black church that we knew. The pulpit is for sale. By for sale I mean any politician can come and pass a few dollars to the minister and he or she can ascend the pulpit. We often thought of it as sacred, you know. In some churches they only allow the pastor in the pulpit. Or others, but not politicians. For most leadership of the Catholic church, money is their God. Not moral principle.
So I’m not all that surprised, although I guess I am; I’m hurt by it. And so we go forward. And we had to make this decision in preparation for the Year of Baldwin. Because you know, we had these ideas, just like we did in the Year of Du Bois; the City Council passed a resolution. Trade unions and churches welcomed us as Philly Reads Du Bois. And WURD was a friend until it wasn’t, where we read Du Bois every week, you know. Well, we’re not in that situation so we said, “We can’t get City Council or this mayor to endorse something.” Then if we invite Cornel West to speak, they’ll say, “Well, we’re for Biden and we don’t want anything to upset his re-election.” And then they want, you know, to attack us. And so we said we would go, to the best of our ability, directly to the people, and to the youth and children.
And the youth and children must be given the opportunity to think and to grow and to know what morality is. And they must be separated from this fraud of Black leadership. It is a fraud, it is a disgrace to everything we have fought for and stood for. Most of them in the churches could give less than a damn about Martin Luther King Jr., you know what I’m saying? If you say the Black Prophetic Tradition, they’ll use it to distort it. They don’t give a damn about the Black tradition at all.
So we have work to do. But I think, I really believe that new ground is opening up. Farrakhan is speaking at 1 o’clock today. We’ll look at it, and I have an idea of what he’s going to say, and it’s very important. His voice is very important, you know what I’m saying? He is speaking. But then, there’s a whole schedule of demonstrations today and going forward. This is all good. The Palestinians have mobilized their community and that’s a beautiful thing. There’s fracturing of the Jewish community. Let’s hope that it becomes a real mass movement. Black folk are not yet in it. And this is not not good, and there are reasons, you know, as we talked about. That’s what we face going forward.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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