An Open Letter to The Black Nation

Regarding The 911 Calamity 

& The “War On Terrorism”

Dear Family,

          Like many of you, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee was greatly saddened to see so many of our people perish in the incredible calamity of 911.

          We were, however, greatly heartened to see that so many of you did not get bamboozled by the flag waving hype of white amerikkkan nationalism that emerged in its aftermath. We were especially heartened to see and hear so many of you saying what Malcolm said and what so many of your leaders would not say as to the real meaning of this incredible calamity, that it was definitely a “case of the chickens coming home to roost”!

          To be sure, there was a lot more that Malcolm said that gives further meaning and understanding to that flaming and engulfing moment as well.

          What makes us join in this dialogue now was what we heard and didn’t hear your so-called leaders say at this very critical moment.

          One of your leaders, to our surprise, described those who willingly sacrificed their own lives to see their mission through of setting several of massa’s prime houses on fire as “beasts,” the same language that the u.s. national media order uses to demonize our youth in the name of reporting violent crime.

          Another Harlem minister even prayerfully exclaimed that when it was all over, he was “so happy to see that ‘lady liberty’ was still there.” By the way, Dr. Leonard Jeffries* has long ago made it plain that the gatekeepers of white amerikkkan nationalism stripped ‘lady liberty’ of her original chained Afrikan identity at the door to ensure that the ‘she’ would never have anything to do with us, just like so many of our foremothers were so ruthlessly violated in slavery.

          One leader even called for a ‘truce’ of all things with Rudy Guiliani, one of the most violently brazen upsouth enemies that our people have faced since the days of Philadelphia’s mob-endeared Frank “Get Their Black Asses” Rizzo, may he rest in piss, as if you can unilaterally call for a truce.

          In our eyes, these kind of accommodating pronouncements can leave many of our people who look to these leaders for real direction confused and defenseless at a time when we should be especially on guard.

          So we enter this important dialogue addressing your attention to three huge white lies that your leaders did not address.

          White lie no. 1, George W. Bush said that those who made this incident happen did it because they “hated” the prosperous amerikkkan way of life.  This lie conveniently covers up a very important truth as to why these  chickens came home to roost, why the cycle of amerikkkan violence came so full circle in such a bursting boomerang of justice fashion.

           This all happened not because of hate, but because of what the u.s. has done in the so-called Middle East to advance their own narrow oil-based imperialists interests! Although many here were greatly traumatized by the spectacle of some 6500 innocent people perishing with the taking down of the twin towers, how many times does 6500 go into the one million people bombed with depleted uranium who were callously dismissed as ‘collateral damage’ in the Persian Gulf War, a war provoked by the u.s. government, by the way?

           How many times does 6500 go into the on-going loss of life with a u.s. policy that allows Israel to bomb and shoot Palestinian civilians, assassinate Palestinian leaders and use military force at will on anyone whom they deem a threat to their security, an Israel whose total population is smaller than New York City, yet she receives more u.s. aid a year than the entire 12 million square miles of the Afrikan continent?

           Or if we look at the u.s. within the framework of the western hemisphere, we can ask the same question. How many times does this 6500 go into the thousands bombed and bulldozed in Panama in 1991? How many times does this 6500 go into the hundreds of thousands murdered by u.s. trained death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala or Haiti?

           If it is wrong to target innocent civilians in the u.s., then it is wrong for the u.s. to target innocent civilians anywhere else in the world at anytime.

          In his outlined petition to the UN charging the u.s. government with genocide, Malcolm said that the genocide of which we speak has a “definite relationship to foreign affairs.” That is absolutely true here as well.

           Another white lie burned on our eyes in this flagcovered hysteria, hoopla and hype is that amerikka is now preparing to fight a “war on terrorism,” and it is to be a war against “all terrorism.”

Does this mean then the government will now ban the Klan? Has the government ever banned the Klan since its inception in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866?!

          Will it now address the state terrorism that is the bleeding scourge of police brutality in our streets?

          Will it mean that the wild two-legged police dogs who shot Amadou Diallo to pieces will now face federal charges?

          Please note the walking of the police officer whose killing of a Black man over traffic tickets set off a rebellion in Cincinnati while all the flags were waving and when Bush was announcing the launching of this new “war.”

          How come there was no outrage from “Americans” when a bomb was dropped on MOVE? 

          The excuses which shot from the cannons of the u.s. national media order for that horrific Friday the 13^th bombing of a Black community just to get one family of dissidents out of a house were some of the most obscene illustrations of u.s. racist hypocrisy ever expressed.

          Will the government now put the madbombing anti-Castro Cubans in Florida out of business and bring the perpetrators among them like Orlando Bosch to justice? Or will they perpetuate the madness of a 40 year old blockade instead?

          Did the government tell you that many of our political prisoners like Sundiata Acoli were put in solitary confinement in response to 911? And are they going to use the cover of this “war on terrorism” to throw away the key on them once and for all?

          Some very serious questions.

          Already it appears that what this “war on terrorism” will do is try to solidify the obscenity of racial profiling, and it may even set off a new chapter of covert and overt war on dissent if we are not careful.

          Time will tell…

          The other big white lie that is being pushed hard is that the perpetrators of these acts were “cowards.” Nothing is further from the truth. The men who pulled off this incredible “mission” had to be incredibly focused and determined to even challenge such enormous odds, and they were men who from the door were paying the ultimate price for their cause. This is not to romanticize or justify the actions at all. But it is to make it plain that this kind of total self-sacrificing behavior is the ultimate human factor in war, and they don’t want anyone under their foot getting too acquainted with that kind of irrepressible behavior.

          “Once you let your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom, you’ll get it,” Malcolm said.

          Once this kind of behavior gets out of the bottle, especially for truly legitimate causes, it is the kind of behavior that gets results. So be clear, this demonization here is about aborting the breeding of more acts and actors of this bold, fearless and destructive variety.

          This brings us to the matter of the demonization of the accused Osama Bin Laden. For the record, he denies being involved in the attack. And if he is everything that the government and the media says he is, one would think that he would want to take credit for an action that, militarily speaking, was so devastatingly successful, even if it was legally and morally out of bounds. But he hasn’t.

          The only thing that we’ve come across that he does take credit for is the routing of u.s. ground forces in Somalia several years ago interestingly enough.

          More interestingly, and nobody is reporting on this at all, and it deserves a real serious look, there may be a Bin Laden link to the Sudanese slave trade, and that his link to that may be in Uganda with the LRA, or the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel force in Uganda fighting against the Ugandan government.

          According to British-based journalist David Blair, in an article entitled ‘Bin Laden Buys Child Slaves For His Drug Farms In Africa,’ Bin Laden has purchased Afrikan slaves who were captured in northern Uganda by the LRA and sold for weapons, and that they are then for the most part, sent to work on his drug farms in Sudan. According to this report “Bin Laden pays one Kalashinikov assault rifle for every child he buys.”

          If this is true, then Bin Laden should go to hell, and the LRA should go to hell.

          But it also begs a question of a Pan-Afrikan kind of the Ugandan government. That is this, why is the Ugandan government spending so much time and resources invading and occupying  the Congo, betraying the Pan-Afrikan paradigm and participating in a genocide that no one is talking about, all in the name of u.s. interests in the Great Lakes Basin? (According to Afrikan scholars like YaaLengi Ngemi, at least a million people have been killed in eastern Congo as a consequence of the Ugandan-Rwandan invasion and occupation.) Couldn’t Ugandan forces better be used as a unifying Pan-Afrikan force looking to make slavery in that country history instead?     

By the way, why is there no outrage in the international community about the persistence of this slave trade in Africa? 

          So what should we be doing now? First, we should “think for ourselves” in terms of just what our particular place in the international order is as Malcolm also taught us and move forward. We should build on the success of the recent UN World Conference on Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Afrika, which declared that the TransAtlantic Slave Trade is a crime against humanity, and did so without the united states’ permission, and work towards the development of something comparable to the NonAligned Movement that Malcolm sought to connect our struggle with. (We should also have the surviving remnants of the TransSaharan Slave Trade, which is what is at issue in Mauritania and Sudan, declared a crime against humanity as well and deal with any perpetrators accordingly.)  In this historical moment, however, this answer to the NonAligned Movement means that the people of the southern hemisphere must unite to resist the current neocolonial order that is marked by their lands and their peoples being exploited to the umpteenth degree by the so-called global capitalist order of the north.

          Second, Muslims in this country, who include a lot of our people by the way, should take a page from the organizational legacy of the Nation Of Islam, by uniting, closing ranks and defending themselves from the government and media fostered madness that they are already facing. As an international force, Muslims should also unite and develop some standardization or canonization of just what the various acceptable approaches and interpretations of Islamic practice are in a way that flows with international human rights law as well. In that process, the question of the oppression of women needs to seriously be addressed.

          Finally, as a part of our particular role in building on the success of the WCAR, our people should not only accelerate our right and just call for reparations, we should also strongly reconsider the option of land-based independence. Why get caught up in the crossfires of the white man’s wars and crimes on the ridiculous premise that we’re “Americans” too? After 40 years of you trying integration, on top of more than 400 years of sheer hell, he still is not treating you like you’re Americans. When are we going to get it?… All due respect to the many innocents lost, but when massa’s house is on fire, include us with those who are “prayin’ for a wind to come”…

“I’m a field slave!…When the master’s house catches on fire, I’m prayin’ for a wind to come!…”

Malcolm X, Feb. 6, ‘65

Selma, Alabama

*In an episode of Like It Is several years ago, Jeffries exposed that the original model given to the united states by its French originators was in fact that of an Afrikan woman slave who was shackled at the ankle…

Bro. Zayid Muhammad,

Press officer, Malcolm X Commemoration Committee

@2001 all rights reserved