Two daughters of Marvin X, Nefertiti and Amira, and Cornel West at Marvin X's Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness Concert, San Francisco State University, April 1,2001.
Nefertiti teaches English at a Community College in Houston, TX. She, Amira and daughter Muhammida, help their father with event planning. Attorney Amira recently won a case against Burger King and just won a round in a case against the Port of Oakland (see Eastbay Express).
I don't know how Marvin X gets so much information--especially since he doesn't have a TV. For sure, knowing him, I don't need to watch CNN. He mostly stays at home but he knows everything going on in the world and comments on everything that is of interest to him.--Quitta, Berkeley CA
I read the Black Bird News every morning. I can't start the day without seeing what Marvin X has to say. There are few bold enough to deal with the subjects Marvin writes about or posts on Black Bird News.--Emanuel, Fresno CA
Highly informed, he speaks to many societal levels and to both genders—to the intellectual as well as to the man/woman on the street or the unfortunate in prison—to the mind as well as the heart. His topics range from global politics and economics to those between men and women in their household. Common sense dominates his thought. He shuns political correctness for the truth of life. He is a Master Teacher in many fields of thought—religion and psychology, sociology and anthropology, history and politics, literature and the humanities. He is a needed Counselor, for he knows himself, on the deepest of personal levels and he reveals that self to us, that we might be his beneficiaries.
Two Champions of Children Are Given Nobel Peace Prize
Malala Yousafzai, 17, said she was honored to be the youngest person to receive the award. She dedicated it to the “voiceless.”Credit Oli Scarff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Who is Malala?” shouted the Taliban gunman who leapt onto a crowded bus in northwestern Pakistan two years ago, then fired a bullet into the head of Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old schoolgirl and outspoken activist.
That question has been answered many times since by Ms. Yousafzai herself, who survived her injuries and went on to become an impassioned advocate, global celebrity and, on Friday, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize alongside the Indian child rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.
Yet since that decisive gunshot in October 2012, Ms. Yousafzai and her compelling story have been reshaped by a range of powerful forces — often, though not always, for good — in ways that have left her straddling perilous fault lines of culture, politics and religion.
In Pakistan, conservatives assailed the schoolgirl as an unwitting pawn in an American-led assault. In the West, she came to embody the excesses of violent Islam, or was recruited by campaigners to raise money and awareness for their causes. Ms. Yousafzai, guided by her father and a public relations team, helped to transform that image herself, co-writing a best-selling memoir.
Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children's rights campaigner.Credit Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
And now the Nobel Prize committee has provided a fresh twist on her story, recasting her as an envoy for South Asian peace.
Announcing the prize in Oslo on Friday, the committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, said it was important for “a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism” — a resonant message in a week in which the Pakistani and Indian armies have exchanged shellfire across a disputed stretch of border, killing 20 villagers. But it was also a message that highlighted how far Ms. Yousafzai has come from her original incarnation as the schoolgirl who defied the Taliban and lived to tell the tale.
Amid the debate about the politics of her celebrity, few question the heroism of Ms. Yousafzai — a charismatic and exceptionally eloquent teenager who has followed an astonishing trajectory since being airlifted from Pakistan’s Swat Valley. At just 17, she has visited with President Obama and the queen of England, addressed the United Nations, and become the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize since it was created in 1901.
She learned of her award on Friday when a teacher called her from a chemistry lesson at Edgbaston High School for Girls in Birmingham, the English city she now calls home.
“I was totally surprised when she told me, ‘Congratulations, you have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and you are sharing it with a great person who is also working for children’s rights,’ ” Ms. Yousafzai said at a news conference.
She will share the $1.1 million prize with Mr. Satyarthi, 60, a veteran, soft-spoken activist based in New Delhi who has rescued trafficked children from slavery.
“If with my humble efforts the voice of tens of millions of children in the world who are living in servitude is being heard, congratulations to all,” Mr. Satyarthi said in a television interview on Friday.
There had been some speculation that the Nobel committee, which last year gave the prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, might withhold it this year, as it did in 1972 during the Vietnam War.
The Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi speaks after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against the oppression of children.
October 10, 2014. Photo by Adnan Abidi/Reuters.
Yet Ms. Yousafzai offered an emotional counterpoint to grinding conflict in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. “With her courage and determination, Malala has shown what terrorists fear most: a girl with a book,” said Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general.
In Pakistan, she has come to symbolize the country’s existential struggle against Islamist violence. She rose to prominence in 2009 as the author of an anonymous blog that described life in Swat at a time when fighters, armed with Kalashnikovs, terrorized the valley’s residents and shut schools where girls were being educated.
Later, she became a national news media figure, speaking about the need for peace, which drew her into the Taliban’s cross hairs. In the summer of 2012, the insurgents hatched a plan to kill her, then put it into action that October.
After the shooting, with life-threatening wounds to her head, Ms. Yousafzai was flown to Britain for treatment. But back in Pakistan, a news media-driven backlash had already started, some of it by crude conspiracy theories — accusations that the teenager was a C.I.A. agent, a blasphemer or a traitor.
But more reasonable people were discomfited, too — in particular by the way Western news media outlets lionized Ms. Yousafzai at a time when American drones were pounding targets in the tribal areas, sometimes killing civilians.
“Malala’s story, and the way it was framed, fitted neatly into a certain Western narrative,” said Ziyad Faisal, an economics student in Milan, Italy. “But at the end of the day, she’s just a teenage girl. She means so many things to so many people.”
After surgeons inserted a titanium plate in her head, Ms. Yousafzai made a rapid recovery, and quickly drowned out her critics with her preternatural poise and speaking skills. She shifted her focus, moving away from the fight against the Taliban and toward a broader advocacy for children. An alliance with Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister turned education campaigner, honed a message she continued to deliver on Friday.
“This award is for all those children who are voiceless, whose voices need to be heard,” she said. “I speak for them, and I stand up with them.”
A 2009 documentary by Adam B. Ellick profiled Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl whose school was shut down by the Taliban. Ms. Yousafzai was shot by a gunman on Oct. 9, 2012.
But that advocacy — important yet politically inoffensive — has also drawn sharp criticism from those who say that the choice of Ms. Yousafzai exemplifies the way the Nobel Prize has strayed far from the purpose intended by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite and who originated the prize.
“This is not for fine people who have done nice things and are glad to receive it,” said Fredrik Heffermehl, a Norwegian jurist who has written a book on the prize. “All of that is irrelevant. What Nobel wanted was a prize that promoted global disarmament.”
Nonetheless, for the many Pakistanis and Indians who enthusiastically hailed the joint win by Ms. Yousafzai and Mr. Satyarthi, it was a welcome taste of what unites, rather than divides their countries: a shared interest in education and in improving the plight of millions of downtrodden and abused children. And for Ms. Yousafzai, it brings her story full circle, back to South Asia.
Once-cynical voices in Pakistan were drowned out on Friday by a chorus of well-wishers. “A bright moment in dark times,” said Nadeem Farooq Paracha, a news media commentator, on Twitter.
But a few clung to the old conspiracy theories. “Her shooting was a ready-made drama that was created by foreign powers,” said Ghulam Farooq, a newspaper editor in Ms. Yousafzai’s hometown, Mingora.
Others noted ironies — that Pakistan’s previous Nobel Prize winner, a scientist from the minority Ahmadi community, had been shunned for his religious beliefs, and that for all of her travel, the one country that Ms. Yousafzai cannot visit, for security reasons, is her own.
“Maybe Malala can come home now?” said Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, a Pakistani filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2012.
‘Kill the Messenger,’ a Film About the Reporter Gary Webb
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Movie Review: ‘Kill the Messenger’
The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis reviews “Kill the Messenger.”
At some point in almost every movie set in the world of journalism, someone drops a big speech about the Truth. “Nothing’s riding on this,” an editor growls at Woodward and Bernstein in the film “All the President’s Men” amid the horror-flick gloom, “except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.” The rare exception to this big speech rule may be “His Girl Friday,” the greatest movie ever set in a newsroom, which ditched sanctimony for the syncopated report of wits firing at each other like Tommy guns.
The big speech in “Kill the Messenger,” a likable if formulaically pulse-pounding fiction about a real investigative reporter, Gary Webb, arrives near the end. By then, Gary (Jeremy Renner, affable and on cruise control), has tramped, in victory and defeat, through his newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, and parachuted in and out of danger while chasing a name-making story. It’s the mid-1990s. Mobile phones are as big as clown shoes, and a cutie named Monica Lewinsky has been working in the White House. Gary should be riding high after reporting a series, “Dark Alliance,” linking the Central Intelligence Agency with Nicaraguan contras and the wildfire-like spread of crack through black neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Instead, he sounds and looks haunted or maybe hunted.
Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, whose reporting that linked the C.I.A., the contras and the spread of crack came under attack.CreditChuck Zlotnick/Focus Features
Written by Peter Landesman, “Kill the Messenger” is based on a book by Nick Schou about Mr. Webb, his rise and fall, and Mr. Webb’s own book, “Dark Alliance,” his 1998 follow-up to his much-heralded, much-contested 1996 Mercury News series. The film tracks Gary as he reports the story, opening soon after a slinky number, Coral Baca (Paz Vega), hands him a Pandora’s box of a tip. Baca points Gary in the direction of Danilo Blandon (Yul Vazquez), a Nicaraguan drug smuggler and contra supporter who supplies product to a Los Angeles dealer, Ricky Ross (Michael Kenneth Williams). Suddenly, Gary is at a foreign prison visiting another shadowy power player, Norwin Meneses (Andy Garcia), who swans around the yard in a straw hat twirling a golf club.
The director Michael Cuesta started as an independent filmmaker (his credits include“L.I.E.”) but, like many other indies, also works in television. He directed the pilot of “Homeland” (he’s one of its executive producers) and helped establish its insinuatingly intimate, often claustrophobic feel and nervous rhythms, partly through its hand-held camerawork. The look that Mr. Cuesta and his director of photography, Sean Bobbitt, give “Kill the Messenger” at times evokes “Homeland,” but the movie’s cinematography isn’t as frenetic and self-consciously raw, and there’s less bobbing and weaving. Even so, the visual choices in the movie, including all the close-ups of Gary’s face as it lightens and darkens, help create the sense that something deeply personal is at stake.
Mr. Cuesta does his best work in the early scenes of Gary’s sleuthing, which develop a nice, agitated pulse. And because Gary’s dawning awareness of the story’s magnitude mirrors your experience as a moviegoer (you figure it out together), and because Mr. Cuesta keeps you close at Gary’s side, you feel invested in his fate. But the film falters as the story swells and churns, and real people like Representative Maxine Waters of California enter the fray in clips alongside fictionalized scenes meant to look like documentary footage. Gary’s story comes under attack, including from big media types, and he enters a downward spiral as so, too, does the film. There are high-horse speeches, long goodbyes, enveloping sadness, a sense of doom; mostly, there is a journalist betrayed by many factors, including his own calling.
“Kill the Messenger” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language.
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.” – Ida B. Wells
Letter to North American Africans
by
Ajamu Baraka
“The value put on black life by the occupation force in Ferguson and in our communities across the country is no different than the value put on the lives of the “natives” in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. occupation forces.”
The Black radical tradition has always understood the inextricable link between racism and militarism: racism as a manifestation of white supremacist ideology, and militarism as the mechanism to enforce that ideology.
That fundamental link grounds our analysis of the Obama administration’s policies in Iraq and Syria. But the link between race (white supremacy) and the deployment of violence to enforce the interests of white supremacy also explains the repressive mission and role of the police in the colonized barrios and segregated African American communities within the U.S.
Achelle Mbembe explains in “Necropolitics” that “…in modern philosophical thought and European political practice …, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law … where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end.’” In the non-white world of the internal and global colonies, the rules are different. In those zones where the consent of the oppressed is not expected, colonial/capitalist domination is reinforced with force and violence.
In those colonized spaces it is clear that the people are not the ones to be “protected and served,” and even gestures such as throwing one’s hands up to surrender only means that the police have a better shot. Even the time-honored idea of national sovereignty is different in the non-European world than what is taught in political science and international relations classes, according to Mbembe. As we have witnessed in Iraq, Libya and Syria, sovereignty “relies, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
That is why the Obama administration has not bothered to give its actions in Syria any legal justification. As Samantha Powers, Obama’s lunatic representative to the United Nations claimed, the U.S. has all of the authority it needs to bomb in Syria.
“In those colonized spaces it is clear that the people are not the ones to be ‘protected and served,’ and even gestures such as throwing one’s hands up to surrender only means that the police have a better shot.”
The African Americans who are supporting the latest war plans in Iraq and Syria while simultaneously calling for something called justice in Ferguson have forgotten, or never completely understood, that the war being waged by the U.S. to maintain global Western hegemony also includes them as a target. If Congress can give unanimous consent to the murder of more than 2,000 people in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, why would anyone think that those same people would really care about a few hundred African Americans who are being murdered annually by police forces charged with containing a population that has been rendered economically superfluous?
The value put on black life by the occupation force in Ferguson and in our communities across the country is no different than the value put on the lives of the “natives” in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. occupation forces. The cavalier way in which white policymakers decide issues of war in the non-white nations of the global South and place tens of thousands of innocents at risk mirrors the value they put on non-white life in the U.S., especially when those non-white bodies are involved in activities that they define as threatening – like resisting, or at this point simply existing.
We must always remind ourselves that in the colonies of the world as well as the racialized, segregated communities in the capitalist metropolis, the non-white is seen as the living negation of everything deemed important to the European mind – the underclass, the violent, the welfare queens, gangbangers, the terrorists – the quintessence of evil. And in reminding ourselves of this reality we can remain clear about what forces and interests we should oppose and with whom to be in solidarity.
What this means is that we cannot afford the comforting myths of U.S. benevolence that attempt to conceal the naked deployment of U.S. state power in the service of Western capitalist/colonialist interests. And we must view with suspicion, if not treat with disdain, our comrades, white and black, who support U.S. interventions, even if they frame that support in leftist justifications. For oppressed nations and peoples’ of the world, the U.S. white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy is and remains the principle contradiction. There must not be any nationalist sentimentality or equivocation on that position.
“The cavalier way in which white policymakers decide issues of war in the non-white nations of the global South and place tens of thousands of innocents at risk mirrors the value they put on non-white life in the U.S.”
The current phase of naked aggression in Syria is not a reflection of U.S. strength but rather its weakness. Nonetheless, we cannot underestimate the threat that the continued reliance on militarism and repression poses for African Americans and the peoples of the world. In the U.S., the national security apparatus has been moving systematically to strengthen its ability to target, contain, disrupt and repress when necessary all domestic oppositional movements. The threat of domestic terrorism provided the convenient cover for intensifying those efforts in the post-9/11 period, the result being graphically demonstrated by the militarized police in Boston and their police-state tactics in the aftermath of the Boston bombing, and in Ferguson, Missouri in response to a few hundred demonstrators protesting another killing of an unarmed black person.
The white supremacist, colonial/capitalist, patriarchal ruling classes of the U.S. and Europe are clear, even if we are not, that war and repression will be used with brutal efficiency to maintain their hegemony. Their brief turn toward utilizing “soft power” to shore up “legitimacy” in response to popular opposition to the Bush administration with the “selection” of Barack Obama (the smiling brown face of imperialist domination), was only a short-term tactical innovation of that strategy.
Scholars, pundits and commentators from across the political spectrum in the U.S. have already started to speculate on the legacy of Obama’s presidency. And even though his record of “accomplishments” is thin, very few will identify the most significant but insidious legacy of his presidency – concealing the reality of racialized violence in the service of Western global white supremacy.
Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence” (Counterpunch Books, 2014). He can be reached at info.abaraka@gmail.com andwww.AjamuBaraka.com
Letter to the White Man
Marvin X
Dear Mr. White Man:
I write to you in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. I pray for you at this hour. I pray that you will remove yourself from all Muslim lands at the earliest possible date. You have known for centuries the day would arrive when your beheading would be in order for all your sins against the righteous people of the planet earth. Yes, you have known many of the righteous would go down as well, especially those associated with you in any form or fashion.
Surely you know from the story of Job or Ayub, that Allah will use the devil to do his work, i.e., he will fight fire with fire. We know you are the fire man of the planet; no one has more fire power than you, more guns, bombs, bullets, nuclear weapons, poison gas, germ warfare, chemical warfare. Yes, you are the king. Yet, the time arrives for a changing of the guard. That hour has arrived that the prophets told us about; the hour of the final battle between God and the devil. You have revealed yourself as the devil simply because you love doing evil, i.e., robbing, cheating, raping, dominating the planet with your filthy ways.
Talk of beheading? Wasn't it your brother King Leopold who practiced the art of beheading and chopping arms and hands during his rape of the Congo? You chopped hands of Africans in the American slave system when you learned they could read and write, since you wanted them kept in triple darkness, deaf dumb and blind for eternity, if you had your way. You lynched them, men and women, you deemed too uppity and recalcitrant; often you burned them at the stake for just looking at you and your woman.
And so what goes around comes around. There are few good guys in this tragic drama full of classic hubris and other human flaws made so famous in the plays of Shakespeare, greed, pride, niggardliness, hatred, and other deadly sins. More than anything, it is lust for power that is the downfall of many men, women, nations, empires.
If the Muslims have been fighting for centuries, better that you remove yourself from the battle, although we know your domination is entwined with the reactionary regimes in the area that are the primary cause of present events. Your sycophants will prove insincere as you are, as hypocritical as you are, especially since they emulate your behavior. They mastered your iniquities and now a force of pure evil has arisen to adjudicate matters. They ask one question: what side are you on--the wrong answer is cause for heads to fall. This is the type of justice you have inspired after centuries of injustice to the poor, the ignorant and diseased, the disenfranchised and economically deprived.
You have revealed yourself as an insincere, dishonest broker of peace and justice. We can see your attitude and behavior with respect to nationhood rights for Palestinians: a clear example of your insincerity and duplicity. You persist to clamor for peace in occupied Palestine, yet we know without justice there shall never be peace while the Zionists keep their boots and guns on the necks of Palestinians. Your Zionist allies have the best army in the world, the best guns, planes, bombs, yet they claim fear of security. The fear is hearing the cry for justice, for there is no true fear of security, especially with the USA and Europe as the ultimate maintainer of the Zionist entity. Demanding Hamas demilitarize is asking the men to deliver their balls to the altar of Zionist aggression. We see what happened in America when the 200,000 Africans gave up their guns after the Civil War. We have languished ever since in the caldron of Americana.
The real tragedy is the common people caught in this final dance between God and the devil. It would be nice if you were on the moral high ground as Christian Crusaders, although you seem to expect another Hundred Years War in the Holy Lands. Didn't the Kurd Saladin end your Crusades in 1187 when he drove you from Jerusalem? It took a century more for the last remaining Crusaders to depart Syria for Europe.
Now here you are again, sick with it, that same Crusading spirit resurrected for another doom in the land of Islam. Whether the righteous Muslims must suffer in the present quagmire is not the question, whether they are innocent is not to be considered, for the devils must meet on the battlefield for that last round, unless of course, lessons are learned, but we doubt this is possible because this educational objective involves decolonization, including the deconstruction of white supremacy ideology. Some call it white lunacy and so it is.
Often lunacy is a virus that spreads to the sane and they become infected until the insanity is full blown madness on their part. And of course, such madness can be a severe pathological phenomena that is reported as pure evil. Yet this evil is ready to battle what they perceive as a greater evil, the decadent regimes, the people who have strayed from the straight path. You say who gave them authority in such moral matters, especially while they themselves are guilty of plunder, rape, robbery, the poison of sectarianism and dogmatism of the most virulent variety. Unfortunately, they took authority and in many cases you are backing them--you love playing both sides of the fence, donning the persona of duplicity so pervasive in Middle Eastern political chicanery.
Sadly, there are few right in this matter and perhaps it will be better if one combatant should extricate himself from the battlefield. But, alas, it appears, Mr. White Man, you have every intention to continue involving yourself in a matter of great complexity, much of tribal origin, theological concern, beyond the pure economics of the matter, which is no doubt your primary interest. There are mythological concerns, the Caliphate, rise of the Persians who desire to rule from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Mediterranean.
For sure, there is no future for the State of Israel in the area. Its days are numbered along with those of the reactionary, autocratic political and religious orders, with whom Israel is in bed with as we write. Yes, there are many Odd Fellows in this bed of iniquity.
Go home, Whitey, please, for the peace of the world. Let the Arabs kill each other until they are not only ready for peace but ready for justice, especially among themselves--for sure they have regressed to Ya'um Jahiliyah or the days of ignorance that preceded the birth of Islam. You cannot help them because you have yet given justice to the North American Africans who are descendants of those who suffered the American Slave System.
Marvin X is a free thinker. See his Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality; also, How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, Black Bird Press, Oakland. He can be reached at jmarvinx@yahoo.com.
We congratulate the Peralta Community College District, Merritt College in particular, as the birth place of the Bay Area Black Cultural Revolution, including the Black Panther Party, Black Arts and Black Studies Movements. Merritt gave birth to two Black Panther groups: The Black Panther Party of Self Defense (Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, et al.) and the Black Panther Party of Northern California (Ken Freeman, Ernie Allen, Oba T'Shaka, et al). Through the Afro American Association meetings at Merritt ,headed by Donald Warden, aka Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour, students gained knowledge of African consciousness. According to AAA member Ed Howard, Kwanza originated in Oakland. Maulana Ron Karenga was the Los Angeles representative of the AAA. As per the Black Arts Movement, Merritt students were key, e.g., Sarah Webster Fabio, Ellendar Barnes, Ernie Allen, Richard Thorne, Maurice Dawson, Kenny and Carol Freeman, Ann Williams, Isaac Moore, Adam David Miller and Marvin X. Merritt had the first Black Studies program in the nation, although San Francisco State had the first on a major college campus. Alas, many of the San Francisco State University students involved in the BSU and Student Third World Strike at SFSU were Peralta College District transfers. --Marvin X, A.A., Sociology, Merritt College, 1964
