FIST hosts youth forum in Los Angeles

WW PHOTO: GLORIA VERDIEU
From left, Sister Haero, Mary Tamburro and Sarah Al Nnan.

By Jesse Fantoni and Mary Tamburro
Los Angeles

Twenty-five people gathered at a youth forum hosted by San Diego FIST (Fight Imperialism Stand Together) in the office of the International Action Center in Los Angeles on Aug. 26, a year after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the U.S. and showed the U.S. government’s racist neglect of the people of the area, to talk about fighting U. S. imperialism’s wars at home and abroad.

Sarah Al Nnan, a student at UCLA who is a member of the Muslim Student Association, the Lebanese Social Club, and the United Arab Society, gave her personal account of visiting her family in Lebanon when the Israeli Air Force began bombing last month. She talked of the fear that kept her awake at night, and that eventually led her to cross the border into Syria to come back to the U.S., which was by no means an easy accomplishment. She told us that after the first day of bombings and devastation, Lebanon was set back 15 years in terms of destruction of infrastructure. introduction to FIST and talked about how to get military recruiters away from the youth and out of our schools. The FIST organizer explained how to use “opt-out” forms to exclude a youth’s personal information from being handed over to the military for recruiting purposes and encouraged those attending to make copies of the forms FIST handed out and give them out to family and friends.

“The United States government is the terrorist and the military rank-and-file are forced to become sheep that follow orders blindly. Do not let our youth become sheep,” was her encouragement to listeners to get involved in the anti-recruitment struggle. And as a special treat, the meeting ended with revolutionary chairperson Sister Haero offering a beautiful spoken word performance.

One piece entitled “Black August” talked of political prisoner George Jackson and his brother Jonathon Jackson, who attempted to free George in August 1970 by taking a judge hostage, and of the struggle of African Americans throughout history in the month of August.

Marines forced to call up reserves for Iraq

By Larry Hales

The Marine Corps announced Aug. 22 that it would begin calling up troops from the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) on an involuntary basis. The Marine Corps says the IRR has a pool of 34,000 soldiers, but President George W. Bush’s order limits the call-ups to 2,500 at a time.

This announcement comes a little over a month after Nouri al-Maliki, prime minister of the puppet government in Iraq, addressed the U.S. Congress asking for more money and more troops. At that time, the number of U.S. occupying troops in Iraq was at 127,000. Currently, the number stands at 138,000.

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Many of the people being called back into active duty have already been to Iraq two or three times. The Army says it has called up 5,000 people from the ready reserve and has issued “stop loss” orders for several thousand more. Since the second half of last year, an average of 13,178 soldiers have been in Iraq for an extended amount of time via stop loss.

Since the appearance by al-Maliki, at a time when more and more people are growing tired of this capitalist adventure, the Army has issued a stop loss order for a Stryker Brigade out of Alaska and has called up forward troops from nearby Kuwait. The Army now has 2,200 IRR soldiers in Iraq; over 1,800 are there involuntarily.

According to the Aug. 23 Los Angeles Times, “When its involuntary call-ups began in 2004, the Army encountered problems when some mobilized ready reserve members failed to appear and others were disqualified from service for medical reasons.”

This latest maneuver by the Marines, an outfit that prides itself as an all-volunteer, highly trained force that is “the first to fight,” is a signal that the latest “pacification” of Iraq is failing.

The call up of more soldiers will not be able to stop the resistance. The numerous operations in Baghdad are failing, as they are across the country, and now the puppet Iraqi regime’s army and the U.S. military are both, once again, embroiled in a fight with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

The Mahdi Army fought U.S. forces to a standstill twice in 2004. Al-Sadr’s party is now a part of the Iraqi puppet government, but the U.S. occupiers still consider him to be an opponent.

The resistance in Iraq has been resilient. Each time someone from either of the capitalist parties in the U.S. makes a statement about the successes of the imperialist war in Iraq, the resistance grows stronger and throws it back in their faces. This has happened even though the Iraqi resistance itself is not united throughout the country.

Contrary to what is being said, the situation in Iraq is becoming more tenuous for the occupiers, and will increasingly become more so. The world has seen how the resistance fighters in Lebanon repelled the Zionist invaders. The Arab world is emboldened and this will show in Iraq.

The only way to keep more young men and women, whether Iraqis or the soldiers sent to fight them, from being destroyed because of the greed of a few is for the people in the U.S. to step up their demands for an immediate end to the war.