Are We Still Out-Organized?

By E.O. Dean (Guest Writer)

What do we do now? Are we still out-organized? What can we learn from the past? What is our collective future? 

Gordon Parks, Via 120lomo. 

We are not out-organized. And they are desperate, deprived, and doing the most diabolically evil. 

We are experiencing and bearing witness to kidnapping, human trafficking, incarceration, detainment, “black sites”, concentration camps, and enforced statelessness. The most disturbing part of this nation’s history, coupled with the everyday realities of the US-Israel genocide of Gaza, is reverberating domestically throughout the United States. The “shame”, secrecy, and gaslighting of the US’s contemporary foreign policy and immigration policy of years ago no longer exist. From the United States to occupied Palestine, there are no secrets: 

Genocide is clear. 

The intentions of forced displacement are clear. State-sponsored and perpetuated terrorism is clear. 

Militarized white supremacist ethno-nationalism is very clear. 

The Trump 2.0 presidency and the prolonged genocide led by the Biden-Harris administration have exposed this raggedy country for what it has always been. Although Trump officials were deceptive, the US administration's most recent talks with Hamas for a hostage-exchange deal and ceasefire negotiations, along with a ceasefire deal with Yemen, both bypassing Israel, demonstrate that the United States has always held the levers that started this genocide and, most importantly, the levers to stop it 19 months later. 

The cartoonishly evil language, speeches, smirks, and threats over social media take place under the very real backdrop of 2,000-pound bombs, Israel-enforced mass starvation, murdered and mutilated children, and journalist and medical staff assassinations. And here, in the United States, with the complacency and collaboration of the media, every day someone is disappeared into the already unjust and very illegal sea of mass deportations and arrests for speaking up against genocide and Palestinian existence. 

Beyond establishment Democrat 50501 protests actively not including Gaza and platforming “Hands Off NATO”, the Democratic National Committee is still gaslighting us. And along with Cory Booker's performative 25-hour speech (not a filibuster) and “sit-in” with AIPAC's favorite Hakeem Jefferies, Bernie Sanders and AOC’s leadership remains ego-driven and moot as they slimily add AIPAC talking points to the watered-down left-ish (you read it…) “fight the oligarchy” campaign. 

After six months, our message from Kamala Harris is, “I told you so.” Former Madam Vice President! WE TOLD YOU SO. Along with anti-genocide voters, the Black Left, in particular, warned Harris to change the course of her billion-dollar campaign and stop pandering to AIPAC and the invisible “white women swing voters”. In addition to the Biden-Harris administration lying about working tirelessly for a ceasefire, Harris told all of us to shut the f*** up. 

Then Obama steps in within the few days of Harris’s comment to say he could never behave like Trump during his presidency. When the Global South has receipts of mass deportations, bombed weddings, coups, and assassinations—but at least the Obama Administration wasn’t total jerks about its destructive and destabilizing US foreign policy and repressive border politics. To be clear, Tom Homan cut his high teeth within the Obama Administration–this is where he took on the title of “Border Czar”. Homan has recently bragged about the endgame of making deportation more automated and efficient, Amazon Prime-like, within his leadership in the Trump Administration.

What is happening? Well, every day, things get worse and a bit more complex.

In addition to early lower court decisions to attempt to uphold some sort of system of legal integrity with rulings in Maryland and New Jersey in favor of due process for Kilmar Abrego and Mahmoud Khalil respectively; the US Supreme Court recently decided to halt use of the controversial 18th century law cited for the mass deportations supporting lower court rulings in Colorado, New York and Texas. With immigration detention and “War on Terrorism” propaganda attached to US Capitalism, money is central. The Trump Administration is expanding domestic immigration detention camps. Besides an estimated  $45 billion to expand ICE, CoreCivic, a private prison company, recently signed a five-year, $246 million contract to reopen a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. 

The US government is using the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 and the McCarran Act of 1952 (a stronger offshoot of the 1940 Smith Act, strengthened by a 1951 Supreme Court decision) to kidnap, human traffic, and detain. The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 was controversial to Thomas Jefferson and Jeffersonian Republicans of the time. After mass arrests and high-profile trials, the early US government quickly planned to phase it out. Many saw the targeting of journalists and printing presses would break the less than 20-year-old nation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted the act in the 9066 executive order in 1942, issued for the internment of Japanese American communities into concentration camps until the end of World War Two in 1945. 

Right now, organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Canary Mission, and Betar International are doxxing students and claiming to be working with ICE and the State Department to hunt people down and make them into political prisoners. 

In an effort to curb support from law firms, the Trump Administration is also going after lawyers and law firms using “anti-DEI” and new Civil Rights executive orders to create cover for any push-back. In terms of higher education, some universities, such as Columbia and the University of Michigan, have welcomed and shown no type of performance or disdain for the human rights violations we are witnessing. 

The FBI and local police in Michigan have worked with the University of Michigan to raid the homes of pro-Palestine activists, seizing electronics and refusing to show warrants. And many universities, even when expressing push back, have shown they are complicit and ill-equipped to truly contend with what we are currently facing. 

The Trump administration is currently attempting to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, stopping legal challenges to detention by US citizens and non-US citizens alike. A reaction to administrative losses in federal courts, this would make the courts ineffective and render moot the little protections and due process that the US Constitution provides.

Mahmoud Khalil is in ICE detention in Louisiana and faces deportation by the State Department due to his “thoughts”. However, this is a wash, rinse, and repeat of pre-9/11 anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant targeting and policies. 

In 1987, lawyers for the LA Eight, a group of pro-Palestinian activists targeted by the Reagan-Bush administration, exposed a government plan contrived to detain and mass deport legal residents from six Middle Eastern North African (MENA) nations. Reminiscent of the Japanese internment of 40 years before, the plan detailed using land in Louisiana for a “modern” concentration camp. Although the US government scheme against MENA communities never took place, the repression did. 

The Holy Land Five case documents repression against pro-Palestinian charities and activists in the 9/11 era. The Holy Land Foundation (HLF) was one of the largest Muslim charities in the United States, directly serving the needs of the most vulnerable Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and beyond. Early smear campaigns by the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, and politicians, such as Chuck Schumer, against HFL gained momentum during the Bush era “War on Terrorism”. Within three months of 9/11, criminal and alleged terrorism charges were placed on leaders within the organization, with some currently serving up to 65-year sentences in federal prison. 

This is not new. The nation-state of Israel serves as the United States’ outpost to control West Asia and North Africa. Bipartisan dehumanization of Palestinians and the targeting of those who support the existence of Palestine have been normalized in US policy and practice for decades. 

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, aka Malcolm X, asserted, “We’re not outnumbered. We’re out-organized.” He was right, given the space and time, and some aspects ring true with celebrity culture and individualistic apathy, a definitive part of Americanization. However, we do have to give space to our current realities and what has greatly evolved from the movement work of the 1960s. 

These fascist powers we are working against have no shame, are viral, technologically advanced, exposed, carefree, and have unimaginable wealth. They are a deprived entity consolidating power by reintroducing some of the scariest times in modern US/global history and military aggression of 150 years (or more) into a tiny segment of time. They do this with new technologically advanced weaponry, surveillance, and re-interpreted laws to disappear human beings deemed disposable in milliseconds.

Malcolm X waiting at Martin Luther King Conference via getarchive.net

I am not going to outright contest the apathy and the work that organizers will have to do, which includes co-opting what has been co-opted. Let’s be hands-on with “Hands Off” and 50501. With discernment and care for vulnerable community members already committed to this fight for the long run, many organizers have begun to guerrilla organize within these spaces. We need to take advantage of the fact that establishment Democrats and Liberals do NOT have a plan. The establishment Dems are going to try to ChatGPT ours and trick the masses with rhetoric of “joy,” “hope,” “change,” and even use phrases like “oligarchy” and “fascism is coming” or “fascism has arrived.”  Fascism has been here. Fascism never went away.

El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) and the cadre of revolutionaries born out of the same consciousness and realities were truly outliers following in the footsteps of Ida B. Wells, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, CLR James, Aimé Césaire, and others of the Black Antifascist Tradition. And I know they would be proud of the growth we have made in terms of Black, brown, and Indigenous solidarities and intercommunalism from the deep to superficial—this matters. As they take milliseconds to confuse us, threaten us, kidnap us, kill us, and debilitate us, we take that same time to organize across borders, as well as space and time. The deranged powers-that-be are on the defensive, and they are losing. They plan to overwhelm the world with the most unimaginable pain and destruction. In contrast, we must match energy and stay consistent for the long haul.

El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) visited Gaza in 1964 and published “Zionist Logic” in September of that year. In a 1965 speech in Detroit, he stated unequivocally that "We need a free Palestine." An enigmatic truth teller, like journalist Hossan Shabat and scholar activist Refaat Al-Areer, El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was assassinated in Harlem, New York on February 21, 1965, a week after his house was firebombed and his speeches in Detroit, Michigan. His assassination has been linked to state entities, such as the FBI, CIA, and NYPD.

In his Detroit speeches, he took to task the US government, addressing the US’s assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Gaza, the US and France's war on Vietnam, and violent repression in the US south. El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) contended before his death: “And you know how they’ve been consciously behaving in the Congo and how they consciously behave in Vietnam and how they consciously behave right now in Alabama and Mississippi. So you and I got to get conscious and start behaving in a way that we can offset this thing, before it’s too late ... They'll do it to them today, and do it to you tomorrow, because you and I and they are all the same.” 

As the Trump administration brags about bombing Yemenis praying during Ramadan, turning Gaza into a tourist trap “Rivera”, threatening Burkina Faso's sovereignty, or doubling down on repression of political dissent for people’s “thoughts”—we must keep organizing differently, intentionally, consistently, and for the long haul. We must claim each other’s interconnected fights from the local to the international. 

We also should take note of the steadfastness of Mahmoud Khalil, who, unknowing of his future, reminds us of the thousands of diverse people with him in the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, and across the state of Louisiana. He stands in solidarity with the detained, whose cases lay stagnant, human rights violated, teetering on statelessness, and remaining in ICE custody— in the U.S. and abroad— indefinitely.

So, are we out-organized? No, we are out-eviled. 

Maybe the deep-rooted question is: How do we survive this level of state-sponsored terrorism by the US government and beyond, in which our mere “thoughts” (perceived or expressed) render us disposable? 

With love for Hossan Shabat, Shireen Abu Akleh, and Refaat Al-Areer. 

And respect and condolences to grieving parents, from Rodney Hinton of Cincinnati to Alaa Ayad of Gaza, and far too many others.

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