This statement is carried as an act of solidarity with those struggling against Zionism and imperialism in Israel/Palestine.
Transcribed by Daniel Rubinstein.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for REDS – Die Roten.
The criminal terrorist attack against the centers of economic and military power in the United States does not help the anti-imperialist fighters but, on the contrary, it helps the imperialist rulers to present the oppression of the “Third World” masses by imperialism as a fight of economic progress and intellectual enlightenment against the forces of backwardness and ignorance. The insanity of mass terrorism against civilian population is a perverse reflection of the insanity of decadent capitalism itself, a society in which, according to the United Nations, world unemployment amounts to 120 million, more than 100 million children live in the streets, capitalist restoration has halved the economy of the Eastern European countries in a decade, and a third of humanity, heavily concentrated in the semi-colonial countries, suffers from hunger.
We do not know at the moment who carried out this criminal act of terror, which killed and maimed thousands of American workers, but it was clearly neither a Palestinian organization nor the Iraqi government, who are too poor and too closely watched to carry out an attack on this scale. At present the principal suspect is Osma Bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire who acts from Afghanistan. Bourgeois media, however, prefer to forget the fact that Bin Laden is a creature of the CIA, which trained and funded the fundamentalist guerrillas in Afghanistan to wage war against the Soviet Union. The eventual clash of the bloody pupil with his teachers is reminiscent of similar events in the past, such the US support for Idi Amin in Uganda and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Israel’s support for Hamas against the PLO.
The claim that such a large-scale operation, demanding much training and logistics, was not known beforehand to the CIA, the world’s expert in “anti-terrorism” and “counter-insurgency,” raises many suspicions. Above all, it reminds of the American intelligence’s incapacity to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which put an end to the “isolationism” of American public opinion and enabled president Roosevelt to intervene openly in the Second World Imperialist War. Though the scale of the present attack was most probably unexpected, there is no doubt that the terrorist act itself leaves the hands of the Bush administration, which is openly financed by the oil monopolies, free to intervene militarily in the greatest oil reservoir of the world: the Middle East.
The organ of the Israeli bourgeoisie, Ha’aretz, remarks that the attack gives the Zionist state a much larger margin of maneuver to carry out its criminal war plans against the Palestinians, and adds: “Yesterday began what amounts to a Third World War against terror.” There is no doubt that Israel will use the Palestinian demonstrations in support of the attacks in order to justify its policies of assassination and ethnic cleansing. The mistaken response of the Palestinian masses, like the growth of terrorist leanings in their ranks, is a product of their desperation at the dead-end reached by the Intifada due to the lack of a revolutionary leadership. Instead of the present infatuation of the Arafat regime with the United Nations and European imperialism, such a leadership would turn to the working masses in the Middle East, the United States and Israel, and point out the capitalist class as the common enemy of the workers everywhere in the world.
Now is the time to warn the international working class against the danger of a new war in the Middle East, which will be conducted in the interest of imperialism and its client Zionist state. We will do everything in our power to prevent the outbreak of such a war, but if nevertheless it does break out, our duty is clear: the interests of the masses demand the defeat of imperialism and Zionism.
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Last updated on 18.9.2001