George Ibrahim Abdallah: sometimes a flower, sometimes a thorn
What is the value of a freedom disarmed, stripped of the intransigence of the revolutionary flame? This is the question that wanders in the mind of every rebellious heart. A freedom dead, degenerate and surrendered to the selfish ends of human weakness. And if you defend with passion and intensity every moment of life, you must first of all fight the death of values. The death of morality. Ideas are not killed, they are conceived in revolutionary bodies that even when buried in concrete,they root like seeds and climb up to present the most beautiful flower: the flower of social liberation.
It was in the mid-1960s that guerrilla resistance against imperialist movements evolved in both Vietnam and Palestine. And while hundreds of internationalists are enlisting in the guerrilla nuclei of the Palestinian resistance, a new wave of armed struggle is breaking out in European metropolises. Hundreds of armed cells build a fighting revolutionary front that has taken the war to the heart of the imperialist centers. The consistency and massiveness of the militant anti-war movement is accompanied by various armed propaganda actions: kidnappings and executions of soldiers, diplomats and agents of foreign secret services, bombing and arson attacks on camps, NATO bases, military and administrative facilities, bullets in the imperialist’s embassies weave the spectrum of propaganda through action. The weapons of the anti-colonialist movements now sound in the heart of the beast.
For revolutionaries there are two destinations: prison or death. The armed intransigence left behind dozens of comrades, whose blood filled the inkwell of history. Comrades in arms lost their lives in clashes with the cops, such as the first dead RAF fighter Petra Schelm, others in counter-terrorist operations such as Mara Cagol of the Red Brigades, others perished in deadly hunger strikes such as the IRA’s Bobby Sands, others murdered in the sensory isolation cells like the dead RAF insurgents at Stammheim. Comrades of the armed struggle died during actions of revolutionary violence such as Giorgos Tsikouris and Elena Angeloni, while hundreds of witnesses of the revolutionary struggle consigned themselves to the anonymity of history. Those who did not face death, filled the dungeons of tyranny. They were tortured, abused, buried in concrete for decades. Some were defeated. Some betrayed the struggle, submitted, snitched on comrades and infrastructures, capitulated and were condemned by history itself for some breaths of freedom that carry suffocation itself. The true revolutionaries stood firm to the end unrepentantly supporting the struggle.
“Who are the terrorists? They are the ones who kill a young man in the West Bank for resisting the annexation of his country by Israel, they are the ones who bomb the civilian populations of South Lebanon, they are the ones who kill blindly and dare to invoke a so-called “cease” fire”. We strike those who organize the genocide of the Palestinian people. We secure the lives of the innocent, even at the risk of our own safety.(…) It is our right to defend ourselves. It is also our right to strike imperialism everywhere where it takes place and especially where it benefits from the political support of the existing government”.
FARL
Comrade George Ibrahim Abdallah is also one of the waves of this stormy sea. He was born in Lebanon where he politically matured . He enlisted in the ranks of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, contributing from a young age to the militant struggle against imperialism and Zionism. In 1980, the occupation of Southern Lebanon by Israel and allied Western mercenaries led George I. Abdallah and other militants to build the organization Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions – FARL, taking armed resistance to the heart of imperialism.
Even though his initial arrest in 1984 was regarded possession of forged documents, in 1986 he was brought before a special court and was accused of the executions of the military attaché of the American Embassy in Paris Charles R. Ray and the Israeli Mossad secret agent Yacov Barismantov. Actions carried out by the FARL in retaliation for the involvement of France and the US in Operation “Peace in Galilee” by the Israeli army in 1982, to crush the resistance of the Palestine Liberation Organization – PLO. Since then (and since 1999 he has been entitled to a suspended sentence) he has been imprisoned in the French dungeons for 38 years. Unyielding, unrepentant, tireless, “a relentless and determined fighter” as described by the Paris appeals court’s rejection in 2009. Facing domestic and international terrorism, as Israel and the US constantly push for his universal captivity with the latter even being present as a civil suit in the special court, the comrade is a symbol of the irrevocable struggle for the international revolution.
In the face of our comrade George I. Abdallah we see the indomitable will that the revolutionary law draws. We see faith and commitment to the necessity of radical resistance outside the disarmed paths of reformism and capitulation. We see the revolutionary duty of an unscathed fighter to defend the historical responsibility of the armed path at all costs, away from the discounts and conventions of the superego. And then we see our own duty to the history of struggle not to lay down arms, not to retreat, not to forget the revolutionary war and its prisoners.
For international anti-terrorist forces, unrepentant captured rebels are a trophy of repression. George I. Abdallah, the unrepentant anarchist rebel Claudio Lavazza, the imprisoned members of November 17 and the Revolutionary Struggle, the Turkish revolutionaries, but also the unrepentant Red Brigade prisoners, comrade Jean-Marc Rouillan of Action Directe, who, although released, are permanently in regimes of surveillance and repression, will be forever in the line of fire of fascism and imperialism as their implacable enemies. For us, their paths then and now are the cause and occasion for the battles that follow. Comrade George I. Abdallah is an integral part of an era full of fire and history and his release is an open case for each and every one of us.
Comrade George,
Maybe you have, also, forgotten of the ugliness of this world. In places far away from our cells, the shining is lost. Green is gradually fading from the mountains and forests. Rivers lose their momentum, they dry up. The sky is filled with more and more trash that spread death. The birds are muted, with the silence that covers modern metropolises. Our world has been become a vast graveyard. And the grey of our cements pours more and more into the prisonlike cities. You know, comrade, maybe I am, also, too small to stand beside you after all. And yet, hand on the heart, the day will come for us all when we will draw again with colours.
Victory to the arms of the Palestinian struggle
Power to the Palestinian prisoners who are on hunger strike against the administrative detention regime that preemptively imprisons activists without charge
No repentance while facing the necessity to change this world
Thanos Chatziangelou, imprisoned member of the Organisation Anarchist Action
D’ wing, Korydallos’ prison
19/10/2022