Transcribed text from a recent discussion with Black Liberation Army (BLA) and Black Panther Party member Dhoruba bin-Wahad. In this short segment he discusses the BLA and parallels with the Hamas movement.
The people that came into the BLA, some of them, many of them were never in the Black Panther Party. Because everybody assumed that everybody that was in the BLA came from the Black Panther Party.
That’s a misassumption. So I started talking about, before we went underground we were in the community. We were in the pool halls, we were in the barber shops, we were selling papers by the subway, we were at Miss so and so’s crib in the backyard. You understand, at the barbecues and we were among, and we were a part of, the people.
You see, so when we go underground the people that know us, you understand, you know, “I’m going to see my aunt for the weekend. Here’s the key (To a safe house),” she says. “You know we going to be back six oclock Monday now.” She says, “okay, baby cool.” So now I got a safe house for the weekend. She knows what’s going on. “They looking for you. You know they looking for you, boy. But don’t worry, don’t worry them crackers can’t find shit.”
So if we understand that Hamas, just like the BLA, is an expression of the people’s relationship to power and the status quo. It’s just that we took a position and the community knows that whenever the status quo does something bad to our community we will retaliate in kind. And black folks appreciated that!
Yeah, if you stick a mic in their face from CBS and say, “two cops was just killed just yesterday by these black extremists and these radical revolutionaries. What do you think about them?” They might say well, “that’s a shame you know. I don’t think police should be killed.”
What else they going to say. “Yeah they should have killed that motherfucker.” You understand what I’m saying. But if you took a survey of the people there, people would say “Yeah them cops always coming in here beating up on people. Good somebody got their ass! Especially that white one that’s always bullying people. It’s good they killed his ass.”
And they might not say that on CBS. But that’s what they feel. It’s just like the Palestinians when Hamas went across that border and defeated all of that surveillance and snatched them ‘Israelis’ they were cheering! They were dancing on the tanks with their cell phones!
They couldn’t cheer when they were occupied and ‘Israeli’ soldiers standing at the checkpoint. They had to humble themselves. They had to let these people push them around. But yeah our boys got them! Our boys got them! Yeah when they see when they see the rockets coming over from Iran and dropping from from Hezbollah, dropping on them ‘Israelis’ they start talking about, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
People identify with resistance. You see. And who are the ones in Lebanon talking about Hezbollah in a negative way; it’s the Christians talking about Hezbollah is endangering Lebanon. Like Lebanon is safe with “Israel” on your border. And if it wasn’t for Hezbollah, Lebanon would be cool? American imperialism wouldn’t have any problem and ya’ll would be good?
So justifying the BLA only means understanding psychologically what Frantz Fanon talked about the native; when the native kills a colonist he’s reinventing himself. He’s asserting his humanity. Now the act may seem inhumane, but that’s the psychosis of it. Look at how they changed the struggle around when the FLN started blowing up cafes in Paris. How could they just blow up innocent people sitting in the cafe getting coffee? The same way you could bomb a village in the mountains in Algeria and don’t give a fuck. The same way you could kill goat herders.
When you are suffering what you inflict on others, now you understand, that what goes around comes around. That your humanity is just as valuable to you as it is to them. And the fact that they will come here and kill you tells you that they are far more braver and straightforward than you are. Because they come in here just to make sure that you understand, we ain’t getting mad, we going to get even.
That was the BLA’s mantra: blood to the horses brow and woe to those who cannot swim. That’s what we said every time we went out and did something. Blood to the horse’s brow bro, woe to those who cannot swim. Bang! Bang! Then we gone. That’s it.
Didn’t make make any difference if you were a black cop, a white cop, if you was a female cop. If you took the life of a black boy in our community and shot him down like a dog you were going to die.
Of course they are going to portray us as just these criminals. Every slave revolt, the one’s who revolted were criminals. They were inhumane. Even your homeboy Finkelstein said he went back and looked at Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and how the abolitionist dealt with that. Because he was in a conundrum about how to respond to Hamas, and how to respond to these things. And he realized out of all of these abolitionists not one of them condemned Nat Turner. They all said, “we told you so.” “We told you this was going to happen.”
And so, what I’m trying to point out is, we used to have an axiom, that repression breeds resistance. All of this murder and killing you see these young kids, that are watching their whole families get murdered in their sleep. Them babies that are starving and watching their mama cry and watching their daddy and their siblings die. If you think that that is not the next generation of Hamas, you’re a goddamn fool.
And they’re going to be far more ruthless than the ones that you got now, so you better negotiate with these motherfuckers you got now, cause when that baby grows up….
This is why the Egyptians are like, “I ain’t letting these motherfuckers in here. You know what I’m going to have on my hands in 10 years with a population that experienced this and they live in the desert and Gaza is suffering, and we are the ones that’s keeping them there suffering.” Whoa!
Transcribed by Abolition Media
From Black Power Media/I Mix What I Like