Acta Populi

2025-10-26 18:14:44

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abolitionmedia

2026-01-15 06:14:36

Reem Al-Riyashi – Daughter of Al-Zaytoun

On 14 January 2004, Reem Saleh Al-Riyashi, 22 years old, became the first female martyr of the Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades.

Reem grew up in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, one of ten children, six boys and four girls, the eighth in the family. She excelled in her studies, achieving 96% in high school, and chose to study engineering, though she postponed her academic projects to get married and raise her children.

Her path to the resistance began in high school, influenced by resistant thought. She made her intention for martyrdom known to leaders, including the martyred Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who advised her to focus on raising the next generation of youth to love the cause and embrace sacrifice.

When men’s movements were heavily restricted during the Second Intifada, Reem was called upon to act.

The Operation

At 9:37 a.m., 14 January 2004, Reem carried out her martyrdom operation at Beit Hanoun crossing “Erez”. She had inspected the site days earlier, studying the mechanisms carefully to know how to move through it.

Reem detonated the explosive belt, killing four zionist soldiers and injuring ten, four critically. Zionist forces quickly surrounded the area. Reports confirmed indescribable damage. A zionist commander stated:

The perpetrator of the “Erez” operation deceived the soldiers during the security checks. She exploited their preoccupation and suddenly advanced toward them before detonating herself.

A Historic First

Reem was the seventh Palestinian female resistance martyr, the first within Al-Qassam Brigades, and the first from Gaza. She was 22 years old, a mother of two.

This operation carried deep messages: the first female martyrdom mission prepared by Al-Qassam Brigades after previously rejecting the option. It demonstrated the determination of Palestinian women to rise for the cause, even as mothers and students.

From Reem’s Will

“I turn to you without men, because I no longer see men among us, only remnants of them in Palestine and Iraq. You are the remaining hope for this Ummah after it has been emptied of men. You are responsible for leading this nation toward victory, dignity, and honor after men resembling men dragged it into humiliation and disgrace that spread from its east to its west.”

Reem Saleh Al-Riyashi – daughter, mother, student, hero, martyr.
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abolitionmedia

2026-01-15 06:12:33

Breaking the Silence Revisited: Gaza, Venezuela, and the Enduring Relevance of Dr. King’s Critique of Empire

The annual ritual of sanitizing Martin Luther King Jr. serves to obscure his radical anti-war politics, which are urgently needed to challenge U.S. imperialism.

Every year in the U.S., what has emerged as a cynical ritual around the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King takes place, where the state uplifts an image of Dr. King that is compatible with the fiction of what the U.S. society sees itself as and that depoliticizes King by ignoring his progressive Anti-war and anti-imperialist politics. But with the medieval barbarism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza fully supported by the U.S., rogue state gangsterism by the U.S. in Venezuela, and consolidating fascist terror domestically, the critique of the U.S. by someone with the moral clarity of King combined with a material analysis of the interests driving U.S. policy brings a new clarity to the normalizing horrors being carried out by the U.S. state.

The U.S. state capture of Dr. King was a part of the process of deradicalizing African Americans, an objective of the counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary program of the U.S. settler state. That objective was to not only to neuter the radicalism of Dr. King but also to diminish the radicalism and internationalism of the Black Liberation Movement and transform the consciousness of the colonized Black population from a radical, oppositional force into a domesticated, deradicalized pro-“American” population. It would be a population that is, more “American” than African, with a psychological and emotional investment in the fiction of “America.”

But the reality of Dr. King and the movement that he personified, along with the parallel radical Black Liberation, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, was much more complicated.

The complexity of those two movements and their intersectional politics were captured in the opposition to the Vietnam War that Dr. King publicly articulated in 1967.

But that Dr. King is much too dangerous to be a focus. This is why the official celebrations, including a celebration of his birthday, are not on his actual birthday but on the Monday after, giving the population some time off to engage in mindless consumerism with “King Day” sales

The real Dr. King, and also the real movements that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, were less accommodating to state manipulation and distortion. King was always a fierce critic of the contradictions of U.S. life and politics. But by 1967, he felt morally charged to expand his political critique beyond domestic civil rights to address the structural violence of U.S. imperialism.

In his April 4, 1967, address at Riverside Church, King argued that the Vietnam War was not an anomaly, but a symptom of a broader system rooted in militarism, racism, and economic exploitation — what he called “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” (King, 1967). This was important because it highlighted the theoretical and practical interconnection of these elements. It located U.S. power within a global racial-capitalist order. As he noted: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death” (King, 1967). King also emphasized the humanity of those targeted by U.S. violence: “They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops… so they must see Americans as strange liberators” (King, 1967).

Gaza and Venezuela: Racialized Violence, Settler-Colonial Power and Empire

The assault on Gaza exemplifies the racialized logic of imperial violence. Palestinian life is rendered disposable within dominant Western discourse, enabling extraordinary levels of civilian death to be framed as unfortunate but necessary.

King’s words regarding Vietnam apply with striking historical precision: “We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village” (King, 1967). Settler colonial practice has demonstrated that such violence is not episodic but structural.

Venezuela demonstrates a different modality of imperial coercion. The U.S. used unilateral economic sanctions on the country, economic warfare targeting civilian populations but justified as “nonviolent.” But the U.S. recently escalated with military violence, kidnapping the President of the Bolivarian Revolution

King condemned U.S. imperialism while arguing that it would bring imperial blowback: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home” (King, 1967), underscoring that militarism deforms social relations everywhere. This insight into the interconnectedness of imperial and domestic power relations is almost completely absent among the contemporary left, let alone the general population. This is another product of the success of the five-decade counterrevolution – the construction of a weak, soft class collaboration social democratic left, a left that adopted analytical frameworks that prioritize critiques of “authoritarianism,” corruption, or abstract human rights violations in isolation from imperial power. This theoretical and political shift, often grounded in liberal cosmopolitanism or post–Cold War humanitarianism, treats states like Venezuela (or resistance movements) like those in Palestine as morally equivalent to imperial powers.

This produces a false symmetry that erases asymmetries of power. Such frameworks “collapse imperial relations into a flat moral universe,” rendering the United States and its targets as equally culpable, and thereby legitimizing intervention, sanctions, or regime change in the name of protecting “democracy” or “human rights.”

In this sense, sections of the left become ideologically aligned with imperial projects even when subjectively opposed to war. King anticipated this danger when he warned that the greatest obstacle to justice is not overt reactionaries but those who prefer “order” to justice and “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Ethics, Silence, and Complicity

King’s warning that “a time comes when silence is betrayal” (King, 1967) applies not only to governments but also to intellectuals and movements. Silence about imperialism — or its theoretical minimization — becomes a form of complicity.

Knowledge and consciousness are terrains of struggle. To depoliticize empire is to normalize it. Dr. King concluded his Vietnam speech by identifying with the victims of empire: “I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam… the barefoot peasants of our world” (King, 1967). This identification was not symbolic but political. It grounded King’s ethics in solidarity with the colonized, the exploited, and the excluded.

Contemporary radicals face a similar task. People(s)-Centered Human Rights offers a framework that reclaims human rights from state-centric, liberal, and imperial interpretations and recenters them on collective dignity, sovereignty, material survival, and self-determination. It allows movements to defend life without legitimizing empire, to oppose repression without endorsing intervention, and to build unity across the Global South and within oppressed communities in the North.

Such a framework restores the connection King insisted upon between morality and power, and between justice and structure. In a world where empire increasingly disguises itself as humanitarianism and war as protection, People(s)-Centered Human Rights provides a language for resistance that is ethical, political, and internationalist.

King warned of the “fierce urgency of now.” That urgency remains: to confront Gaza, to defend Venezuela, and to resist the normalization of imperial violence requires not only protest but theory, not only outrage but analytical clarity. Breaking the silence today means refusing both the weapons of empire and the concepts that excuse them — and standing, as King did, with the barefoot peasants of the world.

References

Baraka, A. (2017). The problem with humanitarian imperialism. Black Agenda Report.

Baraka, A. (2018). Racism, imperialism, and the politics of silence. Black Agenda Report.

Baraka, A. (2021). Sanctions are war: Venezuela and the normalization of economic warfare. Black Agenda Report.

Baraka, A. (2023). Gaza, Zionism, and the crisis of Western political morality. Black Agenda Report.

Baraka, A., & Kovalik, D. (2019). Human rights as a weapon of empire. CounterPunch.

King, M. L., Jr. (1967). Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Riverside Church, New York.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon.

Weisbrot, M., Sachs, J., & Montecino, J. (2020). Economic sanctions as collective punishment: The case of Venezuela. Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).

source: Black Agenda Report

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abolitionmedia

2026-01-15 06:09:10

Selective Sisterhood: How Imperial Feminism Chooses Which Women Deserve a Voice

One of the most striking hypocrisies of contemporary Western feminism is not its concern for women’s rights, but its ruthless selectivity. In today’s media ecosystem, women do not appear as human beings with complex lives and contexts; they appear as symbols, activated or erased depending on political utility.

This is not feminism. It is narrative warfare.

Consider the arrest of Umm al-Baraa, Hayam Ayyash, the widow of the martyred Palestinian commander Yahya Ayyash.

She was detained not for an act of violence, but for remembering her husband. Where? On Facebook!

Her dignity, endurance, and refusal to disappear quietly should have resonated with any movement claiming to defend women against oppression.

Yet her story was met with near-total silence in feminist circles. Why? Because her suffering exposes occupation, not patriarchy, as defined by imperial frameworks.

Now, let us consider Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. When she appears in Western discourse, it is rarely as a woman with agency, but as an extension of a demonized political system.

Her existence becomes a rhetorical tool, used to personalize sanctions, delegitimize a state, and humanize regime-change fantasies. Concern for her rights is neither consistent nor sincere; it is conditional.

In the US itself, when a woman is killed in Minnesota, the tragedy is filtered through domestic political calculations. Her life is mourned loudly or quietly, depending on who benefits from the outrage. Justice becomes secondary to alignment.

Even within the so-called heartland of women’s rights, grief is curated!

Iran provides perhaps the clearest example of this moral manipulation. While some women who burned images of Sayyed Ali Khamenei are elevated in international media as “symbols of resistance,” the reality of countless Iranian women is erased or distorted.

A nurse, burned alive by Mossad-backed riots, had her humanity flattened into a slogan; her life and social reality went unexamined.

Meanwhile, manufactured narratives glorify foreign-based “icons”, spreading spiteful myths rather than truth.

In this way, the genuine struggles, achievements, and dignity of Iranian women—scholars, scientists, activists—are obscured, replaced by propaganda that misrepresents both their agency and their lived realities.

What mattered was how efficiently her story could be folded into an already prepared indictment. Context was stripped away to make the narrative lighter, faster, and more useful.

Deliberately, global attention is disproportionately lavished on carefully framed images: women smoking cigarettes, removing headscarves, or burning portraits of Sayyed Khamenei.

These scenes are elevated into icons of liberation, endlessly recycled because they photograph well and serve a psychological objective. They signal defiance in a form easily digestible to Western audiences—and easily weaponized against a targeted state.

What is never asked is whether this obsession reflects genuine concern for women, or merely the needs of an imperial storyline. Where is the outrage for women crushed by sanctions? For mothers in Gaza living under siege? For widows whose loss is criminalized rather than mourned?

These women do not disappear by accident; they are actively excluded.

This is the essence of imperial feminism: a framework that does not defend women universally, but recruits selected women into a geopolitical campaign.

It celebrates transgression only when it weakens an adversary. It mourns death only when it indicts an enemy. It speaks loudly when silence would undermine power, and falls silent when truth would disrupt it.

Smoking a cigarette or burning a photo does not, by itself, constitute liberation. Nor does remembering a husband constitute incitement. But the elevation of one act and the erasure of the other reveals the core problem: women’s bodies, grief, and gestures are being instrumentalized.

Emancipation that walks comfortably alongside sanctions, occupations, and psychological warfare is not emancipatory; it is managerial. It manages outrage, distributes sympathy, and disciplines dissent.

Until this hypocrisy is confronted, the claim of universal solidarity will remain hollow.

True justice for women cannot coexist with selective visibility. Either women matter as human beings—everywhere, without exception—or they are merely tools in a war of images. And today, far too often, the choice has already been made.
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abolitionmedia

2026-01-15 06:05:43

Irreversible Damage: Palestine Action Hunger Strike Nears 70 Days

Twelve days into the new year, two of the imprisoned members of Palestine Action, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed, have entered what doctors describe as the most dangerous and medically irreversible phase of the hunger strike. Their protest has become a matter of survival, placing unprecedented pressure on the British prison system, now facing one of its most serious political hunger strikes in decades.

Medical professionals, including Dr. James Smith, warn that after two months without sustenance, the human body begins cannibalizing itself to sustain basic organ function. Fat reserves are exhausted, muscle tissue is broken down, and the risk of organ failure escalates rapidly. According to doctors who have either examined the prisoners or reviewed their conditions, the hunger strikers’ bodies are now “breaking down”, with some experiencing severe neurological impairment.

Several activists have already been forced to suspend or end their strikes in recent weeks after reaching the brink of death. Teuta Hoxha was among those who halted her protest following acute medical deterioration.

Reports from inside the prison system and from visiting physicians describe conditions that are increasingly dire. Activists have suffered partial loss of vision and hearing, tremors, and loss of motor control. Heba Muraisi, the longest fasting member of the group, is reportedly struggling to breathe. This suggests that the muscles responsible for respiration are beginning to fail. Last week, Kamran Ahmed was transferred to hospital after his condition became life-threatening.

Observers have increasingly drawn parallels between the current hunger strike and the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strike, the largest and most politically charged prison protest in modern British history. That strike, which led to the deaths of ten prisoners, including Bobby Sands, reshaped British and Irish politics and forced international attention onto the conditions inside UK-controlled prisons.

The current strike is now widely regarded as the most prominent in UK prisons since 1981, both in terms of duration and the scale of political implications it carries. As in 1981, prisoners have turned to their own bodies as a final means of protest after legal and institutional avenues failed to produce relief.

On New Year’s Eve, Belfast saw hundreds of Irish people gathering in solidarity with the starving activists whose struggle serves as a reminder of what happened 44 years ago. Standing beneath a mural of Bobby Sands, Pat Sheehan, a survivor of the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strike, warned in comments to Al Jazeera that history is once again approaching a deadly threshold. Sheehan, who spent 55 days on hunger strike before it was called off, said he was “in theory… the next person to die” when the protest ended. By that point, he recalled, his liver was failing, his eyesight had deteriorated, and he was vomiting bile. “Once you pass 40 days, you’re entering the danger zone,” he said, adding that those currently fasting for more than 50 days “must be very weak now.” Yet Sheehan noted that hunger strikes often harden resolve as they continue, explaining that if participants are psychologically prepared, “their psychological strength will increase the longer the hunger strike goes on.”

Appeals from lawyers, doctors, and MPs to British ministers to intervene have been met with outright refusal. Government officials argue that engaging with the hunger strikers would “create perverse incentives that would encourage more people to put themselves at risk through hunger strikes.” The government has attempted to normalize the situation by suggesting that hunger strikes are routine within the prison system. According to The Guardian, officials have claimed that “over the last five years we have averaged over 200 hunger strike incidents every year,” implying that no extraordinary response is warranted. However, the figures cited refer primarily to short-term food refusals by individual prisoners, a fundamentally different phenomenon from a prolonged, collective hunger strike that now presents an imminent risk of death by starvation.

Frome police raids of pro-Palestine marches, to the alienation of activists and the cowardly official response, a non-surprising pattern takes shape as the United Kingdom continues to uphold a legacy of imperialism and genocide affiliation. Yet the hunger strikers remain intent on carrying on until their demands are met.

source: Al Akhbar

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Belfast Rallies in Solidarity with Palestine Hunger Strikers | Ireland | New Years | 2026

As the New Year began in Belfast, hundreds gathered on the city’s streets, not to celebrate, but to show solidarity with pro-Palestinian activists on hunger ...

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