A response to Rust Belt Revolution’s reactionary ideas and Zionist excusing line:

Niggas ain’t buyin ya story bore me tearin’ up shit with fire, shooters, looters Now I got a laptop computer, I told you all what happened and you heard it, read it, but all you could call me was anti-Semitic, regret it-nope, said it-yep Listen to my big black boots as I step Niggas had to break you off somethin’, give bush a push But your national guard ain’t hard You had to get Rodney to stop me cos you know what? We woulda to’ this muthafucka up — Ice Cube, “We Had To Tear this Muthafucka Up”

Crown Heights, Brooklyn, 1991.

For whatever reason (probably white opportunism), a white individual and recovering alcoholic in Pittsburgh who I vaguely remember telling me to “take off your nice shoes and get a pair of Red Wing work boots” a year ago and then issuing a self criticism after I pointed out how this was racist as shit (which was quite victim-blamey and even more self-excusing) decided that he wanted to take up the anti-Semite flag that is raised against BDS activists, Black organizers, and countless others on the left who do not engage in or defer to Zionist entryism and machinations.

Rust Belt Revolution’s latest tirade, titled “Anti-Semitism is still the Socialism of Fools”, starts out with a series of personal attacks (what’s good for the goose is good for the gander). He states:

Because many Jewish people were basically able to “melt into” the European American nation of the USA and thus were able to “climb out” of the working class into the middle class and thus became the visible face of the system and often hated in how some treated the people, some forces focus antagonisms in a way that doesn’t target the real enemy and that angrily denies the basis for solidarity through sound and fury, bombast and bravado, all signifying nothing but a desire to be self aggrandized on the Internet.

1. If you’re going to holler about self-aggrandizement on the internet, you don’t write tumblr articles on 23 year old black kids in Saint Louis. I write things to educate people and express my opinions, white people apparently like writing things to attack black people. That’s fine, but don’t run around posing as a communist while you do so. Nor do you promote a fraudulent caricature of Maoism that is heavily based on internet presence with pictures of yourselves holding weapons surrounded by dozens of cops who have better weapons than you do that they actually know how to use, 11,000 word polemics against individuals, and destructive behavior within the left in your own city, namely, splitting, wrecking, and unprincipled attacks. This lesson should have been learned with the collapse of the Red Guards Philly collective that was directly trained by Red Guards Austin through their “cadre school” experiment that apparently was replete with brainwashing and psychological abuse. Hopefully the Red Guards Pittsburgh project will get off to a less bumpy start and we will find out exactly why RG-PHL has scattered to the winds.
2. It is the pinnacle of arrogance for a white person in the United States to tell a black person who his friends and enemies are. I have been the victim of Zionist harassment at my university for asking simple questions. Zionists, as everybody knows, are not comprised of the entirety of the Jewish diaspora. This is a wilful, unprincipled and disingenuous misreading and R.B.R knows it full well. Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish, are the enemies of the Palestinian people. If we really oppose Zionism and seek to defend Palestine, we will be very clear on this differentiation. I will defer to the P.F.L.P for clarification.

Israel is in reality an integral part of the world Zionist movement — indeed, it is an offshoot of this movement. Thus, in our battle with Israel, we are facing, not the State of Israel alone, but an Israel whose structure is founded on the strength of the Zionist movement. Zionism as a racial religious movement is trying to organise and recruit 14 million Jews in all parts of the world to support Israel, protect its aggressive existence and consolidate and expand this existence. This support is not confined to moral backing: it is really and basically a material support which providing Israel with more people, more money, more arms, more technical knowhow and more alliances concluded by the movement by virtue of its influence, in addition to its support through publicity and propaganda in every part of the world. Thus, when we say that our enemy is Israel plus the Zionist movement we do not add to our enemy a mere string of words but a material force of a certain size which we must take into account in making our calculations for the battle.

In the present report we confine ourselves to this general view of Israel and the world Zionist movement, but we must refer to the necessity of making a precise and detailed study of Israel and the world Zionist movement. Far from obstructing the genera I view, such a study would confirm this view and make it more palpable, thus enabling us to get rid of any superficial imagination about our enemy.” —

-Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, “Who Are Our Enemies”, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Only a fool would conflate Zionism with Judaism. Only a fool would ignore the experiences and political lines of parties actually making revolution in the Palestinian region, and only a giant fool and a racist would promote attacks on a black anti-Zionist organizer and revolutionary at such a time as this. I will admit that the language that I use in the blog post that R.B.R. seeks to make hay with was more than a bit vague. But, to engage in unprincipled slander based on an internet post is unbecoming of one who claims to be a Maoist organizer. When I discuss RGA’s misdeeds or criticize individuals, I know what the hell I’m talking about. R.B.R., on the other hand, does not. He does flatter me by calling me an “eccentric”. I’m actually a pretty boring person in real life, by “eccentric” I’m pretty sure he means “uses language that colored folk don’t normally use”. Cute.

In response to my being “formally distanced” by Black and Brown dominated Maoist collectives, most Maoist collectives and the Maoist movement in the US as a whole are whiter than snow on Mitt Romney’s asscheeks and includes probably less than 200 people out of three hundred million. This small circle mentality and introversion is one of the major reasons why Maoism has less influence in the United States than anarchism even. Spend less time whining about bad niggers and Hoxhaites and more on getting more of these 300,000,000 to be willing to fight for Maoism. I saw a fool the other day say that “we didn’t become Maoists to be popular”. He should have stayed making music that sounds like it was recorded in a toilet and giving out tattoos. If you’re not popular, you’re useless. Maoists in the US hate me because regular people outside of the small circle Maoist movement pay attention to what I’m saying because it corresponds to their material reality. Nobody pays attention to R.B.R because R.B.R is a typical dime a dozen cracker with no skill, talent, ability or notoriety and is full of pure D grade dog shit and is more interested in rehabbing crackers than making revolution. Nobody’s going to follow such as that.

R.B.R then waves a hilariously bad and petty statement signed by less than 10 individuals in my face as if I give a shit about people going through my Facebook posts itemizing every time I made some cracker in Austin or Houston mad. This includes RGLA, who is probably the most non-white collective, but for whatever reason allowed a white person from Austin to come live with them and dictate to them for months. That’s their business, of course. However, using a few token black or brown people in high positions who promote settler-colonial in practice lines and believe that things like “identity opportunism” exist is, ironically, actual identity opportunism by their own definition. Furthermore, using anti-Semitism to attempt to slander black Communists is despite more than a few actual anti-Zionist Communist organizers disagreeing with this characterization is, again, “identity opportunism. It seems to me like the only identity opportunism here is white identity opportunism. Opportunism loves hypocrisy. Enough of that.

Today it cannot be denied that the majority of Jewish people in the U.S. are middle class, playing many different social and political roles in society. Some merchants and slumlords in Black working class communities, especially in New York City, have been Jewish.

There is no such thing as a “middle-class”. R.B.R means “petit-bourgeois”, which is correct. Jewish people in the US, Zionist or not Zionist, are statistically over-represented in petit-bourgeois occupations such as doctors, attorneys, or positions in finance. He is also correct (but, again, heavily generous) in saying that storeowners, merchants, and slumlords in Black communities not only have been but still are Jewish. This is the cause of much antagonism between the Black and Jewish communities and if R.B.R. had actually spent any significant amount of time among Black people he would know this. There are entire blocks of apartment buildings, slums, in Black neighborhoods on the East Coast that are owned by slumlords that just so happen to be Jews. As a result, the people within them have, unfortunately, developed anti-Semitic tendencies. There was an anti-Jewish riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 because of pent up frustrations and anger of the masses of that community. These things don’t just appear out of anywhere, just like the narrow nationalism and portrayal of Europeans as “devils” from the Nation of Islam did not just appear out of nowhere. When oppressed nationality communities display anti-Semitic tendencies or narrowly “anti-white” tendencies, the response is not to hound and harass people that point them out and label them anti-Semites, but to recognize that these are reflections of actually existing material conditions and criticize the people within Jewish, Arab, etc. communities that are exploiting Black people. The Jewishness is, of course, irrelevant, a slumlord is a slumlord, but when we are discussing relations between communities, this cannot be glossed over or ignored for fear of appearing anti-Semitic.

Israeli Jews control Israel and depend on American Jews and other non-Israeli Jews for support. This is true. Yet this is not a special or intrinsic characteristic of Jewry — it is typical of every diasporic nationalist project the world has ever seen. When R.M. asks the Zionist “whats yours [net worth],” says Zionists have “disproportionate influence” and produce “stupid ass movies and manufacture phony news” one should first assume in good faith that he’s not repeating age-old anti-Semitic tropes and should instead demand nuance, but when this is asked of him he doesn’t seem to want to rephrase and instead becomes defensive. This is seen in the 2nd status.

R.B.R. excuses Zionist fascism by portraying it as a “diasporic nationalist project”. The settler-colonial, fascist, US puppet state of Israel is not a “diasporic nationalist” project. Would he call South Africa under Apartheid a “diasporic nationalist project” and support the Voortrekkers? Would he support Rhodesia? Settlers think alike, apparently. In terms of “repetition of anti-Semitic tropes”, I have been criticized for the tone by Jewish comrades who were more than a bit offended by my failure to clarify what I meant. This is fair criticism. I did not take into account the existence of poor Jewish communities like Kiryas Joel in New York State. However, the fact still remains that Zionists display disproportionate influence in the United States through a myriad of channels. R.B.R goes on:

AIPAC needs to be confronted but their influence is overrated. They are in fact a relatively minor force in American politics. Groups like IfNotNow, while not undeserving of criticism themselves for their liberal orientation, go after them for their outsized influence and control they play on American Jewish politics. AIPAC however is not a conduit for a legitimate and ground-up politics from American Jews but a tool of the Apartheid Israeli state and a conduit for right wing goy politics into American Jewish politics. But AIPAC’s prominence has more to do with the importance of the Middle East, not because of the strategic implantation of Jewish people into the U.S. power structure.

This is the pinnacle of irony. Someone who will spend countless hours tracking down a methamphetamine addicted neo-Nazi and picking physical fights with fascist sects and street crews calls a Zionist lobby in control of millions of dollars “overrated”. I wonder if R.B.R has ever had any experience in Palestine solidarity work or has moved in any Palestinian support circles at all. If you call AIPAC or any of these other types of groups “overrated”, you will be labeled, rightly, a Zionist apologist and laughed out of the room. There are people who can literally not return to the place of their birth and where their families lived for generations because of Zionist harassment. Downplaying it is a disservice to the Palestinian struggle, and harassing Black organizers who have directly suffered from it is a disservice to the Communist movement and to centuries of resistance waged by my people against the same type of oppression that the heroic Palestinian people now face. AIPAC is indeed a representative of Zionist Israel, it’s good that R.B.R. has this much common sense. He has provided no data or evidence, besides his own word, however, to prove his other assertions, but rather chooses to go off on a wild tangent and say some horseshit about “strategic implementation of Jewish people into the US power structure”. I also find it strange that R.B.R. has no interest in the plight of Ethiopian, Mizrahi, Sephardi, and other non-Ashkenazim that reside in Israel. There is a literal Black Lives Matter movement in Israel and there were Black Panthers inspired by the US group. This history is apparently lost on RBR in this anti-Semitic haze which apparently means “black man says something that white people that just so happen to be Jews don’t like”.

R.B.R. closes off his little screed this way:

Likewise, Jewish ownership of the media has been a lie since the Protocols of Zion, with Henry Ford noting that the “Twelfth Protocol” shows “the entire plan of Control of the Press, reaching from the present time into the future when the Jewish World Government shall be established.“ This, too, is a lie. Some prominent figures and capitalists in the media, music industry and Hollywood are Jewish, but the culture and media of the United States serves the capitalist class as a class–by promoting images and ideas designed to reinforce and preserve the system.

What’s this “some” shit? He loves it. “Some slumlords”. Many slumlords. Go to New York and ask around and still see if you’re nattering “some”. That’s like saying “some Arab people in Saint Louis own gas stations”. There are trends and majorities in everything. Who owns most of the slums in New York? Jamaicans? Zionist influence in Hollywood, media, finance, and the music industry is widespread and well known. This is by no means asserting that “Jews control the economy” or any of the tripe pushed by the Black Hebrew Israelites or the Nation of Islam. But R.B.R. Most Jews within the United States are more financially well situated than the average Black person, but they by no means control the financial system or group together as a cabal to decide what to put on television. This is simply ludicrous and would actually be anti-Semitic. If you would like to see actual black anti-Semitism, listen to Farrakhan’s rants or input “Black Hebrew Israelites” into YouTube.

When we criticize the state of Israel as an enemy of the international proletariat and direct oppressors of the Palestinians, we must be careful in acknowledging that its the dog that wags the tail, not the tail that wags the dog. R.M. does not sit well with criticism, so this will likely not be responded to by him.

Who the hell is wagging R.B.R’s brains?