FBI Raids Can't Stop Antiwar Activists from Organizing

The right to free speech is recognized by the First Amendment and given lip service by most U.S. politicians – whenever they're not trying to ban rap music or bar people from saying mean things about them.

In practice, though, the right to voice one's opinions is more tenuous than it is on paper; just ask Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned by the “progressive” Woodrow Wilson for speaking out against the draft during World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

And so it is today with those who organize opposition to another self-styled progressive's attempts to make the world safe for democracy by way of heavy munitions and military occupations. Since September, the Obama administration has raided the homes and offices of a half-dozen prominent anti-war activists, issuing 23 people subpoenas to testify before a grand jury, all ostensibly as part of an FBI investigation into whether a group of pacifists and peaceniks provided “material support” for terrorist organizations.

That “material support” thing sure sounds bad, doesn't it? And that's the point. The truth, however, is that the charge encompasses everything from actually providing guns and bombs to terrorist groups – which no one alleges those targeted by the FBI did – to merely counseling designated terrorist organizations (itself a political label) to embrace nonviolence, a fact that's led the ACLU to denounce the material support charge as a legal hammer for the state to stifle dissent.

The material support charge is also very much selectively employed, evidenced by the fact that prominent U.S. politicians, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, recently traveled to Paris where they openly flaunted their support for a group listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a cult-like group of Iranian exiles who fled to Iraq after the 1979 revolution, where they received arms and financing from Saddam Hussein.

“The United States should not just be on your side," Giuliani gushed to MEK members at their annual conference. "It should be enthusiastically on your side. You want the same things we want" -- meaning regime change in Iran (the group's leader, Maryam Rajavi, has anointed herself the country's "President Elect"). No charges have been filed.

Nor have there been charges filed against those U.S. officials who for decades armed and financed -- and continue to arm and finance -- Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his apparatus of state terrorism. You see, the material support doctrine is intended to bused against those perceived to be powerless, not those in positions of power.

But the effort to stifle antiwar speech and intimidate peace activists into turning against each other has hit a wall: those targeted by the FBI are refusing to participate in the sham investigation.

“I am one of 23 individuals who have been recently subpoenaed by the FBI and who face a federal grand jury because of our work to end US military aid to Israel, and because we organize in solidarity with the people of Palestine,” writes Maureen Clare Murphy, the managing editor of the online publication The Electronic Intifada. “Because of this, and even though it means we risk being put in jail, all of us who have have been summoned to testify have refused to participate in this attack on our movement.”

Meanwhile, those who haven't been subpoenaed are rallying to support those who have, the FBI's investigation actually having the effect of revitalizing portions of an antiwar movement – primarily in Minneapolis and Chicago, where most of the raids transpired – that had largely become dormant upon the election of faux-peace President Barack Obama.

Whoops.

Later this month, activists will be holding conferences to plan further actions to stand up to the government's intimidation tactics, a move that comes after last month's nationwide "Day of Action." Two of the conferences will take place February 12 in Oakland and Chicago, and two more will take place February 19 in New York and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

“Though this repression against our movement in the U.S. is very real,” writes Murphy, “not for a single day should any of us stop organizing in support of the liberation of Palestine, against the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and against U.S. support of dictatorships in countries like Egypt and Tunisia.”

Photo Credit: Jacob Anikulapo