Ken Klippenstein: Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

 Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

Federal prosecutor can't explain why or who Antifa is

Ken Klippenstein June 23 2026

U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen

NSPM-7 is a scandalously under-covered story, please subscribe so I can cover it more

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Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens beforethey commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.

It is one of the first cases where presidential national security memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.” 

Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”

And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.

In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.

The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.

Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.

Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN · SEPTEMBER 27, 2025

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’…

Read full story

Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.

That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.

U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:

“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”

“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”

NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.

In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.

Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath. 

Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.” 

This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed throughcourt filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.

Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.

And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.

Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.

In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.

None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.

Trump spews and the machinery of government plods along behind. Yes Noem, Bondi, and Kash Patel can tweet as if there is both a threat and the feds are quickly responding, but Task Forces have to iron out their budget and their letterheads before they can get to the X (née Twitter) on-ramp.

Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.

Subscribe if you saw Antifa hanging out with bigfoot

Sikhs and Other Indians Fought Heroically For Britain in Two World Wars.

Richard Mellor

The movie clip above is not connected to the commentary below from Andy Singh Baines. I added it to give some idea of the important role the Indian people, and all the colonised people played in WW1 and WW2 fighting for the British. Nigerians and other colonial people were a huge section of the British armed forces, this is so of the Irish as Ireland was England and then Britain's first colony before British capitalism colonised India, or parts of Africa. 

Laurence Fox, the right wing racist British actor had made disparaging remarks about a Sikh soldier appearing in the movie 1917, claiming it was "forced diversity." One can imagine the insult this is to Indians and the Sikh population in general. Having grown up in a military family and in the UK after Myanmar and Nigeria, I would not have known of the contribution Indians played in fighting for Britain against the Nazi's and Japanese Imperialism. My father, though a conservative, talked often of the heroism of these people especially the Gurkhas.

The right wing forces in the UK that are attacking immigrants and siding with Neo-fascists and white supremacists are being looked to by many English people who are completely unaware that their safety and freedom as members of a parliamentary democracy was defended by immigrants or their parents who are being vilified in the UK today.

I am very much in agreement with Andy Singh Baines' comments below.

*************

Andy Singh Bains

 

During World War One, over 65,000 Sikhs served in the British Indian Army, comprising 22% of its forces despite only being 2% of India’s population. During World War Two, over 300,000 Sikhs served in that same army. Together, over 83,000 Sikhs died in both wars. 

These facts are being used by Sikh politicians in Britain right now to critique the rhetoric of the far-right and to console racist and backward sections of the population by showing that Sikhs are “loyal citizens” that can be trusted and that many of them “sacrificed their lives for democracy in Britain.” 

In reality, these two wars were fought not for “democracy” - as Lenin showed, democracy under capitalism has always been, like in ancient Athens, simply democracy for the slave-owners - but instead, these wars were fought for the selfish interests of the British Empire, and thousands of Sikhs, alongside thousands of other Indians, were just seen and used as cannon-fodder for imperialism. After all, how could they have been fighting for “democracy” when Indians were being denied their basic democratic rights and India remained a colony of Britain tied in shackles? 

As an aside, this simple fact was even lost by the Communist Party of India which, under orders from Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy, discouraged Indians from struggling against the British because it “disrupted the war effort against fascism.” As a consequence, the Communists, who had grown very popular among the masses for their heroism in the previous period, during the 1920s and 1930s, now became sidelined from them. 

Meanwhile, the native bourgeoisie, wrapping itself in the cloak of Gandhi who gave the famous “Do or Die” speech which sparked the Quit India movement (1942-45) or what the Governor-General of India referred to as “by far the most serious rebellion since 1857,” took firm control over the political leadership of the anti-colonial struggle. In 1946, the mutiny of 10,000 sailors in the Indian navy, which was spreading to other sections of the army and which sparked solidarity strikes and riots throughout the subcontinent, from Mumbai to all the way in Karachi, was heading in the direction of a national liberation war for independence against the British. 

The leaders of Congress Party and Muslim League, however, condemned the uprising, seeing it as detrimental to a negotiated settlement with the British, which would ensure a safe transfer of power from the imperialists to the native bourgeoisie. With the road to revolution blocked, the pendulum swung toward counter-revolution: the partition of the country, and the bloody communal violence that accompanied it and left millions dead.

Returning to earlier, the only way to ensure the safety of migrants and fight the far-right is through the unity and revolutionary struggle of the working class against capitalism, a system which breeds racism to divide and disorient the common people and turn their attention away from the real cause for worsening living standards. The problem is not that people coming into the country, looking for a better life, are exhausting already limited resources. There are more than enough resources to go around. The problem is that the capitalist class, the millionaires and billionaires, are hoarding most of it. The problem is a system which puts the interests of a few ahead of the collective interests of humanity as a whole. 

The London Far Right Rally. On Immigrants, Identity, and Who the Real Enemy Is

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On Immigrants, Identity, and Who the Real Enemy Is

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
5-22-26

A few years ago, my brother Roger Martinez and I were walking past a hookah bar on the Edgware Road in London when three young black women sitting at one of the outside tables, heard Roger’s accent and asked us if we were from America; we said we were. 

"We can't go to America," one of them said.

"Why not?" Roger asked.

"We're Somalis, Muslims”, one of them replied, “Trump says we're terrorists and he's barred us from entering the US. There's only 12 million of us on the planet.", she added with a wry smile.

We had forgotten about that ban entirely. We stopped and talked for a while. They were warm, funny young women with strong London accents — they'd been born there. Roger asked about traditional dress and head coverings. They were all dressed as young western women typically dress. They explained that they wore traditional clothing when they wanted to show respect to their parents, at cultural events, or simply when they felt like it. It was part of who they are.

I feel no threat or anxiety about immigrants wearing traditional clothing. When I left London more than fifty years ago, Young Indian women almost always dressed in traditional clothing. That's largely changed now, and it changed on its own terms, over time, within families — not because anyone demanded it.

I'll be honest: when it comes to the full covering of a woman's face and body, as practiced by some Muslims, I find it difficult to look at its origins without seeing misogyny and patriarchy. Whether the Quran demands it or Allah commands it are questions I'll leave to those with more knowledge of the subject than me and to the women themselves. What I am certain of is this — no priest, no mullah, no religious authority, and no politician has the right to tell a woman how to dress. And we should stress that Madison Avenue and the fashion industry pressure women relentlessly too, shaming girls into a different kind of conformity. The coercion comes from many directions.

I’m writing this commentary after watching some of the coverage of the far-right rally in London last week and the disgusting spectacle in the video above, of the rabid crowd chanting "take them off" at three French women on a stage dressed as fully covered Muslim women. It accomplished nothing except cruelty, and if the fascist elements that are behind such events thought they might “shame” this section of the immigrant population in to “assimilation” as they see it, they are wrong. 

When people feel attacked, they hold more tightly to the traditions they came from. That's human nature. The second and third generations — the children and grandchildren of immigrants — will negotiate their own relationship with their heritage, and that negotiation will happen within families, organically, in ways that no outsider can engineer or accelerate. Muslims make up roughly 6% of the UK population. And they are overwhelmingly working class. They are not a threat. They are neighbors and, more importantly from a workers’ perspective, they are our class allies.  

There is also a breathtaking hypocrisy at the heart of the demand that immigrants abandon their cultural traditions. The British Empire once encompassed 23% of the world's population. British officers, colonial administrators, and settlers went to Africa, India, and across the globe and dressed, worshipped, and conducted themselves as British people. Any soldier who "went native" was considered an embarrassment. The Empire imposed itself on the world. It did not ask permission and it did not assimilate.

Finally, and most importantly: anyone who thinks this movement will stop at Muslims is not paying attention. Muslims are simply the most visible target right now. A Sikh friend told me with some horror that a few Sikhs had shown up alongside the racists at that rally. They would do well to reconsider. The turbans, the kippahs, the crosses that aren't the right kind of cross — all of it is on the list. So are atheists like me.

The crisis ordinary British people are living through is not caused by immigrants. It is a failure of a system that cannot provide basic necessities in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. The people at the top of that system need someone to blame, and immigrants are a convenient answer. Meanwhile, the wars, the drone strikes, the destabilization of entire regions of the Global South — these are what drive people northward in the first place. They are not invaders. They are the refugees of other people's wars

Opinion: If Starmer gets his way, Reform - not the Greens - will be his legacy

If Starmer gets his way, Reform - not the Greens - will be his legacy

The question for Polanski, as for Corbyn before him, is whether the spear of an insurgent politics can pierce the billionaires' defences

Johnathan Cook May 12, 2026

[First published by Middle East Eye]

There are two conclusions to be drawn from last week’s momentous local elections in Britain.

The first, and most obvious, is that two-party politics in the UK is now finished. After a century of being at the centre of British political life, Labour’s time is over. It is a spent force, whoever leads it.

Voters now understand that the party is too utterly captured by Big Business to ever again serve as a meaningful counterweight to the right – or as a vehicle for progressive, anti-austerity politics.

In this election, Britain’s decades-long Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics was finally unmasked as a charade.

The electorate is no longer having it.

Previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, elected by members a decade ago, was the last-gasp effort to make the party relevant to ordinary people. But the rightwing faction that dominates the parliamentary party – and the billionaire donors and media who stand with it – soon demonstrated who had the upper hand.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to dissemble, pretending to be the Corbyn continuity candidate, to win over the membership. But once installed as leader, he rode to power on the coattails of the billionaires.

It will be the same hidden hand, belonging to the same Epstein class, that nudges Starmer’s successor to the forefront in the coming months.

But Labour, offering only a game of catch-up with the right, is doomed electorally.

Pretender to the throne

The second lesson is that Labour is determined, before it sinks into terminal irrelevance, to pave the way for a far-right, Reform-led government under Nigel Farage.

It would be too charitable to suggest that this will be an unintended consequence of Starmer’s dismal, dishonest performance as prime minister.

In a real sense, Starmer’s political trajectory has done more than simply discredit the status-quo politics championed by modern Labour. It has also, by implication, painted Reform as the sole legitimate pretender to the throne.

Starmer and the Labour right did not just carry out a comprehensive, Stalin-esque purge of the progressive left after Corbyn’s ousting. They did not just drive that same Labour left into the embrace of the once-marginal Green Party, sending the latter’s popularity soaring.

No, they chose to launch the same dirty-tricks campaign against the Greens, centred on a supposed “antisemitism crisis”, which they earlier weaponised against the Corbyn left.

In doing so, the Labour right, alongside the British establishment and the state and billionaire-owned media, revealed their true colours: with two-party politics over, they would much prefer the baton be passed to the far-right than the progressive left.

That real-world conspiracy, out in the open, propelled Reform to its massive haul of seats in councils across England, and to its surprise successes in the Welsh and Scottish parliaments.

It also hampered the Greens, as we shall see, by tainting their political brand.

Insurgency politics

Last week’s results proved there is a craving for meaningful change – and the two traditional parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are structurally incapable of delivering it. Each is captured by the billionaire class.

The only game in town now is insurgency politics. That is what Reform claims to be offering, as do the Greens. Both cleaned up in disillusioned Labour and Tory heartlands.

But this is not really a fight between two competing insurgencies. Farage and Reform are cosplaying insurgency politics.

Like President Donald Trump in the United States, they are a wing of the billionaire class pretending to be taking the billionaires on. They are another captured party, another safe pair of hands for the super-rich.

With the Tories and Labour structurally incapable of fixing a system purpose-built to siphon off public wealth into the private coffers of the billionaires, Reform has come up with a crowd-pleasing solution.

Farage isn’t promising to tackle a corrupt political system that keeps the super-rich in power. No, his function is to shift attention away from the billionaires’ malign role and direct it instead towards immigrants and Muslims.

Farage knows where his bread is buttered. And so should the rest of us, given the revelation that the butter was thickly plastered on – to the tune of £5 million – by an expat cryptocurrency trader living in Thailand.

Reform has an endless number of such skeletons in its closet. Among the latest to be exposed was a candidate elected last week to Sunderland council, who among his recent grossly racist and sexist social media posts, suggested of the local Nigerian population that the city should “melt them all down and fill in the pot holes”.

Chorus of concern

Racism is endemic to Reform. It’s central to its platform. Immigrants – always “illegal” – are viewed exclusively as a problem that must be dealt with firmly. Islam and Muslims, in Reform’s view, need to be discussed as a threat to “the British way of life” and western “civilisational values”.

But note this: racism is not central to the media discourse about Reform. However often the profound racism of its members and candidates is exposed, none of it sticks to the party itself. None of it stains the moral character of Farage as leader.

Contrast that with the treatment of the Greens since their new leader, Zack Polanski, took the party from irrelevance a year ago to membership numbers of 230,000 – larger than the Conservatives, and possibly even than Labour by this point.

Polanski is the country’s only Jewish party leader. But he spent much of the local election campaign defending himself and his party from the constant accusation that the Greens were institutionally antisemitic. In this extraordinarily twisted political climate, even Reform felt confident about smearing the Greens as racist.

The media rushed to add every incident, however small or unrepresentative, to a ledger suggesting that there was something unhealthy, even sinister, about the Greens under Polanski. At every opportunity, the media chorus of concern that antisemitism is once again surging – as it supposedly did under Corbyn – was laid at the Greens’ door.

In the ultimate paradox, the insinuation that the Green Party was rife with Jew hatred authorised a wave of grossly antisemitic caricatures of Polanski himself – in the Telegraph, Times, Mail and Sun – that would not have looked out of place in the Nazi publication Der Sturmer.

In turn, claims by the establishment that Iran is ultimately guiding this wave of antisemitism subtly imply that the Greens are really acting in the service of a foreign enemy. The subtext – levelled against Britain’s only Jewish leader, remember – is that Polanski’s party is unpatriotic, that it is serving another master.

In the topsy-turvy, manufactured political and media consensus, racism does not define the racist platform of Reform. But it does define the anti-racist platform of the Greens.

Firing squad

There is a reason that the Greens’ current moment under Polanski feels so familiar – like a rerun of the hounding of Corbyn through 2017 and 2018. Because that is exactly what it is.

Now, as then, an insurgent leftwing party, led by a popular figure, is disrupting the cosy ping-pong politics of the two main, establishment-serving parties.

Now, as then, the left insurgency appears to be growing into something bigger than simply a political party. It is tapping into a wider mood that will not be satisfied with tinkering. It demands wholesale change.

Now, as then, the insurgency is emphasising how the billionaire class has captured and corrupted the political system, and how it maintains “mainstream” narrative control through its ownership of the establishment media.

Now, as then, the insurgency is challenging the lifeblood of Britain’s ruling class: its permanent “rip-off” austerity politics at home, and permanent warmongering politics abroad.

Now, as then, the establishment is playing dirty: it studiously avoids addressing the political issues raised by the insurgents, because it knows it would lose such debates. Instead, it focuses on staining the moral character of the insurgent leader.

And finally, now as then, it has learned that the best way to smear the insurgents, and drain energy and political momentum from the movement, is by tarring them as antisemites.

If the Greens were forced to run the gauntlet during this local election campaign, just wait for the firing squad they will face when the national elections arrive in a few years’ time.

The British establishment is once again cornering the insurgent, anti-racist left with a double-bind ultimatum. It must hollow out its moral core by jettisoning its opposition to apartheid, genocide, wars of aggression, the military-industrial complex, and the war machine’s interminable assaults on the environment – or be condemned as Jew haters.

As became clear through these latest elections, the Greens are going to face relentless hounding until they agree to ditch Polanski. They will be required to find a “moderate” leader ready to cosy up to Big Business – and make their party as politically superfluous as Labour has become under Starmer.

Caught in quicksand

Anyone who imagined that Polanski would be spared Corbyn’s fate because he is Jewish was not paying close attention during the pile-on a decade ago.

The British media and political classes successfully obscured what they were up to then, during what they characterised as a Labour “antisemitism crisis“. The reality was that a disproportionate number of Corbyn’s supporters who were suspended and expelled by the party bureaucracy as antisemites were, in fact, Jews.

That was the reason the left spoke at the time of antisemitism being weaponised – an observation that itself became grounds for expulsion from the party.

Non-Jewish politicians – including prominent rightwing factionalists in Labour – as well as non-Jewish media commentators were among those rushing to label Corbyn-supporting Jews as “self-hating” or “the wrong sortof Jews”.

Polanski now finds himself in exactly the same kind of political quicksand. The more he fights against his smearing, the more smearing he faces, as evidenced by the media’s antisemitic caricatures of him.

Note another feature of this process. Jewish Voice for Labour, the main group of Jews inside Labour who backed Corbyn, were – like the Jews who march against the Gaza genocide – erased from the media’s narrative about a supposedly “antisemitic left“.

They had to be, because their very existence made nonsense of establishment claims that it is the anti-racist left, not the racist right, that poses a threat to Jews.

Polanski’s Jewishness, as he has pointed out, is being carefully erased from coverage too. It has to be if the vilification campaign is to land.

Trading in tropes

But there is a further ominous development at work. The British ruling class is not just exploiting what it describes as a rise in antisemitism; it is stoking it for its own political survival.

Paradoxically, it is the very people casting themselves as the protectors of the Jewish community who are trading in the antisemitic tropes they accuse others of.

It is Starmer, Farage, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch, and Metropolitan police chief Sir Mark Rowley who are responsible for fuelling the kind of antisemitism they claim to be tackling.

The growing clamour to crack down on the marches against Israeli crimes in Gaza and southern Lebanon – or even ban them – depends on an assumption that any vocal opposition to genocide equates to a racist threat to Jews.

That, in turn, depends on a perverse premise: that all Jews support Israel; that the two are inseparable. By extension, it implies that any Jew who calls out these crimes, such as Polanski, is an impostor.

The conflation between Israel and Jews is clearly in breach of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism – a definition that British politicians extol, while cynically wielding it to malign and crush the left.

Consider the event that served as the starting gun for the latest outpouring of concern about antisemitism, and the opportunity to pile on Polanski: the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green late last month. Though you would not know it from most of the media coverage, or even statements issued by police, the accused perpetrator also attacked a Muslim man.

The political and media classes sought to downplay the attack on the Muslim man, because it disrupted a more convenient, and simplistic, narrative they are determined to advance.

Discourse trap

The argument being pressed into service by the establishment – blaming pro-Palestine marches for a rise in antisemitism – is clearly ridiculous.

Had no pro-Palestine marches taken place over the past 30 months, images of children torn to pieces by US-supplied Israeli bombs would still be on our feeds. There would still have been news of Israel levelling Gaza’s hospitals, and starving its population month after month. Palestinians taken hostage by Israel, as well as their whistleblowing Israeli captors, would still have revealed that the Israeli army trained dogs to rape them.

Anyone who blames Jews for the Gaza genocide, or for the ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon, isn’t doing so because of the London marches. At the protests, the distinction is always clear, and indicated by the visible participation of a significant Jewish bloc.

Jeffrey Pretti Murder Forces Union Heads to Say Something

Source NY Times

Richard Mellor

AFSCME Local 444, retired

The murder of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an AFGE Local 366g member in Minneapolis, by Trump’s neo-fascist militia (ICE) has forced some important figures atop organized labor to speak out. 

 

Pretti was shot some 10 times while helping another person who was shoved to the ground by an ICE Agent. Pretti was in possession of a firearm but never took it from its holster or threatened the ICE officer with it. It should be pointed out, especially for readers abroad, that Minnesota is an open carry state which means Petti had a legal, constitutional, right to carry a firearm.

 

Petti was shot after he was disarmed and as he was pinned to the ground by numerous ICE Agents. He was shot in the back.

 

I don’t need to go in to detail here but we have seen the video’s and this is in my mind murder and it’s not the first murder by these masked thugs.

 

Petti’s murder comes after the murder of Renee Good who was shot three times by an ICE Agent as she was in her car. The third shot that was to the head is the one that killed her.

 

The heroic defense of our democratic rights, of immigrant rights and of the US constitutional right to protest by the people of Minneapolis has been lauded throughout the world not just in the US. If there is anything that makes Americans feel proud to be American it is the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota. What they have faced and are clearly winning is a war against a neo-fascist regime in Washington that is intent on driving the US working class back to an era before the rise of the CIO in the 1930’s. 

 

Lives have been lost in this battle that is being fought for all of us.

 

The people of Minneapolis put the Trump Administration on the defensive and Trump has removed the Head of Border Patrol Greg Bovino apparently not pleased with his handling of the Pretti murder. Trump is also sending border czar Tom Homan who also held the position under Obama who himself  was referred to as the “Deporter in Chief”. There are also calls for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to be impeached.

 

As far as the statements from AFL-CIO head Liz Schuler and National Union of Building Trades head  Sean McGarvey goes, we have to take them with a grain of salt and see them within the context of the massive resistance to the Trump Administrations action by the people of Minneapolis. I have included both statements.  McGarvey refers to Nancy Pelosi as a “working-class warrior” and is very closely allied with management in the Team Concept that is such a disaster for working people and all union members which gives us a little insight in to his world view.

 

The state violence, but more importantly, the resistance on the ground in Minneapolis has not only backed off the state somewhat, it has forced these conservative trade union leaders to say something. But for those of us that have spent years active in the trade union movement we are used to weak statements like these from the labor hierarchy. They are crafted in a way they cannot be opposed but will amount to nothing.

 

NABTU Statement

The statement from Sean McGarvey the president of NABTU is very similar to Liz Schuler’s statement as head of the AFL-CIO in that they “mourn the senseless killing” of another Minneapolis resident. “America’s unions join the call for ICE to immediately leave Minnesota before anyone else is hurt or killed. We demand local authorities conduct a full, transparent investigation that will lead to accountability for this tragic and violent act, and for Congress to use its power to hold ICE accountable.”

 

Supporting the demand for independent investigation and accountability from congress is safe and of course we would support it, but it is not enough.

 

Young workers in particular should consider that there are 14 million members in organized labor. The North American Building Trades Unions have three million workers affiliated to it most of them members of the AFL-CIO. These workers alone have the economic power to shut down the US economy.

AFL-CIO Statement

 

It is without doubt true that from the George Floyd murder to the present resistance to ICE the folks on the ground in Minneapolis have learned a great deal and honed their skills in dealing with this type of state repression. They have developed methods of communication, of how and when to appear and how to warn each area of impending danger and so on. I am not there so can only speculate but as a person who has been involved in some serious strikes and community battles, we learn a lot in these struggles. 

 

The need to spread the protests and activity to other cities and other areas of the country is crucial. My guess is they already have them in Minneapolis or they are in formation as the days go on, but community defense committees have to be expanded. As a friend pointed out to me today, many of those activists on the ground in Minneapolis are union members, it is crucial we take this struggle in to our unions and build these defense organizations, community and organized labor together. 

Those of that have been around a while are well aware that the labor hierarchy will not use the resources at their disposal to take this path and help spread the resistance to the present administration's violence beyond the harmless statements included here.They will, as they usually do, temper an independent movement of the working class and direct it in to the Democratic Party. 

 

Regardless of the immediate outcome the Trump Administration has been given a bloody nose and the people of Minneapolis have brought to the fore some of the great radical traditions of the US working class.