Black Al-Qaeda

[Ibtisam]

I came across a speech by Dr. Cornel West in which he says;

 

Black people never responded to White supremacist terrorism (slavery and Jim Crow discrimination) by forming a Black Al-Qaeda. They responded with Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X. The world can learn from the Black Freedom struggle which is the struggle of the weak over the strong."

I like Dr. Cornel, but recently he has started to branch out into Muslims and Islam and Political Islam, and I can't help but notice huge gaps in his views. I saw this interview on Al Jazeera in which he was on a very thin line between being insulting / rude. In this speech what particularly bothers me about this quote is the blank generalisation of Muslims, comparing Islam/ religion with a race course and ignoring the background for each conflict/ issue. Not to mention that the black agenda is America was grounded on at least the same principles/ struggle.

 

What is a Muslim response? guerrilla warfare such as the Mad Mullah, the Chechnya resistance, the stone throwing kids in Palestine? Are those not too interlinked with nationality and survival rather than Muslim response.

 

There was no Black Al-Qaeda response due to lack of resources, space and money to grow. Not to mention the advancement of technology (both in weapon& communication- allowing message to spread much faster/ further with training and available material)

 

Most importantly Al-Qaeda was a western engineered, funded and encouraged and most of all trained. So how can it be judged as a Muslim response, when in fact it was a western tool to attack and weaken the soviet? Now neither ideology/ concept nor its finance needs western support, it is a self sustain ideology funded in Muslim countries.

 

A comparison that would make sense would be if Americans trained segments of the black resistance, fostered a mentality of resistance against say the Europeans, defeated the Europeans or made peace with them and then forgot to follow up where the trained soldiers went. The trained soldiers with their new ideology go back to Africa; predictable and human behaviour would suggest that those trained individuals would manipulate their acquired knowledge to their perceived benefit and few rich individuals in Africa funded them. The ideology caught on like fire with the young black youth in America, at much fast/ large scale etc, then he can make the comparison.

 

In any case, I would much rather the Muslims emulated the Zionist ideology if we want space, power and a little respect.

 

What do you think peeps?

[Raamsade]

Well, there is obvious flaw in Dr. West's analogy. Muslims are not a race or even a monolithic group. Black people are a race.

 

Moreover, Blacks because they were a race were not constrained by religious dogma unlike their Muslim counterpart.

[Abu-Salman]

The Black Community did not face an essentially intellectual/religious onslaught with a colonial component but a struggle for freedom not that dissimilar to that of the "tiers etat" in ancient Europe or the corporate oppression faced by non-Wasps & millionaires in the contemporary US, though all sorts of entertainments, junk food and mirages provide a more human facade.

 

This is epitomised through misleading TV ads by the very pharmaceutical firms that lobby for the continuation of an extraordinarily wasteful yet spiralling and immoral healthcare system, which is the best reflection of a given society level of "civilisation".

In fact, both medicines ads and access to healthcare mainly based on one's ability to pay for it are repulsive to even the rest of the West and constitute one of the few consensual ethical taboos.

 

In an even more cynical way, the state of the education system with its more capitalist philosophy and narrow, vocational focus seems ideally suited to preserve this model of a society of extremes, whereas in France, for instance, a large majority of the population is bound to receive a minimum of general knowledge, and this even before entering higher education.

 

Sadly, this corporate slavery and savagery ravage the rest of the World too through arbitrary limits on drugs access for the poorest countries through "patents rights" etc, monopolies over natural resources offering below market prices, deregulations and strangulation of the delivery of essentials services such as health & education etc (the famous IMF "Structural Adjustments Programs" etc).

 

Yet, systematic discipline stemming from a more coherent spiritual framework may well reverse the tide over the long run, as the traditional Western churches have been compromised through many centuries of condoning the most unhuman or unjust abuses by the powerful elites (of which the genocidal and utterly horrific slaves shipping conditions is but an episode)...

 

 

........................... Interesting, Related Read (by a respected medical journal)..........................

 

 

The Lancet

US region to model health service on Iranian system

Original Text

Nellie Bristol

 

 

Health workers in the Mississippi Delta are taking inspiration from an unexpected source in their bid to improve the health of the region's disadvantaged population. Nellie Bristol reports.

 

Health advocates for the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta in southern USA have spent millions of dollars over the years attempting to address seemingly intractable health issues disproportionately affecting the region's African-American population. Now a group is turning to an unlikely source for a model of primary care provision: the health house programme of rural Iran.

 

Established in the early 1980s, the model uses community health workers to track villagers' health, and provide basic care and health education. Trusted workers chosen from the community help patients connect with appropriate high-level services when needed. The programme has bolstered the health status of Iran's rural population and garnered high praise internationally.

 

Continuous monitoring and support, and a community-based link to the fragmented US health-care system is just what the Delta needs as well, say health house advocates. The present system has failed the rural region for decades. Saddled with a long history of discrimination and unemployment, more than 20% of the population is uninsured, and rates of diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and infant mortality are among the highest in the country. Many residents have no access to regular care and turn to the hospital emergency room when they need attention.

 

Aaron Shirley is a long-time champion of health care for the Delta and chair of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation, supporting a facility that attends to Mississippi's underserved population. He is leader of the health houses initiative. Critical to its success, he said, is community involvement in both designing the programme and implementing it. “You've got to know the Mississippi Delta. There's a distrust factor. But this [programme] is from the ground up”, says Shirley. “You'd be surprised at the response that we're getting starting with the people and saying ‘here's an idea, what do you think about it’ rather than going in and saying ‘here's what we're going to do’”, he added. “They've had a lot of that.”

 

Delta health houses, like those in Iran, will employ members of the community to serve as health workers. They will bridge the divide between public health and clinical medicine, tracking individual household's health status and serving as advocates to improve living conditions including water quality and access to healthy food. They will help patients to negotiate the complex medical system, and follow physician instructions. The group initially will train workers with at least a high school education using the equivalent of nursing assistant certification, but hopes to develop an expanded curriculum with increased focus on community issues and even disaster preparedness.

 

Shirley and others are seeking US$30 million to begin supporting up to 15 health houses in the Delta region. With tight budgets in Washington, and reticence to adopt a model from a country in extreme disfavour in the USA, funding is an uphill battle. But the group is moving ahead with a pilot project in a donated building in Greenwood, MS. In addition to serving as a headquarters for the health workers, James Miller, another advocate for the project and managing director of Oxford International Development Group in Oxford, MS, says the building will be a meeting place for healthy activities, and will house exercise equipment and blood pressure monitors.

 

With health reform faltering in Congress, provision of community-based primary care for underserved populations will be paramount in the USA, both to improve access and cut costs. The use of community health workers like those in the Delta project, long a staple in global health programmes, is becoming more widely recognised and supported in the USA. According to Carl Rush, a community health expert based in San Antonio, TX, more states, insurers, hospitals, and the federal government are realising the value of the workers. They enhance disease prevention, ensure adequate prenatal care to prevent low birthweights, and encourage patient follow-up to reduce hospital readmissions.

 

Advocates hope turning to Iran as an unlikely ally in the promotion of rural primary health will finally start to meet the needs of the Delta population. “This is a human disaster that's been hitting here for decades”, says Miller.

[Caano Geel]

Ibti, not really the case sadly. I don't think i buy the good Dr's version of history. the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's traces its roots back to the ghandi's philosophy of non-violent resistance.

 

Black people in the Americas and Africa have a very long history of aggressive resistance to white domination- from the maroons in the Caribbean to the kingdoms of west africa, when in their means, people have resisted aggression with aggression - Haiti didn't become second-oldest republic in the western hemisphere via peaceful resistance.

 

though this doesn't mean i disagree with your sentiment