Please read an open letter to the Anti-War Movement by the members of RAHA Iranian Feminist Collective and the members of Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression

The Global Justice workgroup of Occupy Wall Street  is marching to end stop and frisk because people around the world are facing an escalation of militarized policing and state repression. The occupy movement stands against the neoliberal economic order, which plunders public wealth to benefit an elite few. This power structure is overwhelmingly stacked against labor, communities of color, collective prosperity and individual freedoms, in favor of corporate profits. The racist practice of stop and frisk is one of the many racialized tactics our local police force uses to bolster the domestic socioeconomic order, just as our military maintains US corporate interests abroad.

We march because police brutality and repressive policies are nothing new to communities of color, especially to Black and Latino communities in the US.  While Black and Latino males ages 14 to 24 make up 4.7 percent of NYC’s population, they accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011, meaning that the same youths were stopped and frisked over and over again.

The racist logic of “guilty until proven innocent” underpins the dehumanization and demonization of whole communities, from Gaza to the Bronx.  Racism is what legitimates and underlies the rhetoric of imperialism, the war on terror, Islamophobia and pro-war propaganda toward Afghanistan and Iran; racism is what drives US immigration policy, and justifies US policing methods, the war on drugs, and the legal and prison systems.  We march because stop and frisk is a major entry point into a system of mass incarceration, and it is through such racist disciplinary regimes that the status quo is maintained, both domestically and globally.

As the police we see at protests look more and more like soldiers, and as the NYPD continues to target people of color and throw them into prisons and detention centers, it’s clear that a militarized police state plays a key role in maintaining foreign and domestic structures of oppression. The intensive policing of poor communities of color–those most affected by a racialized system of enforced poverty and austerity–serves to incarcerate and instill fear in those most likely to agitate for fundamental change.

People in Egypt and Tunisia, Greece and Spain, New York, Oakland, and Quebec are linked in solidarity by resistance to the depredations of neoliberalism.  Opposing racist policing here is part of opposition to a global police state that protects the economic elite, the stability of empire, and the security of capital. We march against stop and frisk because just as our grievances are intertwined, so is our liberation.

A Discussion with Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression

When: Wednesday, May 16 at 7 pm – 9 pm
Where: 365 Fifth Ave. CUNY Graduate Center, Segal Theater, First Floor.

At a time when crippling sanctions and threats of war bear down on people in Iran, there is an urgent need for people in the United States to organize against these policies advanced in our name. As global solidarity between people in the United States and other parts of the world gains new momentum, how can we support grassroots struggles in Iran that oppose both outside intervention and domestic authoritarianism?

Join us for a discussion about how to rebuild an anti-war movement that is centered around people-to-people solidarity.

Video testimonies from activists in Iran will be shown.

Havaar is a coalition of Iranians, Iranian-Americans, and allies formed in response to the U.S. government’s escalating attacks on Iran and to the Iranian government’s ongoing repression of grassroots movements (http://havaar.org/)

Havaar means “cry of emergency” in English.

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SPEAKERS:

Ali Abdi is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University. He was engaged in the student movement and women’s rights movement in Iran for five years, and participated in post-2009 presidential election protests in Iran. The Iranian democratic movement, globally known as the Green Movement, has informed his activism since then.

Arang Keshavarzian is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is currently on the editorial board of the “International Journal of Middle East Studies” and was on the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (www.merip.org) from 2005 to 2011. His book “Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

Bitta Mostofi is a nonprofit, immigrant rights attorney. She has also worked as a civil rights attorney and served on the board of directors of the Council on American Islamic Relations. Bitta has participated in anti-war and anti-sanctions campaigns, and was a co-coordinator for the Voices in the Wilderness; Iraq Peace Team from 2002-2003. In recent years Bitta has co-founded and worked with Where is My Vote, New York, which formed in the aftermath of the highly disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections. WIMV-NY strives to raise the level of international solidarity with the citizens of Iran in their movement towards social justice and democratic change and to speak out against the Iranian state’s human rights violations.

Manijeh Nasrabadi is an American Studies PhD student in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her essays and articles have appeared in “Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” “Social Text online,” “About Face” (Seal Press, 2008), “Hyphen Magazine,” “Tehran Bureau,” “Callaloo” and vidaweb.org. Her latest article “Iran and the US Anti-War Movement” appears in Jadaliyya (http://bit.ly/KJsPFX). Manijeh is a founding member of “Raha: Iranian Feminist Collective” in New York City.

Moderator:
Maia Ramnath organizes with Adalah-NY, South Asia Solidarity Initiative, and the Occupy Wall Street-Global Justice working group. She is on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and is the author of two recent books: “Haj to Utopia” and “Decolonizing Anarchism.” She is currently an adjunct history instructor at NYU.