Kinship of the poor

By Soheir Mursi

When in 1990 the French proposed an international conference to address conflicts involving Palestine and Iraq it was met with an unequivocal response from President Bush Sr. There could be no linkage, he said.

Since the first Palestinian Intifada and the initial phase of the physical and intellectual genocide perpetrated against Iraq under UN sponsorship, the International Peace and Justice Movement has confronted such compartmentalisation by foregrounding the connection between Zionist-imposed apartheid in occupied Palestine and the targeting of Iraq for re-colonisation. Challenging the logic of separately or sequentially attending to these forms of subjugation, and de facto capitulation to deceptive schemes of "peace/road maps" and "democratisation", the international movement against war and imperialist globalisation has laid bare their underlying structural relations.

The international movement against global apartheid continues to expose "linkages", including the impact of the US imperial project on the political rights, civil liberties and socioeconomic welfare of the majority of American people, not only Arabs and Muslims.

Budgetary allocations continue to privilege the rich, the military industrial complex and the "strategic partner" Israel.

Given the growing wealth gap joining the US military has increasingly become the only "choice" for many Americans suffering the violence of poverty and racism. Images of the African- American woman POW and her male colleagues prompt one to contemplate the irony of how the "Shock and Awe" campaign against the deliberately impoverished Iraqis involves disempowered US communities as canon fodder.

A chant reverberated throughout Tahrir Square last Thursday: "The people of Basra are our kin; they are poor like us."

* This week's Soapbox speaker is an Egyptian- American academic and international consultant.