Witha smile and a handshake!

What are the practical reasons why the US feels confident enough not to worry about that right now?

I believe strongly that the movement in the US is much better than that.

Kanafani also waged an unrelenting intellectual struggle against those—whether Palestinians, Arabs, or others—who opposed “external operations.” The author of the dictum “behind the enemy everywhere” continually affirmed, up to the moment of his assassination, that there is neither separation nor contradiction between the actions of the fedayeen in Palestine and across its borders and “external operations,” so long as the political strategy is unified and the enemy is one.

Kanafani was under the strict discipline and structure of a Democratic Centralist party in active warfare against its occupier. What unified political strategy was Rodriguez participating in?

What is the strategic or tactical value of what Rodriguez did? How did it advance the struggle? How did it weaken the US or the entity? What follow-up actions have emerged from it? What did it do?

Rodriguez’s operation not only revealed the limits of liberal discourse; it also restored the value of direct action as a mobilizing and agitational tool, placing everyone before their responsibilities.

Who did it mobilize? What agitation did it achieve?

Therefore, Rodriguez’s operation represents a cry in the face of the American system, and a message that resistance is not the preserve of geography, race, or color, but is an affiliation, an identity, and an ethical and political stance that allows for no compromise.

No, resistance is not an ethical stance or an identity. It is the practical process of defeating your oppressors and finding the path to victory. How did Rodriguez achieve that?

Our assessment is that the majority of the Palestinian people—inside the homeland and in the diaspora—especially in light of the massacres in Gaza, see the revival of feda’i action as a revolutionary necessity. They are calling for broader popular participation in supporting the resistance, whether political, financial, media, or cultural support, or through direct involvement. This is the popular cradle and the revolutionary driving force needed to halt the aggression, shift the balance of power, and achieve liberation.

What is the base of power and strength for Hamas, PIJ, and the PFLP? Their support in the Palestinian masses.

What is the base of power and strength for the IRGC? Their support in the Palestinian masses.

What is the base of power of the Communist parties of Cuba, Vietnam, or China? Their support in the masses of their countries.

Each of these has a true "popular cradle" from which militant revolutionary action can bloom. These were created by the immediate need to resist active violent colonization and imperialism, not moral, ethical, or identity-based stances.

What is the "popular cradle" for violent action on behalf of Palestine within the US? It does not exist at the scale necessary to maintain it. Rodriguez killed someone who didn't matter and whose death disrupted nothing. It landed him in prison, probably for the rest of his life. What could he have achieved otherwise? If he was willing to make that sacrifice, he wasted it on a flunky, a pointless functionary. High level leaders come to the US all the time, walk the streets of New York City. There his sacrifice could have achieved something. Or he could have dedicated his life to constructing a popular movement, doing the unheroic but necessary work of creating the popular cradle to actually wage revolutionary war in the United States! Instead he killed a nobody and got adoration for it while achieving nothing in material or political terms.

We have understood for over a hundred years that propaganda of the deed is ineffective, that assassinations don't win wars or revolutions, that only the masses can wield the power to change the world. Rodriguez, out of his honest and admirable desperation and bravery, made a strategic and tactical mistake. Now we have one less revolutionary organizer, which is far more valuable to us than a former IDF soldier in the US is to the zionists. I have no moral condemnation of him, but our goal must be to defeat the state at the heart of global imperialism. Only the masses, sufficiently motivated and organized, are capable of that. The Islamic Revolution was not made by assassins. Neither was the Palestinian resistance or the Russian Revolution or the Chinese or the Venezuelan... On and on. These were made by the masses.

We cannot think in terms of satisfying acts of violence but in a real path to the victory of our class over the ruling class.

Ohio perfectly average as God intended

Not that far a future, I think

Why are you so defensive about this? I will happily be proven wrong but as of now there is no momentum to stopping the unimaginable destruction being wielded by the US war machine. Until or unless that changes, I will remain skeptical.

I am defensive because you are lumping a lot of dedicated comrades in with counterrevolutionary zionist freaks. The inability of the movement to halt the machine at the moment is not the same as it being in favor of imperialism. It's building up from essentially nothing but that tiny core who held to anti-imperialism in the decades since the collapse of the USSR.

The legitimate solidarity organization Samidoun seems to have been abandoned by the pro Palestine solidarity groups in the US. Just like Elias Rodriguez was abandoned. There is a joke that in the US they didn't ban Palestine Action like in the UK because they don't have one to ban.

Samidoun sadly was legally obliterated in the US and Canada. Any support to its remnants would, by necessity, be completely underground and not publicized. Elias Rodriguez didn't do anything besides kill a random Israeli. It's true there's no group like Palestine Action at scale in the US. Individual cells have attempted similar actions and the US police state, far more comprehensive than the UK's, has swiftly and successfully crushed them. Again, anything like PA in the US would have to be a totally underground, unpublicized operation.

There are two conclusions to draw which can overlap and are necessarily interrelated: the American left is too afraid to take more radical actions because of the power of the police state and/or the American populace at large is too propagandized, demoralized, and disorganized to act as the necessary support base for sustained militant action. The general strategy of the left in the US is to build a mass movement that is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist and has sufficient militancy for revolutionary action, which, given the combination of imperial spoils and a vast police state that obliterated the old revolutionary movement, is a long and difficult task. We cannot simply will into existence a population ready to fight.

Internet search can find communist parties globally calling for "solidarity with Iranian protesters" in 2022. Unfortunately it was not just western.

Turns out there are shitty "communists" everywhere. That does not mean all communists are shitty.

I don't have access to the article so I can't see what specific examples it discusses. I'm aware of and I'm agreement with the sources it references in the one page I can see. Obviously, being pro-imperialist is a tendency that exists in the Western left, but I do not think it is the average and certainly not the universal position. Highlighting a laughingstock group like SWP to attack a movement that a) is built around a core of unwavering anti-imperialists who for decades have been working to combat the exact position you're describing and b) is largely composed of a rapidly expanding mass component holding moderately to well developed anti-imperialist consciousness is completely inaccurate.

You're pointing at a tiny group of freaks who we all hate for the same reasons you do and saying "you're just like them". These people are not remotely representative.

The entire spectrum of "left organizations" was cheer leading the CIA/MI6/Mossad backed riots in 2022 which is actually not very long ago in the scheme of history. Many still did in January 2026!

This is absolutely not true. There are organizations that have always held a consistent anti-imperialist line. PSL is unwavering on this and only DSA is bigger in the US.

I don't know why there's an insistence on broadly attacking the entire American left by picking out tiny fringe weirdos and using them to paint a movement to whom they are irrelevant and unwelcome.

Not exactly "average", this is an explicitly zionist fringe group with absolutely no membership.

:naked-trump: