Then Would You Call It Genocide?
Updated September 30, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Imagine if it came to light that in Russia today, Jewish people were systematically and pervasively discriminated against in housing, jobs, education and health care; and that connected to that, their life expectancy was dramatically lower than that of Russian majority people—as low as three decades in some regions! Let’s even say that the maternal mortality rate for some Jewish women was 12 times as high as that for Russian women in Moscow.
Imagine further that Russia had by far both the largest prison population and the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the whole world—so high in fact that 25 percent of all the prisoners in the whole world were in Russia. Imagine that nearly one half of those prisoners were Jewish, while Jews themselves only made up 1/8 of the population. Imagine that the media and culture purveyed crude stereotypes of Jewish people as violent criminals and degraded fools.
Finally, imagine that it was documented in countless videos that Russian police patrolled Jewish neighborhoods and routinely stopped and frisked Jews who did nothing wrong, routinely beat them and arrested them on phony charges and sent them to prison, and even routinely murdered Jewish people—and then were not prosecuted because they claimed that they were scared of Jews because they were “demons.”
Wouldn’t humane people rightly condemn this as a slow genocide? The U.S. itself would no doubt rush to the United Nations to attack its rival for such gross violations of human rights and would warn that this slow genocide could easily become a fast one.
Well, you don’t have to imagine it. This is going on right here, right now, in America, to Black people. The conditions and specific facts cited above apply to Black people in the US, not Jews in Russia. So why do people in America deny that this—genocide—is what is going on right here, carried forward by their own government, supported by way too many of its own people, silently tolerated by way too many others… when it is right in front of their faces??
The time is long since past when this denial can be allowed to continue. The stakes are way too high. People need to clearly take sides AGAINST this genocide, and especially the illegitimate police terror and murder that enforce it, and demand that “THIS MUST STOP!”
The time to do that is NOW, this October. The place to do that is New York City, October 22-24 – where the whole world will be watching, and all of society will be compelled to answer the question:
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
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