How do we even talk about the horrific killings in Orlando, which left at least 50 LGBTQ revelers dead and more than 50 more injured in the middle of pride month? First we mourn. Then we rage. Then we hug our loved ones, especially our LGBTQ friends, comrades, and family members.
Then we look again, and we see the horror — that this murderer was licensed to carry guns and had no trouble buying incredibly powerful military-style weapons. So casually. So legally. So common, across our country. That’s when we start to rage again.
More troubling still, Omar Mateen worked for a company that was perpetrating systemic violence against vulnerable people long before he took up arms against his LGBTQ neighbors. For nine years Mateen worked for G4S Security, a British-based corporation that contracts with the U.S. and Israeli governments for work that often violates human rights on a massive scale.
G4S, which brags about having 600 staffers on the southern border, has contracts with U.S. immigration authorities to detain and deport people back to Mexico, as well as to run private juvenile detention facilities. In Israel, meanwhile, G4S profits from providing equipment and services in Israeli prisons and interrogation centers where Palestinians are routinely tortured. It’s also involved in running Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Incidentally, G4S is the company that trained Mateen to work as an armed security guard, which licensed him to carry and use weapons. And although his coworkers told supervisors that Mateen “frequently made homophobic and racial comments,” the company did nothing. It kept him on board — and kept him armed.
Should this company continue to profit from multi-million-dollar contracts with the U.S. government?
Since 2012, there’s been a major campaign against G4S, resulting in decisions by major mainstream institutions — like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Methodist Church, numerous European universities, important charities in South Africa and the Netherlands, UN agencies in the Middle East, and more — to divest from G4S holdings, or to cancel or not renew service contracts. G4S is profiting from exactly the kind of anti-Arab and anti-Latino racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia that are all on the rise in the U.S. right now.
If the early reports are accurate, G4S’s long-serving employee is responsible for the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
And here let’s continue to be careful with our numbers. As my IPS colleague Karen Dolan and others have been pointing out, our nation’s origins are grounded in genocide and slavery. Earlier history has to take into account things like the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, when between 150 and 300 children, women, and men were gunned down. That mass shooting is part of our history, too.
But our nation’s history also includes the great movements that have risen against war, racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. The party at Orlando’s Pulse club was part of a month-long Gay Pride celebration rooted in the extraordinary movement that grew out of the 1969 Stonewall revolt, when bar patrons fought back against police brutality toward gay men and lesbians. June 12 was a special Latino Night at Pulse. And Reverend William Barber, a leader of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, reminded me that June 12, now seared in our memories as the day of the Orlando massacre, is also the anniversary of the 1963 Mississippi assassination of the great civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
One more link between our movements — from Stonewall to Orlando, from Mississippi to Palestine.
Muhammad Ali
And with all the discussion and debate these days about intersectionality and the need to link our movements against racism and against war, the name of Muhammad Ali belongs right up in our pantheon with Dr. King, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Howard Zinn, and so many other women and men who fought and continue to fight those linked battles together.
In the history of our movements for peace and for justice, the most strategic activists, analysts, leaders and cultural workers were always those who understood the centrality of racism at the core of U.S. wars, and who grasped the ways in which U.S. militarism relied on racism at home to recruit its cannon-fodder and build public support for wars against “the other” – be they Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Somalis, Yemenis or …
It was Muhammad Ali who first described the Vietnam-era draft as “White people sending Black people to fight Yellow people to protect the country they stole from the Red people.” He said no to the draft and refused to step forward to accept the legitimacy of the coerced registration. Ali was convicted of felony draft resistance, facing years in prison, while remarking “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong [sic].”
What is perhaps less well known, but absolutely consistent with this man of extraordinary principle, is his 1974 statement in Beirut. After visiting refugee camps filled with Palestinians dispossessed of their homes in the 1947-48 Nakba, or catastrophe, Ali said, “I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland.”
All of those statements were massively controversial at the time. Ali’s initial resistance to the draft led to his being excluded from professional boxing for years. Yet Ali and the anti-war and anti-racism movements that Ali was part of continued their work. And Ali’s own presence, his principles, his influence was such that in later years the tributes poured in, including his memorable lighting of the Olympic flame at the otherwise corporate-controlled, ultra-establishment 1996 Atlanta games.
Wracked with the tremors of advanced Parkinson’s disease, he held the torch high and stood tall somehow with more grace, dignity, and power than any of that year’s athletes. His incandescent presence that night made undeniably clear, once again, that the movements against war and racism that Ali so eloquently spoke for and that he remained such an elemental and principled part of, had already succeeded in transforming public discourse, if not yet public policy, across the United States.
15 June 2016