Assata Shakur: Re-Imaging "Terrorism" Into the Face Of a Black Woman

Assata Shakur: An Autobiography book cover released in 1987. Shakur, who was granted political asylum in Cuba during the 1980s, has been placed on the FBI's most wanted terrorists list., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

DID OBAMA FBI RE-IMAGE BOMBERS INTO FACE OF BLACK WOMAN TO COUNTER SMILING, WHITE-BOY-NEXT-DOOR-LOOK OF THE BOSTON BOMBERS?

May 8, 2013 by Alexandra Valiente
By Ezili Dantò
HLLN

On Thursday, May 2, 2013, Assata Shakur became the first woman added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list. The reward for her capture was doubled to $2 million. Shakur is the second person originally from the United States to be placed on the FBI terrorist list.

Assata Shakur is 65-years old and living in exile in Cuba. She was a member of the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War Movement back in the 1960s. She was falsely convicted in 1973 for killing a New Jersey state trooper during a gunfight where she was shot twice while having both her arms held up in the air, and also shot in the back.

Shakur is the step-aunt and godmother to famed Hip-Hop artist and poet, Tupac Shakur and has always maintained her innocence and accused federal authorities of political persecution under Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations to destroy the Black power movement for human rights.

A surgeon who examined her wounds after the shooting said it was “anatomically necessary” for her arms to have been raised for her to receive the bullet wounds she did and that her hand wounds made it “anatomically impossible” for her have fired the shot that killed the state trooper. No gun powder was found on her hands. In 1979, Shakur escaped from jail, later fleeing to Cuba where she received political asylum.

After holding the press conference to suddenly declare Assata Shakur a domestic terrorist who killed a state trooper “execution style” (which grossly misstates the documented and reported evidence), the FBI proceeded, 40-years after the incident, to place huge “most wanted terrorist” billboard photos of Assata in New Jersey.

“We’re talking about a woman who was shot twice while attempting to give herself up to police who were co-operating with Federal authorities to target and assassinate or otherwise eliminate members of the Black Liberation movement just as they had done and admitted in a civil lawsuit to doing to Martin Luther King Jr.” – Scotty Reid, Black Talk Radio.

In these fascist heydays of the morally corrupt financial elites, effectively represented by Barack Obama, the billboard photo simply re-images bombers and terrorists with the face of an African woman.

For psychological purposes, for white supremacy, its vampirish, cannibalistic taste, its world-renown avarice, for the Euro minority’s desperate historical and world lies to keep working, it seems that the kind, smiling, curly-haired white-boy-next-door-look of young Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev or of Connecticut’s Adam Lanza – had to be countered pretty fast, no? Even if Obama’s FBI had to reach back 40-years to re-make reality for today.

It seems, Obama’s FBI found it convenient in this climate when the US public is reeling from shock and fear, after the Connecticut Sandy Hook school massacre and the Boston marathon bombings, to confuse the issue. Re-imaging bombers and mindless gunmen with the face of an African woman freedom fighter and putting her pictures on billboards in New Jersey serves not to find Shakur but only to intimidate the Black community and other civilian justice advocates legitimately protesting the prison industrial complex and US police departments killing unarmed, innocent citizens with impunity.

Adam Lanza, 20. Shot his mother and then fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in cold blood.

If the FBI’s mandate is to preserve and protect the lives of the innocent, then FBI resources would best be applied to reign in the rogue police departments in the US that kill unarmed innocent citizens, especially in the Black community, with impunity. The FBI would better serve the public if they paid more attention to these domestic terror cells or concentrated more on finding the potential Lanzas and Tsarnaevs before these mentally disturbed folks caused public harm.

Attacking and re-imaging a 65-year old Black woman, not even living in the US as a dangerous “domestic terrorist,” who presumably would, like the mindless, gun-toting Lanza, hurt innocent school children, or like the two white Boston bombers, indiscriminately kill marathon watchers and participants is an outragous misuse of the public trust and a gross distortion of the 1960s Black liberation struggle.

This is the very same FBI that’s accused of dropping the ball on the elder Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

It is amazing — and pathetic — how swiftly the FBI felt compelled to frame the domestic terrorism conversation around a Black revolutionary living in Cuba, instead of two White men from Boston. - Kirsten West Savali, Newsone.com

The huge Assata Shakur “FBI most wanted” billboards, plastered in New Jersey where Obama’s FBI know Assata Shakur is not living, is, as many have noted, about politically repressing the Black community. A pretext to invade, send drones to Cuba? Shut up human rights avocates who struggle against tyrannical US foreign and domestic policies? Repress public dissent by dehumanizing and misrepresenting justice advocates as psychopaths or cold-blooded executioner?

“This is not about Assata Shakur, it is about sending a message to the Black community and those that live within it who stand up to police violence, oppression and murder of residents, one of the very reasons for the formation of the Black Panthers. It is about the political repression of those who advocate on the behalf of the many political prisons being held by the United States government often in torturous conditions. It is about sending a message to anyone who would take up arms in defense of life, liberty and true freedom in a country that is home to the largest prison population in the world which the federal government and various corporations use as slave labor. It is about sending a message to those that would dare stand up and point out that the US government is the most violent entity on the planet and one that commits acts of terrorism against non-white people and nations on behalf of maintaining the American imperialist status-quo.”

The Black collaborators and sell-outs who uphold white supramacy

The colonial role of Bafyòti yo, the Black collaborators like Obama, Eric Holder, and the Black FBI agent that was put up-front to help make the announcement at their press conference- are critical.

Haiti has proven this and showed the way out with the Bwa Kayiman call to action for all Africans and liberty lovers.

The Black collaborators and sell-outs for the enslavers fulfill an essential role for the colonial blueprint and false narrative to work and for the Empire’s key stakeholders, for these white minorities to rule the world’s masses they’ve contained-in-poverty, infected with deadly diseases, killed, imprisoned, brutalized, repressed, falsely accused, hunted down or coopted. (But, see “They wait without hate“.)

It is critical to highlight over and over again how Obama is used to distract and cover up the recolonization, AFRICOM/US militarization, drone warfare in Africa, US occupation in Haiti and to whitewash the absolute police and economic repression in Black communities in the USA. White supremacy continues because of the behavior of the Black collaborators, the poor and disconnected who are daily bought out.

Assata Shakur was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and forced into exile. But it is sadly under Barack Obama and Eric Holder that, 40-years later, Assata becomes the first woman freedom fighter added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list as a “threat” to the US government with the reward for her capture doubled to $2 million.

Freedom warriors like Assata Shakur and others in the Black Liberation Movement helped pave the way, during the sixties liberation movement, for an Obama, Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Cheryl Mills to attend previously segregated schools of higher learning. Helped pave the way for them to hold the positions they hold today. Black culture in America evidences that death is not the worst end for a human being and thus Blacks have endured the various stages of white tyranny with dignity for over 400 years , not becoming what their Ancestors fought against.

Yet, in one fell swoop, under Obama, the FBI is projecting upon the Black community perhaps their boss’ personal failures as the head of the white supremacist, profit-over-people world structure. It speaks to the dangerous effectiveness of the power elites Obama services that his presidancy can, without much outrage, attempt to destroy the Ancestors’ dignified legacy as today’s impoverished Black community is being falsely colored as mindless mass bombers who kill innocent civilians.

It’s ironic how Black collaborators, who are also inheritors of Assata Shakur’s freedom work, are now the bounty hunters hunting down anew Assata Shakur who clearly represents universal freedom for all, not mindless terrorism as they would have us believe.

Washington knows she’s not a terrorist. They just want to shut her up because Assata Shakur continues, even while in exile like Mumia Abu Jamal on death row, to exercise her freedom of speech, her right to advocate for “revolutionary changes in the structure and principles that govern the United States.”

Lennox Hind, her attorney since the 1970s says: “The act she was (falsely) convicted of had nothing to do with terrorism.”

The revolutionary Assata Shakur, once described as the soul of the Black Liberation Movement in the 1970s has pointed out that the same US/white power structure of yesterday’s COINTELPRO still practices, with the complicity of the corporate media, systemic terror, racist tyranny against the Black community.

“COINTELPRO utilized and received full cooperation from the corporate media to demonize and alienate freedom fighters from the people who supported them, corporate media today is still fulfilling that role. The concept of a free and independent press in America has always been a fraud and it remains so today.” – Scotty Reid, FBI Billboards not about Assata Shakur, it is about politically repressing the Black community.

The Haiti Parallels and Bwa Kayiman Wisdom

The US government making false accusations to criminalize, marginalize or get killed civilian dissenters to its structural injustices happens not only in the US but in Haiti, regularly. And yet if they used the same standards.

Which is why Ezili HLLN writes the non-colonial narrative for Haiti.

Why, for instance, this week when the corporate media had a field day plastering the “news” that the defunct, Wyclef Jean charity Yele Haiti, was being sued for not paying its bills. We posted it thus:

“Wyclef’s Yele Haiti hit with $100K lawsuit. When will Red Cross, Chemonics, DynCorp and Clinton Foundation be sued?” (See also, Ezili Dantò’s Note: The sea of injustice we live in will have you believing Wyclef Jean stole the earthquake monies in Haiti.)

But the Haiti voice keeping track. Asking why the whites stealing with impunity get no media coverage. Just advocating for “revolutionary changes in the structure and principles that govern the United States”, or for self-determination, self-reliance and self-defense is criminalized and, as in the case of Assata, will bring the might of the FBI or other authorities on the justice seekers’ head, for life.

But still, “live free or die” is Desalin’s imperative. So we must face evil straight up, not become media zombies. For Haiti, one must always ask again and again why is the world allowing the lawless UN to hide the US occupation of Haiti with impunity? Why is Wyclef Jean always getting sued, but the UN, the Clinton Foundation, Red Cross, Dyncorp, Chemonics, “Partners & Death”, USAID, their large NGOs, et al, are not also being sued for legal improprieties, money laundering, ethical conflicts of interests, over-reaching, switch ‘n bait, not meeting their obligations to Haitians and for stealing Haiti earthquake funds?

Is it because, the white saviors of Haiti, both from the Left and Right Washington duopoly, benefit like bandits, by constantly securing their paternalism and elevating “the Haitians are corrupt” narrative?

Assata Shakur’s life and struggles evidences how the radical, transformative voice against these parasites is systematically suppressed by (Ndòki) the elites, their intelligence agencies, NGOs, medias, military arms.

Haiti women, like Sesil Fatima, Gran Guitonn, Mari Jann, Defile, Grann Toya, Sanit Belè took up arms in self-defense to abolish slavery, forced assimilation, colonialism, the Euro-slave trade that sold their babies as cargo and to create Ayiti.

In the US, it was the FBI’s COINTELPRO that was unleashed to prevent a “Black messiah” from rising.

In Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide and the Democracy Movement was destroyed and overthrown twice by the US, its client-states and Haiti-supported oligarchs and death squads.

She was betrayed, captured, put to death by firing squad by the French along with her husband, General Belè, who tried to save his soldier-wife by trading his life for hers. Napoleon’s soldiers killed them both after agreeing to the swap. Sanit’s courage and how she died is what Haitians remember.

She refused to be blindfolded. “Fire,” she urged the French enslavers, baring her naked chest to Napoleon’s firing squad. “You didn’t put a blindfold on my husband. I don’t need your blindfold. This is how a woman warrior dies.” (Ezili Dantò’s Haiti Work: The non-colonial narrative.)

Haiti has been under US occupation since the 2004 bi-centennial US regime change. Its sovereignty grind down to bitter ash with the help of the international economic hit men and the White Savior NGO Industrial complex, headed by the likes of Dr. Paul Farmer, the UN, USAID, the Clintons, George Soros, the Bushes, the Washington “beltway bandits” consulting firms ( DynCorp, Chemonics…) and their Black collaborators.

Haiti is today occupied, terrorized, pillaged, re-enslaved.

“My name is Assata (“she who struggles”) Shakur (“the thankful one”), and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color.”.” — Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur my sister, djab la di l ap manje w, se pa vre.

Recall Haiti’s Bwa Kayiman – the call, the prayer, the greatest struggle for rebirth ever told…and still unfolding. E, e, Mbomba, e, e! Kanga Bafyòti. Kanga Mundele. Kanga Ndòki. Kanga yo!

Kenbe la Assata. Nou la, nou la. Pa lage. Lamou pa nou an, li pli fò ke lanmò. Chèn sa pap janm kase! Nou fè yon sèl kò. Boukmann pa te fè Bwa Kayiman pou Assata Shakur sevi etranje.

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” — Assata Shakur

Ezili Dantò of HLLN
Desalin’s Descendant
May, 2013