The AWC Stands With Women Worldwide

Speech given by Autumn Lake at International Women’s Day rally on 3/10/2019 in Minneapolis

In order to be a genuine advocate for the advancement of women and our liberation, one has to be militantly anti-war and anti-imperialist. When we look at the myriad ways that the United States and other imperial powers exert their political dominance around the world – sanctions, embargoes, the funding of right-wing extremist movements, and direct military intervention, to name a few – it becomes evident that the destruction of the lives of women is an essential feature of imperialist intervention.

The US’s consistent support of the Israeli apartheid regime has enabled the Israeli occupying force to engage in systematic violence against Palestinian women. This includes a wide range of tactics: denying Palestinian women access to healthcare, undermining the ability of Palestinian women to seek out employment and education, and actively targeting and killing Palestinian women during military offensives against Gaza. One of the most harrowing tactics is the use of rape as a method of control and subjugation, a fate which befell Rasmea Odeh, one of the most well-known Palestinian women of the current political era. A lifelong anti-imperialist and resister of the brutal Israeli regime, Rasmea was raped by members of the Israeli military in a successful attempt to force a confession from her during a trial in 1969.

It is clear that In all methods of imperialist intervention, women have always been – and will likely continue to be – the ones suffering the most brutal consequences of western militarism and economic domination. Not just in Palestine, but in all regions where the US imposes its financial and political will. Despite this fact, too many supposed icons of women’s progress in the United States not only fail to center anti-imperialism in their politics, they outright reject it. Such is the political outlook of Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has a long history of voting alongside Republicans on the issues of foreign intervention and militarism, to include voting “yes” on bills that imposed sanctions on Syria and Iran. It is the outlook of Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the US State Department’s material support of the coup that destabilized Honduras in 2009; the same coup that created the conditions that led so many Honduran refugees to seek asylum in the US. The same coup that created and intensified a climate of violence against women living in Honduras, a climate that includes the use of rape as a means of political repression. Despite this horror, the US denies the constant danger of rape as a legitimate grounds for seeking asylum. This type of representation, without an anti-imperialist outlook, is what leads so many seemingly well-intentioned “feminists” to look at the destruction of schools and hospitals in Syria by means of US drone strikes and conclude “half of those drone pilots should be women!”

Unlike our local imperialist, Klobuchar, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar has consistently utilized her position to speak for the victims of imperialism, going so far as to condemn US war criminals such as Elliot Abrams, lay bare the Obama administration’s aggressive drone strike campaigns, and draw attention to the outright brutality of the Israeli apartheid regime. Unlike Hillary Clinton, the work of Berta Caceres in Honduras actively opposed the presence of the US military in the country since 1993, and she continued to lead resistance efforts against the destructive actions of US financial interests well after the US-backed coup in 2009. Unfortunately, she was assassinated in 2016 by forces that were trained here in the United States, at the School of the Americas, another component part of the US’s aggressive imperial machine.

Politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties advocate for the destruction and plunder of foreign nations, under the tenuous claim that intervention will lend itself to the liberation of women in the nations victimized by the US’s aggressive foreign policy. This is an outright lie made even more heinous by the fact they do not do nearly enough to ensure that women here in the US are granted equal pay, access to reproductive healthcare, affordable daycare, and an end to patriarchal sexual violence. Let’s be perfectly clear: any political position that actively denies the advancement of the causes of working and oppressed women domestically, while actively working to create and intensify violence against women abroad, is a far cry from anything that could possibly be considered progressive or feminist.