DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
The Black Liberation Army & Hamas

Dhoruba bin Wahad, The Black Liberation Army & Hamas Back
Liberation Media, withfared A Bll May 5, 2021
Whvwyoutube.com/watchv—dGikymstt

Cover image by Emory Douglas,“In Revolution One Wins or One Dies”
lack Panther: The Revolutionary At of Entory Douglas

with whatever weapons a hand

: —
Tand the people that came into the Black Liberation Army, many of them
wwere never in the Black Panther Party. Everybody assumed that
everybody that was in the BLA came from the Black Panther Party. That's
amisunderstanding. Before we went underground, we were in the
community. We were in the pool halls. e were in the barbershops. We
were selling papers on the subway. We was at Mrs. So-&-So’s crib in the
backyard—you understand?—at the barbecues. We was among, we were a
part of, we were with the people, you see? So when we go underground,
the people know us, you understand? “I'm going to see my aunt for the
weekend." “Here. Here's the key.” “We going (o be back 6:00 Monday,
now.” “Okay, baby. Cool.” I got a safe house for the weekend. She knows
what's going on. “They looking for you. You know they looking for you,
boy.” “Don’t worry. Don't worry. Them crackers can’t find shit.”

If we understand that Hamas, just like the BLA, is an expression of the
people’s relationship to power and the status quo, it's just that we took a
position—and the community knows that—that whenever the status quo
does something bad to our community we will retaliate in kind. Black
folks appreciated that. Yeah, if you stick a mic in their face from C1
said, “Two cops was just killed yesterday by these Black extremists and
these radical revolutionaries, what do you think about them?” They might
“Well,that’s a shame. I don’t think police should be killed.” What else
they going to say? “Yeah, they should have killed that motherfucker?” You
understand what I'm saying? But if you took a survey of the people

there... “Yeah, them cops always coming in here beating up on people.
Good somebody got their ass, especially that white one that's always
bullying people. 1's good they kill his ass.” They might not say that on
CBS, but that's what they feel

Sand

10 just like the Palestinians when Hamas went across that border and
defeated all of that surveillance and snatched them Israclis, they were
cheering. They was dancing on the tanks with their cell phones. You see?
‘They couldn’t cheer when they were oceupied and Isracli soldiers.
standing at the checkpoint. They had to humble themselves. They had to
let these people push them around. But, yeah, our boys got ‘em. Our boys.
got ‘em. Yeah. When they see the rockets coming over from Iran and from
Hezbollah dropping on them Israclis, they be talking about, “Yeah! Yeah!
Yeah!” People identify with resistance, you see? Who are the ones in
Lebanon talking about Hezbollah in a negative way? It's the Christians
talking about, “Hezbollah is endangering Lebanon.” Like Lebanon is safe

e lack bertion sy & hamae f
with Israel on your doorstep? If it wasn't for Hezbollah, Lebanon would be
cool? American imperialism would have no [influence]? Yall be good?

Justifying the BLA only means understanding psychologieally what Frantz
Fanon talked about the native. When the native kills a colonist, he's
reinventing himself, He's asserting his humanity. Now, the act may seem
inhumane, but that's the psychosis of it. Look at how they changed the
struggle around when the FLN started blowing up cafés in Paris. How
could they just blow up innocent people si
‘The same way you could bomb a village up in the motherfucking
‘mountains in Algeria and don’t give a fuck. The same way you could kill
goat herders. When you are suffering what you inflict on others, now you
understand that what goes around comes around, that your humani
just as valuable to you as it is to them. The fact that they will come here
and kill you tells you that they're far braver and more straightforward
than you are, because they come in here just to make sure that you
understand, “We ain't getting mad, we going to get evil.”

‘That was the BLA's mantra. “Blood to the horse’s brow and woe to those
who cannot swim.” That's what we said every time we went out and did
something, “Blood to the horse’s brow and woe to those who cannot
swim.” “Bam. Bam.” We gone. That's it. Didn't make no difference if you,
was a Black cop, if you was a white cop, if you was a female cop. Ifyou
took the life of a Black boy in our community and shot him down like a
dog, you were going to die. OF course they're gonna portray us as “just
these criminals.” I mean, they portray us... Every slave revolt, the ones
that revolted were criminals. They were inhumane. Even your homeboy
Finklestein says that. Remember when Finklesten said he went back and
looked at Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and how the abolitionists dealt with
that? Because he was in a conundrum about how to respond to Hamas and
how to respond to these things, and he realized out of all of these
abolitionists, not one of them condemned Nat Turner. They all said, “We
told you so. We told you that this was going to happen.”

What I'm trying to point out s that we used to have an axiom that
repression breeds resistance. All this murder and killing, you see them
young kids that's watching their whole family get murdered in their sleep,
them babies that are starving and watching their mama ery and watching
their daddy and their siblings die. If you think that that’s not the next
generation of Hamas, you a goddamn fool. And they going to be far more

PR —
ruthless than the ones that you got now. You better negotiate with these
‘motherfuckers you got now, because when that baby grow up... That's
why the Egyptians like, “ ain’t letting them motherfuckers in here. You
know what 'm going to have on my hand in 10 years with a population
that's experienced this and they in the desert in Gaza suffering and we the
ones just keeping them there suffering?” Whoa.

e lack bertion sy & hamae s
‘Dhoruba bin Wahad was a leading member of the New York Black Panther
Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters
throughout the Kast Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. Arrested in
June 1971, he was framed as part of the illegal FBI Counter Intelligence
Program (COINTELPRO) and subjected to unfair treatment and torture
during his nineteen years in prison. During Dhoruba’s incarceration,
litigation on his behalf produced over three hundred thousand pages of
COINTELPRO documentation, and upon release in 1990 he was able to
bringa successful lawsuit against the New York Department of
Corrections for all thei i

wrong-doings and criminal a

both Ghana and the U.S,, Dhoruba, an uncompromising eritic of
imperialism and capitalism, continues to write and work promoting.
freedom for all political prisoners and revolutionary Pan-Africanism,

Support Dhoruba with medical expenses:
www.gofundme.com/f/support-dhoruba-bin-wahad

PR —
e lack bertion sy & hamae
“BLOOD TO THE
HORSE’S BROW &
WOE TO THOSE WHO
CANNOT SWIM”