MAS Brooklyn & Within Our Lifetime Present: Boycott Zionist Dates – Outreach & Training

Join us on Wednesday, February 19 at 7 PM for an important outreach and training session focused on the Boycott Zionist Dates campaign. Learn how you can take action this Ramadan to support justice and stand against the normalization of occupation. Together, we can make a difference!

Zoom Link: bit.ly/bzd2025

Campaign Toolkit: https://wolpalestine.com/campaigns/dates/

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get involved!

With the holy month of Ramadan right around the corner, we are calling on all businesses to #BoycottZionistDates and ensure that our communities don't break our fasts with dates supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people 🇵🇸 Learn more about how you can plug into this campaign at wolpalestine.com/dates

Last night, WOL hosted a training on community outreach for this campaign alongside MAS. We call on everyone to get in touch with their local businesses and institutions using the materials found in our toolkit to inform and encourage our communities to #BoycottZionistDates. If you would like to organize an outreach training for your school or community, email us at wol.palestine@gmail.com

Today on the 60th anniversary of his assassination and martyrdom on February 21st 1965, we honor the life and legacy of Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

Through his lifelong commitment to linking the Black liberation struggle in the United States to the struggle of all oppressed people resisting colonialism and imperialism around the world, Malcolm redefined what it meant to fight for freedom. Malcolm's revolutionary internationalism and travels across Asia, Africa and beyond, led him to taking an unwavering stance in support of Palestine and against zionism as part of a worldwide struggle against oppression and injustice.

Just months before his death at the age of 39, Malcolm traveled to Palestine in September 1964 and spent two days in Gaza. In Gaza Malcolm visited Palestinian refugee camps established following the Nakba in 1948, met with the poet Harun Hashim Rashid and prayed in local masjids.

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During his next stop in Cairo, he met with the newly founded Palestine Liberation Organization. The trip inspired him to publish an article in the Egyptian Gazette September 17th 1964 in which he famously wrote that "The zionist argument to justify israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history."

Today as we look back on Malcolm's legacy, we also uplift the Palestinian poet, intellectual, professor and martyr Refaat Alareer, who like Malcolm, was assassinated.

In 2021, on the 56th anniversary of Malcolm's martyrdom, Refaat recounted that years prior in 2004 he "was asked in an interview for a scholarship who my role model was. I took a breath, smiled, and unflinchingly proudly, said, ‘Malcolm X.’ The interviewer said, ‘But he was violent!’ I spoke for 5 minutes nonstop about brother Malcolm X. I won the grant. It was one of my proudest moments."

Refaat's interview in 2004 took place exactly 40 years after Malcolm's trip to Gaza in 1964. Despite the decades that separated them, Refaat became immersed in Malcolm's writings and his teachings, across space and time, with Gaza at the center.

In 2012, during an event commemorating Malcolm X at the Centre for Political and Development Studies in Gaza, Refaat was invited to speak. During his talk, Refaat reflected that he was first introduced to Malcolm in his early 20s, which is when he first read his autobiography.

"All Palestinians admire him, or should admire him, for many reasons," Refaat declared in his talk. “As Palestinians, we can use different means and methods to liberate ourselves, to get rid of the occupation and the evils of the occupation, ‘by any means necessary,’ like he said."

“If you don’t read him," Refaat continued, "there is a blank area in your mind or heart that needs to be filled.”

Malcolm filled this area in Refaat's mind, and countless others through the generations, from Harlem to Gaza and around the world. During the Great Return March in Gaza in 2018, Refaat showed up to one of the demonstrations with a handwritten sign featuring a quote of Malcolm's: "If you want something, you'd better make some noise."

Like Malcolm, Refaat rejected any and all attempts to condemn and vilify the resistance of colonized people in the face of genocide. As Malcolm once said, "We need allies who are going to help us achieve a victory, not allies who are going to tell us to be nonviolent."

Malcolm and Refaat, like Gaza, continue to teach us what it means to fight for our collective humanity in the face of oppression, and will continue to inspire generation after generation until liberation within our lifetime.

As Malcolm taught us: "Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression, because power, real power, comes from conviction which produces action, uncompromising action. It also produces insurrection against oppression. This is the only way you end oppression — with power."

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ALL OUT TO DEFEND BAY RIDGE & PALESTINE 🇵🇸

📆 Wednesday, Feb. 26
⏰ Press conference at 4 PM, rally and salah at 5 PM
📍 6807 5th Ave Brooklyn, NY
🗞️ Press release: tinyurl.com/ProtectBayRidge

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For over 15 months of escalated genocide in Palestine, we have been flooding New York for Gaza. All the while, we have incurred both brutal repression from the NYPD and now increasing attacks from zionist organizations. Betar, Herut, and several other racist, anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic groups have attempted to instigate fights at our rallies, maced us, worked to doxx community members, and put out a reward for anyone who can hand a beeper to WOL chair Nerdeen Kiswani (effectively a death threat). Now, these same groups are planning to protest a masjid in Bay Ridge, a clear escalation of their incitement of hatred against our community. WOL, along with over 30 organizations across New York, are calling on allies to come out to Bay Ridge for a press conference, rally and salah on Wednesday at 4 PM in defense of our community and the Palestinian people.

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Honoring the Martyrs of the Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre — Thirty-one years ago on February 25th 1994, zionist terror bred in Brooklyn spilled Palestinian blood in Al-Khalil. On that day Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born settler, entered the Ibrahimi Mosque and murdered twenty-nine Palestinians in cold blood as they prayed during Ramadan. Goldstein was subsequently overpowered, disarmed and beaten to death by the surviving Palestinians in an act of self-defense and collective resistance.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Palestinians in Al-Khalil estimated that as many as 70 people were martyred that day, with more than 250 injured.

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Before he settled in Palestine in 1983, Goldstein’s anti-Palestinian hate was molded by his membership in the Jewish Defense League. Founded in New York City in 1968 by Meir Kahane, who was also born and raised in Brooklyn, the JDL was notorious for carrying out multiple bombings and terrorist attacks throughout the 1970s & 80s and the assassination of Palestinian-American community activist Alex Odeh in 1985 in Santa Ana, California. 

Although the JDL was investigated and surveilled for its terrorist activities by the FBI for decades, it remains active to this day after rebranding as Yad Yamin and now as Herut, and continues to collaborate with other violent zionist organizations in New York City, including Betar.

In recent years, emboldened by active protection from the NYPD and more “mainstream” entities like the Zionist Organization of America, these groups have increased their physical violence and intimidation against the Palestinian community and allies in New York City.

Recent examples of this violence include former JDL members (now publicly identifying as Herut) macing pro-Palestine youth, Betar offering $1,000 to anyone who hands WOL’s chair and founder Nerdeen Kiswani a beeper (a reference to the occupation’s terrorist attacks in Lebanon in 2024), and JDL-adjacent Councilwoman Inna Vernikov bringing a gun to threaten a demonstration at Brooklyn College in October 2023.

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Meir Kahane & Baruch Goldstein’s Legacies Today: Palestinian Resistance In The Face Of Zionist Violence

The actions outlined above in part one are not isolated incidents. Inna Vernikov’s political mentor, Dov Hikind, a former New York State Assemblyman, was also formerly a member of the JDL. In 2008 he declared, “I’m proud of every single moment, let me make that very clear. Rabbi Kahane had a great influence on me.” In the 1980s, according to journalists Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman, Hikind was suspected by the FBI of “involvement in planning a string of six bombings against Arab targets in NY, Massachusetts and California—in which one man was killed and seven were injured.”

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Before being elected to New York City Council, Vernikov served as an aide to Hikind, and during her election bid in 2021, held a campaign event inviting supporters to “Meet Assemblyman Dov Hikind & His Wife Shani!” Shani Hikind, as of 2024, was the Executive Vice President of American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, a zionist organization funding illegal settlements in the West Bank and Al-Quds. Between 2020-2023, Dov and Shani Hikind contributed $2,550 to Inna Vernikov's City Council campaigns, according to public records.

In 1990 following his death, supporters of Meir Kahane lined the streets of Brooklyn during his funeral procession with israeli flags and signs that read “Death To Arabs.” Kahane’s grandson, Meir Ettinger, who carries both his name and his violent legacy, is one of the leaders of the Hilltop Youth, a zionist vigilante group in the West Bank that carried out the 2015 murder of Dawabsheh family in the village of Duma, in which 18 month Ali Dawabsheh and his two parents were burned to death.

The forces that molded and enabled Goldstein’s terror continue to fuel violence against Palestinians today, both in Palestine and here in New York City. And it's no coincidence that those that found inspiration in Goldstein's genocidal violence, like Itamar Ben-Gvir who had a portrait of him hanging on his living room wall for years, are the most vocal champions of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As we honor the martyrs of the Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre and all of Palestine's martyrs, we must renew our commitment to resisting zionism and colonialism in all its forms and fighting for Palestinian liberation and return within our lifetime.🇵🇸

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🚨HAPPENING RIGHT NOW‼️
ALL OUT TO DEFEND BAY RIDGE & PALESTINE 🇵🇸

📍 6807 5th Ave Brooklyn, NY
🗞️ Press release: tinyurl.com/ProtectBayRidge