ACTIVISTS FOR PALESTINE DEMAND – FIFA: MOVE THE WORLD CUP OUT OF THE U.S.! What can we do here, in the heart of the U.S. empire, inside the belly of the beast, to hasten the end of the war, genocide and carnage in Palestine and Iran? What can we do in Boston, where Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey have already made clear their complicity in the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine by harboring Israel’s criminal consulate at City Hall Plaza and promoting its corporate arms, such as weapons maker Elbit Systems and AI investment accelerator Sheba? One way now is to target FIFA, the World Cup corporation, which is scheduled to take over City Hall Plaza in June. Not only has FIFA refused the world’s righteous demand to ban Israel from its
“beautiful games,” it has joined the Trump real estate cabal in its illegitimate “Gaza Board of Peace,” outrageously creating a fake “FIFA Peace Prize” for the racist, warmongering MAGA president. That is why the Boston Coalition for Palestine has taken up the call of the Black Alliance for Peace and the growing Anti-Fascist Football Coalition to say: “FIFA: Move the Games out of the U.S. now!” and “Boycott the U.S.!” We can bring the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions [BDS] Movement that has targeted the Zionist state back to the source, to the U.S. itself. The U.S. is what Martin Luther King Jr. so courageously called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” What was true then during the U.S. occupation and genocide
in Vietnam is true now during the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine. Every day the U.S. and the Zionist regime find new ways to show their depravity.
Just as the U.S. continues to support genocide overseas, its thugs at ICE are rounding up thousands of immigrant workers. This is not a country that people from around the world can safely visit. Football is “the beautiful game” that has brought together billions of people around the world. It deserves better than becoming a spectacle put on by the gangsters who run ICE and FIFA for the enrichment of billionaires like Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, who has raised the call to organize this boycott campaign, said, “it would have been obscene for the white supremacist South Africa settler-colonial state to host the World Cup. Why is it
acceptable for the white supremacist, settler-colonial U.S. state — a state supporting a racist genocide, illegal wars and carrying out domestic terrorism against residents and citizens — to host the games?”
———— Will Hodgkinson PAGE LAYOUTS: Adrian Alvarez: p. 6, 8 Kelsey Deemer: p. 7 Yasmin Hamilton: p. 1, 4, 5 Abigail Lincks: p. 2, 3