Author: Tim Hayes

As we remember the horror of the Oct. 7 raid by Hamas ..And the memory of the Israeli lives taken. Oppressed people around the world also should remember that nothing happens in a vacuum . The dehumanization , abuse , and herding like cattle, daily murders with little or no consequences , destruction of homes , land theft , mass incarceration, destruction of infrastructure as soon as it’s built among other things that the people of Palestine continue to suffer . pre date the October Hamas raid by decades. I grew up listening to survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto describe not just the horror of being forced to live in that “open air prison” but also stories of Jewish girls who would invite Nazi soldiers into spaces only to have them shot or stabbed to death by their cousins. Or the great rebellion in Warsaw April 19, 1943, when Nazis as well as Jewish people who were thought to be collaborators were hunted and killed by Jewish rebels. Not only were people who survived that ghetto and that rebellion as well as lived through the death camp “Treblinka” the people who first exposed me to the civil rights movement …they were also the first people to explain to me the horror of the abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel and the first people I heard who named it “Apartheid”. They were all Jewish and all people who knew injustice and oppression when they saw it. They were also good teachers and helped put me on a path I’m still on. People who are treated horribly will eventually commit horrors not unlike what was done to them. This is the true lesson of Oct 7th. The best way to remember the people who were killed on October 7 is justice and true equality for the people of Palestine AND Israel…..”from the river to the sea”

I’m in bed today, recovering from something I’m not going to talk about. But I’m watching the news coverage of Israeli families happy because loved ones have been returned, some alive… some not. At the same time we all know.. in the back of our minds that thousands of Palestinian people still have loved ones in illegal detention, close to 10,000 or more, children, men and women held in Israeli dungeons.
Who also have families that mourn or miss them..or both. The concept of race is not real. Who is “Black” and who is “White” is actually all in your head. The fact that you can call Hamas “terrorists” and call the Israeli government something else is actually the worst manifestation of “white supremacy” in current memory. I remember how in 1990s British and American soldiers used the words “sand niggers” for the Arab populations they were called on to fight against. Niggers and Terrorists, they are what ever population you as white people need them to be..On October 7th a group of Arabs did the same horrible things that had been done to them by some Israeli people for decades. But on a much smaller scale. Now we look at the ruins of Gaza…an open air prison turned into a giant grave yard. And the media asks you to mourn the loss of life of one population and not the other. After all, they are just dead “sand niggers”… like it or not… this too is white supremacy. Taking my meds now and trying to get better. What a f**king world.

While the pathologys of the kind of gun violence that happened a few blocks away from me two nights in a row. The handgun urban grudge shooting. And the psycho driven schools/church/workplace mass shootings. Are very different. And different strategies are required to end them. The root cause of both is the way many Americans see their right to “bear arms” and our almost insane failure to pass and enforce responsible gun laws. There is no “one policy fits all”… even countries with even easier to get guns don’t have the horrible tendencies to “pull the trigger to solve the problem” like our country does. I work with gun offenders and gun victims all the time. I don’t have all the answers but I know that this is rooted in the fact that we lie. We lie about what America is… and we lie about the fact that most of what made America was not “freedom for all”… but freedom for those who had the power to use violence to take it. It is simply easier for an American to pull the trigger to solve their problems than any people on earth. It has become a part of this country’s DNA..l am past giving a damn if you don’t agree

There is a big difference in what it takes out of you to talk to a large group of people about what they can do to get guns away from our children. Saying the right words to get them to see parenting differently. Creating a sense of urgency. Getting over the feeling of invading their child’s privacy. ..a lot of other stuff. But the one on one of talking to a young person who is convinced that that weapon they went out and got is the only way to deal with what they see in the moment as a problem, sometimes with triggers that have been at work inside them for a long time.. takes an entirely different skill set and also seems to suck something out of you when you have to do the same thing just a few days later. You go home and look at pictures of your middle aged children. You just want every Black parent to be blessed enough to be able to do that. It’s not like when I was in SNCC or the Black Panther Party… even though in the Panthers I did some times serve “the people” one family at a time. Most of the time we dealt in “broad strokes”..This is something “primal”…I just get to see too many people put their children in a box…in the ground. Ok …. l’m gonna go pull up weeds in the yard, then cut up some cucumbers to make pickles…l just kinda need to think on paper sometimes…… just an old head talking.

Timothy Hayes

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So yesterday I had a lot more on my mind than the Super Bowl. Or the halftime show that I really didn’t pay much attention to as I was very tired and was watching the game with my son and his family. I was more interested in what High School my grandson got into ( it is one of Philadelphia’s finest) I spent most of the day with the parents from the meeting I had Friday who came back to turn in the guns they found among their children’s belongings. 28 parents brought in 32 guns. An impressive amount for what was mostly a group that heard my message for the first time. Like I tell them all “they can be their children’s “bestie” and respect their privacy when they turn 35. In this time you need to know what they bring into your house” a simple way to put it…but it works.. I’m leaving now to destroy and dispose of those guns in the “usual” way. If you have been reading my posts for a while you know what that is. We always say a prayer as we get rid of the guns because like many of you have said to me, each one could be a life saved. It’s not an “easy” mission …but after years of organizing and doing voter registration and all those decades in the movement and those years in the Black Panther Party and the years of trying to help good people get elected ..this……trying to stop my people from shooting each other could be my last fight. And yes …I got lots of haters out there…one of them now looks for stuff to post that he thinks attacks my positions and spends a lot of time spreading his hate…most of the time he doesn’t even understand what the posts he is sharing are saying….He must have a lot of bullshit time on his hands. Going to meet two young people and two members of the clergy now…and do what we have to do…..the struggle continues..

These are pics from last week when I spent a day with students at Neumann University, just outside Philadelphia. There were students studying to be Journalists and students studying to be Historians…I have done this before at colleges and just talked to an audience, But these young people had spent the week researching and “vetting” me and had questions about every part of my life ..from growing up during Jim Crow in the “projects” to my teens in the civil rights movement ..and lots of questions about my small part in fighting alongside revolutionaries in Angola ..and they knew about my time in prison in Israel and were very curious about how and why I came to Philly ..Oddly the questions about the Black Panthers came last…The laptops were flying and it was at first kind of scary that there were sources all over the internet about my life …some of it about things that I have never spoken about. But these students were very respectful..and it was great that one of them pulled out two books as “sources” about my life….not everything is on the internet. I got lost driving home..Neumann University is in Aston, PA……NEVER HEARD OF IT….good to still be useful in my “golden years”

April 30, 2024….It’s about 8:25 am in Jerusalem. I have just finished a very hard to put together Zoom discussion with people we would consider “the left” in Palestine/Israel…it has become harder and harder to do this because people talking to the press or activists or scholars and journalists outside of Israel have come under close scrutiny and repression, whether they are Jewish, Arab or for some reason particularly Jewish and Arab clergy. A Jewish nurse who has served with the Red Cross in Gaza and came home for Passover was detained for almost a week because she would not tell where her cell phone was. An original member of our group, she pretty much lead tonight’s talk. We had two Rabbis, one of whom I know from her days in Rabbinical school in Philly and another who is the son of one of the people who got me out of that Israeli prison in the early seventies. We could not get the Christian clergy…he is under “detention”..we have four Arab activists, one of whom is new to our group, all of whom have been detained,,including the woman who was “sexually abused” while in detention. And three very vocal male Israeli activists..Tonight as usual I mostly listened…They all found it disturbing that they read about so many Americans who say that the IDF attacks and killing should continue until the “hostages” are all free. Many have a hard time believing that so many Americans can say such a thing when the people being killed had nothing to do with the Hamas attack. When it was all over I was kind of given an “assignment”..they consider such a position “irrational” and that what is happening now will make the Israeli population the “villains” to future historians. There has always been concern in this group about how Israel will be remembered for this . The pressure there is on to get rid of Netanyahu while there are still a surviving population of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to even make peace with is an ongoing concern…this has caused many different groups in Israel to form coalitions with other groups. They want me to find a group of Americans who are saying the attacks on Palestinian civilians should continue until the hostages are all free…and assess whether they are “Delusional Trump folks” or represent a larger American grouping. I don’t think the Americans positions on this are that simple…I don’t think I can do this…I know a lot of people who say this..some do indeed sound like fanatics …people I don’t talk to much anymore….but these people in Israel sat down and talked to me at great risk to themselves and then thanked me for bringing people who didn’t talk to each other much in Israel/Palestine, to the same table to find common ground…I think I owe them….we shall see if I can do this.

The caption reads “Thank you South Africa”…..There is a lot of pain going around in many parts of the world today. But I think this is a powerful moment in the history of oppressed people, in the record of a twisted racial colonialism. And in asserting the fact that oppressed people have a right …no ..a duty to resist. South Africa using the “sham” International Court of Justice to actually suing Israel for of all charges that “buzz word” genocide. Here in the U.S. every time that charge is made against Israel ….what Americans PRETEND to hear is that people are threatening Israel with genocide….covering their ears so they don’t hear what is really happening is Israel is being charge with genocide itself. The word itself has become a weaponized way of shutting down criticism of Israel. Gaza is not the only place in the world where people are facing removal, and denied the right to return to their lands…And as awful as the apparent attempt to exterminate the Arab population of Gaza is…it’s not the only place in the world where this is happening. Other than older African Americans who lived through the horror of “Jim Crow” ..no people on earth know the deadly cruelty and mass humiliation of Apartheid more than the people of South Africa…the only people in this moment who have the historical gravitas to call what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank…and what’s been happening in all of Palestine for most the last 70 odd years exactly what it is. Because Imperialism , and colonialism and capitalism are still powerful forces in the world. Thus we know the “law suit” does not stand a chance..I mean look at how the world agonized over the cruelty of the Hamas attack but …after almost thirty times that number of innocent people who had NOTHING to do with the Hamas attack are dead..we are asked to just let the slaughter continue because the lives of one people are important but the dead of the “others” are just numbers…This says more about us than it says about how evil this Israeli slaughter fest is….YES Thank you South Africa ..a country that knows cruelty better than most….for reminding the world how much Justice and Equality still scare the shit out of the powerful