IWA solidarity message during GABRIELA’S “Days of Rage for Jennifer Laude and All Victims of US Military Aggression”

Executive Committee member, Monica Moorhead, shared the following words of solidarity during Gabriela Philippine’s “Day of Rage for Jennifer Laude and All Victims of US Military Aggression” webinar on September 16, 2020. You can watch the entire webinar on GABRIELA PHILIPPINE’S facebook: here

Sisters, brothers and family, Thanks for allowing me to present this solidarity message for this important webinar. In New York City, the International Working Women’s Coalition believes that every issue is a woman’s issue just like IWA. In fact it’s safe to say that every woman’s struggle is an anti-imperialist issue especially when it comes to fighting U.S. imperialism and the Philippine government is a puppet mouthpiece for the U.S.

Three of the excerpted resolutions in the 2015 IWA Constitution state: ” Build a movement for justice, freedom and peace, to advance our struggle to overcome to fight against gender discrimination, racism, sexual violence and abuse, and the neglect and denial of our health and reproductive rights; Build a movement to further unite the oppressed and exploited women from all parts of the world and link local struggles and campaigns against imperialism with the struggle of peoples of the world; Build a movement that will move forward the peoples’ struggle for national and social liberation and the full emancipation of women, and that will guarantee a life without exploitation one that is protective of the world’s natural resources and the environment.”

None of these goals and more can be achieved if we don’t fight U.S. imperialism in our home countries and abroad, no matter our different political views and ideologies. Trump and Duterte – being proponents of white supremacy, misogyny and anti-trans oppression – are nothing more than a two-headed monster for the same repressive, exploitative system. The U.S. military abroad, as the Filipino people and movements know so well, is an extension of the police at home. We demand justice for Jennifer Laude as part of the #SayHerName movement in the U.S. along with Breonna Taylor, and Sandra Bland murdered by the police and Sgt. Vanessa Guillen, a Latinx woman sexually assaulted and murdered by a male soldier at Fort Hood, Texas. Sexual assaults of women in the military at home and abroad are the norm, not the exception. Then there are the many murdered trans women of color whose assailants have never been brought to justice.

So those of us fighting in the belly of the beast, U.S. imperialism, will continue to show solidarity with the women, workers, peasants, youth and the Indigenous peoples of the Philippines because we know that the struggle knows no borders when it comes to capitalist plunder and oppression and that there are no borders in the workers struggle including the U.S. as we will continue to witness with the growing resistance by the global working class led by women in the midst of two unprecedented pandemics – COVID 19 and police and neo-fascist violence. Jennifer Laude’s life mattered!! U.S. Out of the Philippines! Down with imperialism!

You can watch the entire webinar on GABRIELA PHILIPPINE’S facebook: here