Shortly after darkness fell on Saturday night, January 3, Israel launched a massive land invasion of Gaza involving 9,000-10,000 soldiers, tanks, helicopters, and heavy artillery, engineering and intelligence forces, with the support of Israel’s Air Force, navy, and secret police and spy agencies. The ground invasion came after Israel, for the first time, unleashed an artillery barrage on Gaza, striking a mosque and killing at least 11 people. By the next day, Israeli forces had reportedly cut Gaza in half, “bisecting” it between north and south.

As we write—on January 4, 2009—Israel has not only continued but escalated its criminal attacks on the Palestinian people. The ground invasion now under way threatens to bring even more terrible destruction—more killings than the over 400 already reported, and more destruction of infrastructure leading to more disease, starvation and needless death. The pro-Israel New York Times reported on January 4 that most of the newly arriving casualties in Gaza’s hospitals were civilians.

January 1, 2009. With this first issue of the New Year, we are excited to announce a NEW MASTHEAD for REVOLUTION newspaper.

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As many who read Revolution regularly are aware, I have been traveling and speaking very broadly about Bob Avakian’s recent book, AWAY WITH ALL GODS! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. I have reported previously on some of what I have been encountering on this tour. Here, I want to share with readers the ways in which my experiences on this tour—and through the recent efforts of the Party as concentrated in COMMUNISM: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW STAGE: A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party—have deepened my appreciation for the leadership that we have in Bob Avakian and the great importance, and strength, we have in promoting this revolutionary leader.

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As Israel carries out a massacre of the population of Gaza, the Nazi holocaust is again being invoked to suppress, silence, and declare “beyond the pale,” any exposure and criticism of Israel.

This is ludicrous and obscene: The mass murder of six million Jews was a horrific crime carried out by the German imperialist ruling class. And—in fact—the rulers of the “Western democracies” made conscious decisions to ignore, cover-up, and do nothing about it at the time—including the policy of the United States to turn away ships with Jews trying to escape the Nazis.

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At 12 noon Sunday, January 4, Alan Goodman and Alice Woodward, correspondents for Revolution newspaper, displayed a 20-foot banner directly in front of the Museum of Jewish Heritage / Holocaust Museum at 36 Battery Place in Manhattan that read: “After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.”  

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How many times have you had a discussion about the plight of the Palestinians with supporters of the state of Israel and met the argument that the problem is the Palestinian “intolerance” of Jewish settlers? People have been taught that Israel was established as the result of a heroic fight for their homeland up against an “inhuman” enemy. But the reality is far different.

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As the horrifying results of Israel’s attacks on Gaza have become known —bodies lying in the streets of Gaza, houses destroyed, universities bombed and more—many people from different political viewpoints are opposing this slaughter.

In an article entitled “Obama Should Engage Now for Middle East Peace” (posted 12/29) on The Nation’s website, John Nichols, the magazine’s Washington correspondent, argues that there is “nothing surgical” about Israel’s attacks, citing the deaths of children by Israeli bombs. But Nichols then goes on to say the Israeli assault is “justified” and “understandable” because it is a response to attacks by Hamas. He argues, as “a friend of Israel” that Israel’s targeting of civilians and disproportionate use of force is counterproductive.

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An outpouring of protest has swept the world against the attack by Israel on the people of Gaza. In many of the protests, the U.S. is being called out for sponsoring Israel’s attack, with the burning of Bush effigies and the throwing of shoes. Demonstrators have found ways to say “We are all Palestinians,” carrying photos of dead and wounded civilians and the devastation in Gaza.

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Recently, particularly with comrade Sunsara Taylor’s speaking tour, I have seen the party—and only the party, with the goal of all-the-way liberation that is its calling card—raise and grapple with one of the greatest chains shackling humanity to this system and all its horrors: religion. In this world where human rights are ripped away in the name of preserving “holy” matrimony and the fascists that promote this outrage are rewarded by speaking at the inauguration of the holder of the highest office in the land, I am very inspired by your work. The Christian “faith-based initiative” is monstrous repression that must be confronted. But any religion is a poison that spreads even to the minds of those living “alternative” lifestyles. I know this because I was one such person.

Up until very recently, I was a devout Buddhist layperson with prospects of becoming a monk....

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The following is excerpted from a fundraising letter from Revolution Books, New York:

With the support of hundreds of people we created an incredible new store at 146 West 26th Street that has in 6 months begun to emerge as a new revolutionary center of inquiry and ferment—a place where most nights of the week a wide range of people are engaged in dialogue about why the world is the way it is and the possibility for a radically different future.

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Coming from one of the younger generations today, born well after the death of Mao and the defeat and reversal of socialism in China, we learned next to nothing about The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that occurred there from 1966-1976. But the small amount we did learn was the standard narrative that this was a horror, filled with anti-communist lies and distortions. I remember for my world history class at a public high school in the Midwest we read Wild Swans the memoir by Jung Chang, which I learned this past week is part of the wave of “scar literature” that came out from intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie in China, after the Cultural Revolution had ended and socialism was defeated—these personal accounts are often full of lies and distortions and rip things from their social context. This is what passed for history in the U.S.

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Sunday, January 4, Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem: 30 people attended a speak-out against Israel’s U.S.-backed slaughter in Gaza.

Father Lawrence Lucas, an activist Catholic priest; Nellie Hester Bailey, of the Black Anti-War Coalition; and Carl Dix, from the Revolutionary Communist Party, spoke about the situation unfolding in Gaza and the background—the founding of Israel and its history as an instrument of U.S. imperialist domination in that region of the world.

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Nellie asks us to foretell what an Obama Administration is going to do for cities, housing and neighborhoods. Of course we can’t really know what’s going to happen in the future. We can only know what’s already happened. So it’s an exercise that reminds me a little of Johnny Carson’s old late night TV routine with his sidekick Ed McMahon. Carson played Karnak the Magnificent. McMahon would give him an answer. And Karnak, wearing a giant turban, and holding an envelope to his forehead, would guess the question inside the envelope. Ed would give an answer like. “A B C D E F G.” Karnak would reply with the question: “Earlier versions of Preparation H.”

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