The September 17 bombing in New York City left 31 wounded, and the working class, especially Muslim workers, terrorized. While the capitalists’ cops apprehended the alleged bomb-maker, the biggest terrorist—U.S. imperialism—remains at large.
Media + Arms = Fascist Drill
At 7:54 a.m. Monday, September 19, every phone in New York went off to signal an alert by the New York Police Department: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-year-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The description fit hundreds of thousands of men. Mayor Bill de Blasio seized the chance to use the local population as an extension of the racist police force—to put the bosses’ “see something, say something” slogan into practice. That day, the police received 406 calls on “suspicious packages,” none of which turned out to be explosives.
Normalizing collaboration with the NYPD, the largest state terrorist force in the world, is a great danger for the international working class. This is the same police force that has been spying on Muslim students and workers wherever they hang out—colleges, mosques, community centers, restaurants. It’s the same NYPD that routinely terrorizes Black and Latin working-class men and women. But this latest attack by our common enemy can also be an opportunity for Muslim, Arab, and South Asian workers to unite with Black and Latin workers.  
Following their 9/11 model, the bosses respond to terrorist acts (or purported terrorist acts) with heightened fascism. They mobilize anti-terrorist police units, SWAT teams and the FBI. They militarize U.S. cities, from Ferguson to New York to Charlotte. In Chelsea, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, the FBI and other gangs of government thugs all descended on the bomb site.  
As they move to pacify the working class with guns and tanks, the bosses also use their news machine. The New York Post wrote an outright racist piece that claimed that terrorism ran in Rahami’s family (9/24). (In the 1980s, Rahami’s father fought with the Mujahideen, the Islamic “freedom fighters” funded by the CIA in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.) Every minute of the day, every day of the year, the network and cable news channels create more terror by spitting vile bigotry about Muslim and Arab workers, the front line of their war to divide us.
Racist crime against Muslim workers is at its highest since 9/11: “New data from researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent over the course of 2015 (New York Times, 9/17). According to the same report, anti-Arab hate crimes rose by 219 percent. The epidemic of individual violence stems from the systematic racist violence perpetuated by the capitalist U.S. government, police and military.
These abuses and atrocities are all part of the capitalists’ drill for war. Breeding anti-Muslim racism enables the ruling class to build the patriotism it will ultimately need to butcher Muslim and Arab workers throughout the Middle East.
U.S. State Terrorists: Mass Murders by the Day
While the recent bombings in New York and New Jersey were indeed cowardly acts against innocent workers, we must not forget that thousands are murdered by capitalist state terror every day. The finance capitalists of the U.S. ruling class are the world’s biggest terrorists, by far. With one hand, they sign “peace treaties”; with the other, they drop another cluster of bombs on civilians. During World War II, U.S. imperialists killed hundreds of thousands with the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Today, when U.S. bosses aren’t bombing hospitals in Afghanistan, they are wiping out whole families with reckless drone strikes across Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia. Nearly half a million have been slaughtered in the proxy war in Syria (Frontline, 2/11), and more than 4.8 million displaced (Syianrefugees.eu).
On their home front, the bosses are shattering the lives of millions with mass racist incarceration, deportation and unemployment. To divert attention from their own monstrous crimes, they are exploiting fears of ISIS and Al Qaeda to provoke anti-Muslim racism and divide workers against one another.
At stake is the immense oil wealth of the Middle East. The imperialists in Russia and China want to control this cheaply extracted oil themselves; U.S. and European capitalists will stop at nothing to secure it.
As the great Soviet communist leader Vladimir Lenin pointed out, imperialist rivalries can be resolved only by war. No matter how many remote-control drones they have on military bases, the bosses know they will need real-live soldiers to fight for and hold oil-rich territory in the Middle East. Their problem is that they haven’t been able to win the workers to support this bloody mission. Nor can the U.S. capitalists control their so-called allies, including Turkey and Iraq.
The Progressive Labor Party must organize workers to stop imperialist war by fighting to smash capitalism and build a communist society. Under communism, workers will supply their own needs without bosses or money. They will construct a world free of terrorism, racism and sexism.
Fight Through the Dark Night
While it is true that we remain—for now—in the dark night of unchecked imperialist horrors, with no mass workers’ movement to challenge them, the international working class is stirring. The bosses’ ideological control—the crucial element for their continued dominance—is visibly shaky. When the working class rebels as it did in Charlotte, against yet another murder of a young Black man, it hurts U.S. imperialism. If multiracial rebellions were detonated across the United States, with the bold leadership we saw two years ago in Ferguson, they would seriously hinder U.S. war plans. Throughout the world, workers are fighting back. From solidarity marches in New York and Chicago to strikes in India, France and Spain, workers are raising their level of struggle against the capitalists.
One Red Flag
With red leadership, these protests eventually will move to a more conscious level. As we know from practice, every protest deepens workers’ understanding of the world as it truly exists. The anti-racist movement alive in the streets today is preparing our class to face fascism and world war—the potential levers for revolution. Led by communist ideas, the workers’ revolution will smash the capitalists wherever they now stand, from Ferguson to Charlotte, from India and Patagonia to Africa and China.
Only communism can forever cure the lethal disease that capitalism has inflicted upon the working class: racism. Under communism, workers will have no need to fight over natural resources. There will be no “ours” and “theirs.” All resources will be shared, according to need. The state terrorists of capitalism will be eliminated for all time.