Workers Strike Back Protests at the House of Warmongering Congressman Adam Smith
By Shirley Henderson
Workers Strike Back members and other working people rallied on Saturday, March 22 in Bellevue, Washington at the home of warmongering Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, demanding an end to the war on Gaza and an end to all U.S. military funding to the Israeli State.
The protest took place in the context of the short-lived ceasefire in Gaza coming to an end and the horrific killings that have now escalated again under Trump, with more than 100 Palestinians killed on average per day since the resumption of full-scale bombing.
Leading the protest was Workers Strike Back founder and former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who spoke alongside union members, socialists, antiwar activists, and Indian and Sikh community members.
“We’re here in the neighborhood of odious, warmongering Democratic Congressman Adam Smith,” Sawant said. “The genocide and the brutal repression of the antiwar movement was started by Biden and the Democrats, which helped pave the way for Trump to win the election last year. Even in the final weeks of the Biden-Harris administration, the Democrats worked hard to send every last dollar they could for both the genocide in Gaza and the bloody imperialist proxy war in Ukraine.”
The protest was part of Worker Strike Back’s national day of action which was also called to stand in solidarity with antiwar activists who have been abducted or deported by Trump’s immigration agents, including Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, and the now many others like Rumeysa Ozturk who have been brutally targeted for protesting the genocide in Gaza. Speakers at the rally called on all working people to fight against Trump's attacks on immigrants, the antiwar movement, workers, and the labor movement through mass protests, mass civil disobedience, and strike action.
“Trump’s Secretary of State, arch-neocon Marco Rubio recently gave a chilling speech, essentially threatening that those on a visa or with a green card have no freedom of speech,” former Councilmember Sawant said at the rally. “This is bad enough, but we know they will not stop there. They will come after U.S. citizens as well. They will come after all of us unless we fight back and defeat them.”
“Our only protection is our solidarity and the strength of our movement. That is why we need to build a far more powerful movement, a highly-organized movement of millions of people, completely independent of both capitalist parties,” Sawant continued. “An antiwar movement with an internationalist outlook with links to other antiwar movements and working people around the world. We cannot afford to have a nationalist outlook. Nationalism and the blind obedience the billionaires like to call ‘patriotism’ are the tools the capitalists use internationally to divide working people in one nation against working people in others. Working people as a whole internationally have only one enemy: the rich and their political servants.”
Trump and Modi cracking down on dissent
In the same way that the Trump administration has been carrying out retaliatory detentions, firings and visa denials to punish anyone who is voicing dissent against the war on Gaza, the far-right pro-billionaire, Hindu-fundamentalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also punishing dissent by revoking residency status or denying travel visas to activists who have been critical of his brutal anti-worker regime.
Most recently, Kshama Sawant herself has faced political retaliation from the Modi government.
Kshama is being targeted because of her decade-long track record of using her socialist city council office to build movements and win gains for working people and against oppression. Part of that record included standing up against right-wing figures like Trump and Modi.. She passed a resolution in 2020 condemning the anti-Muslim, anti-poor CAA-NRC citizenship laws from the Modi and BJP government. According to Amnesty International, “The Citizenship Amendment Act [CAA] is a bigoted law that legitimizes discrimination on the basis of religion and should never have been enacted in the first place.”
Kshama’s office also won a historic ban on caste-based discrimination, the first in any jurisdiction outside South Asia.
Both pieces of legislation were strenuously opposed by Modi and BJP supporters in the United States — and even the Indian Consulate itself. Sawant’s office also won a resolution in solidarity with the farmers’ movement against Modi’s brutal and exploitative policies. Each of these wins, but especially the ban on caste-based discrimination, went viral across India. And it inspired other cities in Canada and the US to fight for a similar ban.
As a result, over the past year, Kshama has been denied a travel visa to her country of birth, India, three times, including an emergency visa appealing to see her 82-year-old mother who is very ill. On February 6th at the Indian Consulate, Kshama and other Workers Strike Back activists carried out peaceful civil disobedience to demand answers for why Sawant had been placed on a “reject list”. As if politically retaliating against her and denying her right to see her aging and ill mother wasn’t egregious enough, the Consulate staff intimidated, threatened, physically assaulted, and called the police on Sawant and other Workers Strike Back members. It was so obvious that the activists were being assaulted while peacefully leaving that even the police felt forced to say something to object to the manhandling by the Consulate staff.
Over a hundred activists or people who have been critical of the Modi regime have been refused visas or had their Overseas Status of India (OSI) revoked. Modi and his right-wing BJP government have a particularly brutal track record of attacking followers of the Sikh religion. Indian and Sikh activists rallied alongside Sawant on March 22, protesting Smith’s refusal to speak out against Modi’s retaliation, in addition to Smith’s role in the genocide.
Adam Smith and the Democratic Party
Adam Smith, who represents the southern part of Seattle and King County, was head of the House Armed Services Committee during the first year of the genocide. He has voted for every spending bill to support the genocide, and has also done nothing to oppose the visa denials. He has remained silent in the face of the Modi regime brutally targeting Sikh members in Smith’s own congressional district, all while touting his membership of CAPAC (the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus). He has totally failed to resist Trump's attacks on working people, the deplorable detention of Mahmoud Khalil, or the retaliatory firing of UAW 2710 president, Grant Miner.
On the contrary, Smith has made his stance on the genocidal war on Gaza very clear, calling Palestinian protesters “left-wing fascists” and calling for their arrests, which is a shameful attempt to silence opposition to the genocide in Gaza fueled by Israel’s right-wing government. It should come as no surprise that AIPAC, the genocidal, Zionist organization, was the number one donor of Smith’s 2024 campaign.
Smith has long been a darling of weapons manufacturers and the wealthy who profit from war. As Kshama said in her speech at the protest, Smith has never met a war he didn’t like. In fact, he was at the helm of US imperialism during the Biden Administration. Under his leadership the House of Armed Services Committee authorized more than 60 consecutive military spending bills on behalf of U.S. imperialism to the tune of billions of dollars to back the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people and the bloody, inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. By openly supporting the silencing of anti-genocide voices and remaining uncritical of regimes like Modi’s, politicians like Smith aid and abet the growing forces of the global right wing.
“Adam Smith, in other words, is a warmongering monster,” Sawant said.
While Workers Strike Back’s protest was specifically targeting Adam Smith for his particularly horrific pro-genocide track record, Smith’s pro-war stance is part of the fabric of the Democratic party. In fact the brutal crackdown on antiwar protesters began under the Biden-Harris Administration, in the worst attacks on campus protesters since 1968.
With now more than 400,000 people estimated dead since the genocide in Gaza began, we urgently need a powerful antiwar movement that can end the genocide — an independent movement that fights against both Trump and Democratic warmongers like Smith.
Unite the Labor & Antiwar Movements
The attacks on working people are coming from all directions: from Trump, the Democrats, and the bosses. While Trump attacks immigrants, guts public-sector union rights, and threatens to cut Medicare and Medicaid, Washington State Democrats are getting ready to pass a budget that will slash funding to public services by a shocking $7 billion. This would include brazen attacks on the 50,000+ workers unionized with the Washington Federation of State Employees (WFSE).
We cannot let any of these attacks stand. Rank-and-file WFSE members joined the protest at Adam Smith’s house, demanding an end to these attacks.
We need to build the strongest possible fight back to unite the labor and antiwar movements: against the detention of antiwar activist & Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, against the firing of the UAW 2710 President Grant Miner, against Kshama’s visa denial, and against the ramping up of retaliation by the Trump administration against others speaking out against the genocide. An injury to one is an injury to all. These are attacks not only on these activists, but on the whole antiwar & workers' movement.
The rich and both their parties are waging war on workers. Trump has revoked basic union rights for over a million federal workers, a move that the Bezos-owned Washington Post has called “the most aggressive union-busting attempt ever.”
We need coordinated, nationwide strikes to fight back. Shawn Fain, UAW, and other campus unions should be calling for a one-day shutdown of every campus nationwide in response to the abductions, deportations, and retaliation against union leaders on campuses like Columbia. AFSCME, AFGE, and other public-sector unions should be calling for a one-day public-sector general strike to beat back the budget cuts and the dire attacks on public-sector workers being pushed by both Trump nationally and Democrats in states and cities around the country.
These can help prepare the ground for a national general strike to bring down Trump, the billionaires, and both their parties.
As students and working people, we need to get organized in the millions to fight for fundamental, radical change and for an end to genocide, the brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and an end to imperialism itself. We need to build the strongest possible fightback, independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties of U.S. imperialism. We cannot be led back into the Democratic party or the Republican Party, as misleaders like Bernie Sanders and AOC would have it. We need a new antiwar, working-class party.
We need to defeat warmongering Democrats like Adam Smith who need to be held responsible for their attacks on workers and for funding a genocide.
We need to bring down Trump the billionaires and their parties.
We need to fight the rich, not their wars!
Join Workers Strike Back today to help us build a fighting movement that can win. Come out to our national monthly meeting on May 4th to get organized to fight back against these attacks and to win what working people need: an end to the wars, taxing the rich to fund Medicare for All, quality affordable housing, good union jobs, and a new working-class party.
“There will not be peace until we make it so, by winning the class war,” Sawant said at the protest against warmonger Adam Smith. “The only war we want to fight is the class war against the rich. We want all the billionaires and all their representatives to be afraid. “
“Because we’ve had enough, and we’re building a movement to bring down their system.”
