In 2008, Baraka worked with the US Human Rights Network and over 400 organizations to develop a CERD Shadow Report, which concerned US compliance with the terms of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. They felt the US government's reports did not adequately address racial profiling, displacement from Hurricane Katrina, and land rights for the Western Shoshone, among other issues. A large delegation presented their findings.[4]
In October 2014, Baraka traveled to Palestine with the African Heritage delegation. From their experiences there, the 18 delegates drafted six findings and demands and urged the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) "to support moves to hold Israel accountable to international law."[5] These findings / demands included: "settlement expansion amounts to ethnic cleansing and 21st century colonialism"; the settlements should not be financed or weaponized by the US; "Israel deports, harasses, detains, poisons, and even sterilizes its African refugees"; "The global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement is an essential tool in the struggle for Palestinian liberation."[6]
In September 2015, he wrote of being a human-rights activist: "[I]f today leftists in the U.S. can find a way to reconcile the suffering of the people of Yemen and Gaza and all of occupied Palestine for the greater good of electing Sanders, tomorrow my life and the movement that I am a part of that is committed to fighting this corrupt, degenerate, white supremacist monstrosity called the United States, can be labeled as enemies of the state and subjected to brutal repression with the same level of silence from these leftists."[7]
Writings by Baraka have appeared in Black Agenda Report, Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, Pambazuka News, and CounterPunch, and other media outlets.[8] In "What if the Green Party Stopped Being Kooky and Started Getting Real?", Politico writer Christopher Hooks stated that Baraka "has a long history of fringe statements and beliefs."[9]
In 2005, Baraka argued that the victims of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita should be considered "internally displaced" and given assistance in accordance with internationally recognized rights for such people.[10]
Baraka has been a vehement critic of the role of Israel in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and of Israel's presence in the region. After traveling to Palestine in 2014, Baraka wrote that "a negotiated, relatively 'peaceful' resolution of the conflict is impossible" because "the Israeli state has no interest in a negotiated settlement with Palestinians."[11] He accused Israel of carrying out what he termed a "brutal occupation and illegal theft of Palestinian land," adding:
During my activist life I have traveled to many of the counties that Western colonial/capitalist leaders characterized as despotic totalitarian states – the old Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba before 1989 – but in none of those states did I witness the systematic mechanism of population control and scientific repression that I witness in “democratic” Israel. The security walls, towers, checkpoints, and armed settlers created an aura of insecurity and impending assault on one’s dignity at any time. I left that space wondering how anyone with a modicum of humanity and any sense of morality could reconcile living in that environment from the spoils of Palestinian dispossession and degradation and how any nation could support the Israeli political project.[11]
Baraka also questioned news stories about the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, which Israel blamed on Hamas members and which led to Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip against Hamas. One month after the kidnappings, which he called a "false flag operation," Baraka indicated in an interview his belief that "the kids were supposed to be kidnapped but they weren't supposed to be murdered. That was an accident. But nevertheless it gave Israel the pretext that they were setting up for, and that was the opportunity to basically attack Hamas in order to destroy the unity government."[12] Two suspects, both members of Hamas, were killed in a shootout with Israeli forces in September 2014, while a third Hamas member was convicted of the murders in January 2015.[13][14]
In March 2015, Baraka condemned Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu's comments on the day of the 2015 Israeli elections. Netanyahu had warned supporters in a video posted to his Facebook page that his government was in danger because "Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls."[15] Baraka called Netanyahu's words a "racist rant" that exposed "the brutal and immoral reality of the Israeli colonial project" and the "illusion" of a two-state solution.[16]
Speaking in 2014 on U.S. involvement in Iraq, Baraka characterized U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East over the previous 20 years as "disastrous" and said that "what has occurred in Iraq was predictable."[17]
In a 2014 interview, Baraka stated his belief that the U.S. had a part in creating the “boogeyman” of ISIS “to basically garner significant public support for an argument that says that this monster, these evil forces—that, by the way, we helped to create—we are the only ones that can go in and slay this monster.”[18] Baraka has also asserted that the atrocities of the Syrian Civil War are being "fomented by a demented and dying U.S. empire, with the assistance of the royalist monarchies of the Middle East and the gangster states of NATO."[19] In an interview, he has suggested that control of natural resources, such as the proposed Qatar-Turkey and Iran-Iraq-Syrianatural gaspipelines, is one of the underlying reasons for U.S. and Turkish interests in the region:
These are not just geopolitical fights based on principle, but these fights are based on real material realities, real material advantages. So you look at the routes of these various pipelines that are being proposed and actually built to bring natural gas from Central Asia to the European markets. Turkey felt that it was in their interest to make sure that they can influence the best deal possible that will allow them to be positioned to take full advantage of these pipelines. That's one of the reasons many people argue that Syria had to go: that when there were proposals to run these natural gas pipelines from Iran through Iraq and through Syria, that it was a direct threat to some of the ambitions that Erdogan has for Turkey.[20]
Baraka has rejected the U.S. position that Syrian presidentBashar al-Assad and the 2014 Syrian presidential election are illegitimate. In an article, he wrote that the idea of Assad's illegitimacy had been "carefully cultivated by Western state propagandists and dutifully disseminated by their auxiliaries in the corporate media."[19] He further argued that the election was proof that Syrians have "not surrendered their national sovereignty to the geostrategic interests of the U.S. and its colonial allies in Europe and Israel," and accused the U.S. of hypocrisy for supporting elections in Ukraine but not Syria.[19]United NationsSecretary-GeneralBan Ki-moon criticized Syria's holding of an election during an ongoing civil war for undermining a political solution to the conflict,[21] and the lack of independent election monitoring was widely reported.[22]
Baraka characterized the 2014 Ukrainian revolution as a "U.S.-supported coup" that contained "racist neo-Nazi elements."[23] After the 2014 Odessa clashes, which resulted in the deaths of 42 pro-Russian and six pro-Ukrainian protestors, Baraka wrote that he was "outraged by the murder of people defending their rights to self-determination at the hands of U.S.-supported thugs in Odessa."[24] He has also suggested that the victory of Petro Poroshenko in the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election was illegitimate, questioning "what makes the election in Ukraine legitimate when half of the country boycotts the vote and the national army violently attacks its own citizens in Eastern Ukraine who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the coup-makers in Kiev".[19]
Two days after the event, Baraka expressed his suspicions that the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine was a "false flag" operation, saying: "Someone wrote about three weeks ago that we should expect a major false flag operation in eastern Ukraine that's going to be then blamed on the Russians. And that's exactly what has happened. They're trying to say in the Western press that the Ukrainian government does not have access to that kind of weaponry, when it's clear that they do."[25][26] He criticized Western media coverage of the event for "undermining anything coming from Russia Today. That's where you see the story being advanced that there is a possibility that this story is a little more complicated than people realize."[27] Baraka also claimed that observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe were "sent in basically as spies who showed up on the scene to quote-unquote 'monitor'."[28]
Baraka has criticized calls for Western military action against the jihadistrebel groupBoko Haram, arguing that "a purely military response will only exacerbate an insurgency whose roots lie in the complex socio-historical conditions and internal contradictions of Northeast Nigeria."[29] In May 2014, a month after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the northern Nigerian town of Chibok, he expressed skepticism about the official version of events and the number of victims, saying that "even if there was a kidnapping, there's some people who are suggesting that the numbers are in fact inflated."[30] Baraka also stated that while he was "outraged" by the kidnapping, he was also suspicious of U.S. humanitarian concerns in the region: "U.S. policymakers don’t give a damn about the schoolgirls in Nigeria because their real objective is to use the threat of Boko Haram in the northern part of the country to justify the real goal of occupying the oil fields in the south and to block the Chinese in Nigeria."[24]
Baraka condemns the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and other free trade agreements that he characterizes as "neoliberal."[31][32]
Baraka has termed trade deals a "Black issue" both domestically and internationally.[31][32] He asserts that the TPP "is a weapon to maintain U.S. global hegemony by denying the fundamental economic, social and cultural rights of millions of people in order to benefit a parasitic white minority ruling class in the U.S."[31] He has stated that poverty and disruption of Black communities in many US cities and among peoples in Latin America are the result of NAFTA.[31][32]
Baraka described the vigil for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting as a "white power march" and Je suis Charlie as an "arrogant rallying cry for white supremacy" because of France's colonial history, the caricature at issue, French support for American policy in Syria and Libya, and the disproportionate interest in this particular act of war.[33]
In January 2016, Baraka's "Je suis Charlie" article was republished in an anthology about the November 2015 Paris attacks, ANOTHER French False Flag? Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernadino, edited by Kevin Barrett, a Holocaust denier and 9/11 conspiracy theorist.[18] Baraka also has appeared at least twice on Barrett's radio show.[18] Other contributors to the anthology (including controversial figures such as Gilad Atzmon and Alain Soral)[18] posited "that the Charlie Hebdo attacks and many others were perpetrated by the CIA and Mossad" as "false flags."[34] In "Friends Don't Let Friends Vote for Jill Stein", Yair Rosenberg of Tablet described the work as a "veritable who's who of bigots and conspiracy theorists."[34]
In August 2016, Baraka said that he had been unaware both of Barrett's Holocaust beliefs and of the views of some of the book's other contributors.[18] In a statement, Baraka said that he would be "happy to discuss the details" of his own writing:
If others want to imply other motivations or positions not stated in my article related to the subject of the book or any of the authors, I cannot control that. But all who know me and my 40-year history of fighting for the rights of all people who have experienced the indignity of oppression will share my confidence that any smear campaign against my life of human rights activism will not succeed.[18]
Baraka also released a statement disavowing Holocaust denial.[18]
In an article titled "No 'Je Suis Charleston'?" Baraka contends that a similar collective response was absent after the Charleston church shooting at the Emanuel AME Church and criticized Obama for not calling suspect Dylann Roof a terrorist.[35] As a longtime opponent of the death penalty, he has also criticized the Department of Justice's decision to seek the death penalty for Roof, saying that it "should be seen as no more than another tactical move by the state as part of the last phase of the counterinsurgency launched against the black liberation movement. [...] By appealing to African Americans, the group in the country most consistently opposed to the death penalty, state propagandists saw this as a perfect opportunity to undermine opposition to capital punishment and facilitate the process of psychological incorporation."[36]
Baraka has referred to President Barack Obama as an "Uncle Tom president"[37] and has argued that he has shown "obsequious deference to white power".[38] He has said that Obama (in addition to Loretta Lynch) is a member of the "black petit-bourgeoisie who have become the living embodiments of the partial success of the state’s attempt to colonize the consciousness of Africans/black people."[39]
Baraka was critical of the Obama administration's decision to not attend the 2009 UN World Conference Against Racism in Geneva.[40] In 2013, Baraka stated that inviting Obama to the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington "should be taken as an insult by everyone who has struggled and continues to struggle for human rights, peace and social justice."[38] More recently, he has argued that "the Obama Administration collaborated with suppressing the 2009 report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which identified violent white supremacist groups as a threat to national security more lethal than the threat from Islamic 'fundamentalists'."[35]
In February 2016 during the Democratic Party presidential primaries, Baraka wrote that "[i]n this period of media-driven pseudo-opposition in the form of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Beyoncé, or even Bernie Sanders, it is increasingly difficult to make the distinction between image and reality, especially when the production of images and symbols is controlled by dominant forces with an interest in keeping us all stupid."[41] In September 2015, he said that "the world that a President Sanders promises—continued war crimes from the sky with drone strikes and Saudi led terror in support of the Western imperial project."[7] He has referred to Obama and the Sanders campaign as "a tacit commitment to Eurocentrism and the assumptions of normalized white supremacy."[7]
In June 2016, Baraka criticized the family of Muhammed Ali for inviting Bill Clinton to deliver the boxer’s eulogy.[42][39] Baraka described Clinton as a "rapist" and "petty opportunist politician."[42][39]
In September 2015, Baraka criticized Dr. Cornel West for supporting Sanders, saying that he was "sheep-dogging for the Democrats" by "drawing voters into the corrupt Democratic party".[43] West later endorsed the Stein/Baraka ticket after Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton.[44][45]