WE MUST REJECT HATE-MONGERS’ CALL FOR BOYCOTT OF GUYANESE BUSINESSES IN BROOKLYN

Guyanese living in Brooklyn and Queens had a chance to interact with President Dr Irfaan Ali last week during a visit there. The President was in New York City to receive the Legacy Award 2024 from the University of the West Indies. As he usually does, wherever he goes, he decides that during his free time, he will walk about in Queens and Brooklyn where large numbers of Guyanese live before, he returns to Guyana. In both places, he had a rock-star reception, as his Guyanese brothers and sisters proudly embraced him. Now the less-than-a-handful of Guyanese racist elements who have been promoting hate are calling on people to boycott businesses and organizations associated with Afro-Guyanese who interacted with the President.
It is despicable. It is intimidation. The President has firmly rejected the call in a broadcast to the citizens of Guyana and the diaspora. I wonder if anyone in the opposition would have the guts to stand against the hate-mongers since these hate-mongers are their creatures. But the Leader of the Opposition cannot stay silent. His silence is support for this despicable plea to hurt Guyanese citizens and their businesses in Brooklyn.
Anytime an Afro-Guyanese in Guyana or the diaspora decides to utilize his or her fundamental right to support people with ideas and a track record of achievements there are the usual suspects who deem them by the vilest names possible. We know the names – soup-drinkers, house slaves, etc. Just like those who joined the President in Brooklyn, young Afro-Guyanese who have decided to work with President Irfaan Ali in pushing the ONE GUYANA agenda are being called house slaves and soup drinkers.
During the entire trip that the President made, the hate-filled band of Rickford Burke, Mark Benschop and their handful, a sorry band of hate-mongers were in hiding. As soon as the President departed for Guyana, they emerged, out from under the bed, to spew hate and to harass people. But to their great consternation, and making their agony even greater, the Guyanese in Brooklyn that they are threatening are smiling, not shivering, laughing at them and feeling sorry for them. Does anyone think that these businesses and organizations that Burke and Benschop are threatening depend on them for survival?
We hope that Hakeem Jeffries, the Leader of the Democratic Caucus in the House of Representatives in Washington, and New York’s Attorney General, having swallowed Burke’s poison as if it is hot chocolate, noticed that their friend has threatened the livelihoods of people in a district Jeffries represents? Are they going to take a stand? While we are at it, we hope the US representative who brought out spurious allegations to question Guyana’s human rights record during the most recent UN Human Rights scrutiny was paying attention. He had argued that wild allegations or not he has an obligation to raise concerns that people have raised. He took wild allegations and elevated them to one of the highest forums available to discuss human rights. Now genuine threats to the fundamental human right of people having the freedom to associate and interact with our President are before them. In written forms, the hate-mongers are peddling hate. Will they pay attention and see for themselves who the real racists are in Guyana?
Recently, the UN in Geneva also hosted the global assessment meeting on the Decade of the Afro-Peoples. A group from Guyana under the name, IPADA-G, headed by the names of Vincent Alexander and Nigel Hughes, claimed, like the one-man organisation in Brooklyn, that the Guyanese Government headed by Dr. Irfaan Ali has denied them $500M that was allocated in the budget for supporting the people of Afro-origins in Guyana. They neglected to tell the UN that the organizations that supposedly made up the IPADA-G themselves accused IPADA-G of depriving them of funding and supported the government’s move to give some of the funds directly to organizations. The government did not abrogate its responsibility to allocate funds; the government merely decided that instead of using IPADA-G, it would send resources directly to the organizations. IPADA-G did not tell the UN that these organisations support the methodology the government is using.
In Guyana itself, the PNC every single day in our country seek to divide us based on our race and ethnicity. Every single day in our country, the PNC invokes the message that once someone is Afro-Guyanese, he or she is a traitor for not supporting the failed policies and programs of the PNC. For the PNC, all Afro-Guyanese have a birth certificate making them the property of the PNC. Behind the PNC are the front organizations, like IPADA-G, spewing hate every day.
While President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali is busy spreading love and unity and transforming our country, this small band of hate-mongers have called on Guyanese and Caribbean people to boycott those with businesses who dared to walk with or talk with or be part of the conversation when President Ali visited Brooklyn. For these hate-mongers, President Ali must not dare enter Brooklyn; for them, they will concede Queens and any PPP President must not dare cross from Queens into Brooklyn. But President Ali is not dictated to by these hate-mongers. In every visit he makes to a foreign land, he seeks out Guyanese and engages them.
In Guyana itself, the PNC and the hate-mongers spread messages like Buxton and Linden and other places are the property of the PNC. In LGE 2023, the people spoke up and told the hate-mongers that they were not anyone’s property and they would think for themselves. Just like they did in Guyana, the people in the diaspora are sending a message loud and clear – they will speak and think and act for themselves.