The Greatest – RIP (Muhammad Ali’s Quotes on Zionism and Imperialism)

Why should me and other so-called negro go 10,000 miles from home here in America to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who never bothered us? And I will say directly: "No, I will not go." - Muhammad Ali - I Ain't Got No Quarrel With Them Viet Congs

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"My conscious won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, raped and killed my mother and father. Well, shoot them for what? I am not gonna shoot them. They are little poor black people, little babies and children, women. ... Why don't you just take me to jail." - Muhammad Ali on Vietnam War

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Ali Belts Zionism (March 8, 1974)

Muhammad Ali, who says he is retiring from the ring to spread the faith of Islam, is losing no time throwing right hooks at Zionism. He told a press conference in Beirut, at the start of a tour of the Middle East, that “the United States is the stronghold of Zionism and imperialism.” On a visit later to two Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, the former heavy-weight boxing champion was quoted by a guerrilla news agency as saying: “In my name and the name of all Muslims in America, I declare support for the Palestinian struggle to liberate their homeland and oust the Zionist invaders.” Ali told newsmen that after retiring from the ring he will devote his life to preaching the Moslem faith, beginning by establishing a mosque in Las Vegas. Uncharacteristically modest, he added: “I am no longer the greatest. Allah is.”

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During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonize them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarizing the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.

Lenin, State and Revolution, Chap.1. - 1917 via Louis Allday