The Time’s reported today that the US is building a wall to separate Sadr City, Baghdad’s notorious suburb where Shiite resistance against the occupation has been particularly intense in the past 5 years, from the rest of the city.

“The avenue was quiet except for the whirring sound of the cranes and thud of the barriers as they touched the ground. Contractors operated the cranes, but American soldiers transported the barriers on trucks and directed their placement.

The team building the barrier was protected by M-1 tanks, Stryker vehicles and Apache attack helicopters. As the workers labored in silence, there was a burst of fire as an M-1 tank blasted its main gun at a small group of fighters to the west. An Apache helicopter fired a Hellfire missile at a militia team equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, again interrupting the night with a thunderous boom. A cloud of dark smoke was visible in the distance through the Stryker’s night-vision system.”

The wall was erected yesterday on Al-Quds Street in the area. Al-Quds means Jerusalem in Arabic. Its funny they should start there because if I remember correctly there’s a big wall in Jerusalem and all of Palestine that looks pretty similar. I went there a few years ago to do some work and made a radio documentary about that Wall. A man told me that his whole family was on the other side and he was now unable to see them. A woman who worked as a teacher on the other side of the Wall said she could no longer get to work.

When I got back from Palestine, I remember opening the paper and seeing a big picture of another wall; the one on the US/Mexico border.

Later, I remember reading that the US had hired an Israeli security firm to build much of that wall.

But more than contractors, these walls have something else in common; they come from the notion that the threat brown people represent- all lumped together as terrorists, immigrants and “others”- can be dealt with by building giant concrete and metal walls. But that security is built on violence, occupation and exploitation of people of color, be they Mexicans, Palestinians or Iraqis, makes this project a little disingenuous. Unfortunately for occupiers and empires, security results from justice for those who are stuck hardest, not from pieces of concrete.

Walls, walls, everywhere walls.