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Students have been protesting against genocide in Palestine. Shown here is a protest at Sanford University. Credit: CC/Suiren2022

April 28, 2024 (EIRNS)—The late economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche observed years ago that the most difficult, most prohibited thing to say in American politics is: Palestinians are human beings. This is being proven again now, but by the emergence of a growing protest of young people, high school and university students and others against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, among whom are many protesting because they believe that Palestinians are human beings, and have inalienable rights long denied.

The entire national political class, the think-tanks and national media, the Netanyahu government from abroad are mobilizing to stop them, punish them, stamp out that idea. Whatever their faults, the protesters are confronting the indifference that has come over most Americans and Europeans, to this reality: All those being trapped and killed in geopolitical wars—soon to include themselves!—are human beings with those inalienable rights, including the pursuit of happiness and their own creativity.

Their right to the pursuit of happiness of human beings, includes the right and interest of every nation to economic and scientific development, which gives freedom to their citizens’ creativity and innovation.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the Schiller Institute’s founder and the convenor of the International Peace Coalition, says in concluding her “Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture”, that “The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.” That principle means that development is the means to peace, and that the basis of one nation’s “security"—so absurdly claimed now to lie in war and the preparation for war—actually lies in the rise and development of every other nation.

Those who speak out for an end to war—Ceasefire!—must give a vision of “a better day” to follow—an improvement in the human condition on which the warring sides can cooperate if they have had enough of war. Zepp-LaRouche organized an international conference on April 13 on the Oasis Plan for development of fresh water, power, transportation, new ports and development corridors throughout Southwest Asia as part of a “World Land-Bridge” of such infrastructure. Speaking to the International Peace Coalition meeting April 26, she said: “I think we have to be aware of the fact that there is actually an overall strategic war drive which becomes louder and louder. It is actually a militarization which is step by step involving all areas of society.”

And she concluded: “The Oasis Plan organizing must accelerate until we have a majority of people who agree that the new name for peace has to be development, and that there is no alternative to the cooperation of all the major and minor countries in the world.”