How does humanity, in the coming hours and days, prevent a return to the barbarism of the recent ethnic cleansing in Gaza, carried out in plain sight of the whole world by the very same people who piously speak of “the rule of law” to the entire planet? This can be done by, in the words of Ray McGovern, “organizing, organizing, organizing.” The need for “action and action now!” was the motivation for the Emergency Forum held by Humanity For Peace: “No More War Crimes!! Economic Development, Not Depopulation!!”
The forum opened, after co-moderator Anastasia Battle welcomed people, with the “Kyrie” from Mozart’s Requiem, performed by a chorus and orchestra assembled in four weeks in New York City to memorialize the August 6-9, 1945 bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The event concluded with a showing of the film “8:15 Hiroshima: From Father to Daughter.” What happened in between was that, as one person put it, “I was shaken into a realization of what we, the United States and others, have done, and what we have to do about it now. I went out walking afterwards, because I had to think about this.”
In her keynote address, Helga Zepp-LaRouche told the approximately 375 people in the live audience that “we are engaged in the effort to increase the mobilization of the International Peace Coalition, and make it grow, until we have brought the world away from the present course. It is very clear that there is a very great danger, that the continuation of the present geopolitical policies will lead to a catastrophe, much worse, but like [that in] the movie we are going to show in a little while, namely, a thermonuclear war, which would end life on Earth. If not in the short term, the danger, for sure, is there in the medium or long term.… Only an in-depth mobilization of the population, most importantly in the United States, but also naturally in Europe and all the countries of the Global South, is important to escalate until we have the force to implement the solutions which do exist. “
To that end, it was insisted by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity co-founder and Veterans for Peace member Ray McGovern, and by special guest speaker Vanessa Beeley, who called in from Syria, that the next 48 hours requires us all to act to force an extension of the present truce, preferably into a permanent ceasefire. There were many statements received from clergy of various faiths, and from various political organizations, in support of today’s Sunday gathering. These will be immediately made available to use as tools in the organizing of the next days, and as we enter the Advent and holiday season. The International Peace Coalition must become a catalytic assembly whose immediate task is to center the still-disparate protests, focusing them on supporting the idea of the international peace conference that needs to take place, even as soon as the next few days. China’s present chairmanship of the United Nations Security Council has allowed that nation to propose such a conference, and wide international support for that initiative needs to be garnered over the next four days.
There were over 50 questions, most of which have to be answered in the follow-up, or in this coming Friday’s International Peace Coalition meeting. That assembly will convene to evaluate how effective the actions of the next 48 hours, and the period immediately following, have been, in forcing the conditions for an international peace Conference on Southwest Asia (the Middle East): If each of today’s participants successfully organizes one person to join that Friday meeting, if only for part of that meeting, we can create the kind of international strike force that, moving in a charged environment like the present one, can accomplish much more than might or even could be expected.
Every moment counts. Consider a few elements of the eyewitness war report from Vanessa Beeley, who, while not in Gaza at the moment, is in Syria, where the U.S. is in illegal occupation. “So, coming to Gaza, to give an idea of the devastation: 36,000 injured, 20,000 dead, according to a Euro-med Monitor report today, and that includes 8,100 children. It’s very hard to say that number, without taking a sharp intake of breath: 8,100 children dead. Many others, of course, still buried under the rubble, after Israel has bombed the civil defense units, the paramedics, and destroyed the equipment they need in order to dig bodies out of the rubble…. I was there in 2012, during the Israeli aggression in November of that year. What has happened in the last six weeks, I can’t even imagine. Even though I lived under the aggression for one week in 2012, I can’t even imagine what the Gazan people were enduring during the last six weeks. And as you mentioned, the sheer tonnage of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza in six weeks outstrips those that we used, I believe, in Hiroshima.
“46,000 homes were destroyed; 234,000 are damaged. 88 mosques destroyed and 3 churches damaged: This is a very important point to make, because, while the West and Israel portray the resistance very much as an Islamist front, comparing them, of course, to ISIS—although the irony of this is that ISIS is, in reality, a proxy of the U.S. alliance, including Israel, in Syria—and [ISIS] has been triggered since Oct. 7 to carry out intensive and vicious attacks on Syrian Arab Army and civilian positions trying to reclaim the territory around … the gas pipelines basically that they lost in 2015, when Russia intervened and pushed ISIS back out of the central areas of Syria. So, whilst Israel and the U.S. are comparing Hamas to ISIS, they are effectively supporting, promoting, arming and equipping ISIS, and weaponizing them inside Syria; so that is an ultimate irony for me.”
Independent United States Senate candidate Diane Sare’s message to the forum offered an important insight as to why the peculiar Hobbesian Beast-man idea of history that Netanyahu, and for that matter, NATO and the Anglo-American oligarchy promote, is the basis for their military, political, and moral defeat. “As people may know, a couple of days ago, Bibi Netanyahu gave a rug-chewing-fit press conference in response to the press conference held by President El-Sisi of Egypt, and the Prime Ministers of Spain and Belgium, saying that now would be the time to recognize a Palestinian state. And he, Netanyahu in response, talked about the great historian he admires, Will Durant, who said that ‘history does not favor Jesus Christ over Genghis Khan. History favors the strong.’ Well, there are many hundreds of millions of followers of Christ, and apparently only one follower of Genghis Khan, namely, Bibi Netanyahu.”
At the conclusion of his presentation, which included his recounting of his own visit to Gaza seven years ago, Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, said: “My point is simply this. We stopped the Vietnam War; it was later than we hoped, but we stopped it. How did we stop it? We shouted, “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” Real loud. We know now, from revealed documents, that that had an effect. That prevented LBJ from going north into North Vietnam and getting China, almost certainly involved.
“So what do we need to do today? Well, it occurred to me, we have to have a new slogan, and here’s what I’d suggest: ‘Ho! Ho! Sleepy Joe! Genocide Has Got To Go!’ Everybody—’Ho! Ho! Sleepy Joe! Genocide Has Got To Go!’
“If we don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it. Bibi Netanyahu cannot do it without the support of the American people. He’s probably depending on American people just watching TV and cheering for their favorite football team. We’re not going to do that this time; we’re not going to say ‘Hey, hey LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?"’ we’re going to say ‘Ho! Ho! Sleepy Joe! Genocide Has Got To Go!’ Thank you very much.”
