Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the initiator of the International Peace Coalition (IPC), opened the 70th consecutive weekly meeting today, saying that the rallies and actions for peace around the world were “laudable, but the events for war are cascading faster.” The escalating genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has now spread to Lebanon, while Iran’s missile retaliation against Israel may lead to even greater efforts to drag Iran into full-scale war, perhaps nuclear war.
The danger in Ukraine also escalates, as the British and some in the U.S. demand lifting any ban on Ukraine’s use of NATO’s long-range precision missiles to strike Russian cities, already declared an act of NATO war on Russia by President Vladimir Putin, which will get an appropriate response. She pointed to the book The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, which shows that Israel has lost its humanity, and much of the world is following suit. The root of the problem is the neoliberal system, now collapsing, as the Global South and the BRICS countries are moving ahead. She called on everyone to watch and circulate the Oct. 2 Schiller Institute emergency conference, “Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon—Germany Needs a New Security Architecture.” The large anti-war demonstration in Berlin on Oct. 3 was useful, but inadequate to force the government to change its policies.
Jose Vega, the LaRouche independent candidate for Congress in the Bronx, New York (CD15), introduced and showed the video of his Oct 1 intervention on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, which has had more than 35 million views so far. He reported on Krugman’s response, in the form of a quick-turnaround op-ed in the New York Times, trying to blame Trump and lying about the content of the intervention. There must be a massive increase in such interventions against the people responsible for this global disaster, Vega said, and the time is short.
Col. Richard Black (ret.), who served as a Marine Corps helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, and later, as head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon, noted that Vega’s intervention was truly newsworthy, but has been blacked out, as has the actual military developments in Ukraine, where a major city held by the Ukraine army has fallen to Russian forces, as the Ukraine front line is crumbling. He also addressed the Israeli missile attack on an arms depot in Syria, not far from the Russian air bases which have defended the Syrian government from the U.S.-funded and armed terrorist organizations in Syria. He noted that the attack on Lebanon is not the first, but the fourth Israeli invasion of that country, and is part of Israel’s “Eretz Israel” effort to eliminate the Palestinians and other Arabs. It is no surprise that the Ukraine press is cheerful about the attack near the Russian bases, caring nothing about the danger of nuclear war.
Jonathan Kuttab, an international human rights attorney and the co-founder of Non-Violence International, said that the reason there was no nuclear war over the past 75 years is that there was a “precarious but functioning” policy of the principle of international law, which is now being destroyed. This includes belief in the inviolability of national territory; the avoidance of civilian casualties in conflicts; avoidance of destruction of health facilities; the ban on the use of hunger as a weapon—these are all being violated with impunity by Israel. International law is being ignored. Saving the human race at this point will require an international movement.
