The 74th consecutive meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) was opened by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Ritter said that the world was in transition from the colonial era—the British, the French, the Dutch and the American empires—which is over, despite the efforts by the current Western leaders to pretend they can hang on to their unipolar world. The Oct. 22-24 BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia demonstrates that the Spirit of Bandung in 1955, when the former colonies declared the end of colonialism only to see the Cold War wipe out their victory, is now finally being realized. The war in Ukraine is over, he said, although the U.S. and NATO will continue fighting and killing people until the Russians get their demands of de-nazification, de-militarization and “no-NATO.” Russia will not be bullied into a compromise which does not assure their own security, he said. The greatest danger is—what will the U.S. and NATO do in the face of a Russian victory? That’s where the danger of nuclear war must be confronted.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute and initiator of the IPC, then addressed the meeting, pointing to the continued genocide in Palestine, including the Israeli shut down of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). She quoted the UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini that the UN was established to prevent any return of the genocide and horror of World War II, but now it had been revived. There are 350,000 children in Palestine facing murder by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Zepp-LaRouche said. South Africa’s new report on the genocide, submitted Oct. 28 to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), points to the intensification of the slaughter, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war and ethnic cleansing, and the possible escalation of war with Iran. The alternative was seen in Kazan, while another event, the International Conference on Eurasian Security in Minsk, Belarus, is also addressing the solution. The killing and warfare will only end by ending geopolitics, which already gave us two world wars and the current threat of nuclear war. She added that there are also “hunger spots” around the world which must be ended through a new security and development architecture for all nations. She called on everyone to mobilize for the planned Dec. 7-8 Schiller Institute conference.
The next speaker was Jeremy Loffredo, a young independent journalist who was arrested in Israel by the IDF while covering the war, and threatened with 25 years to life or the death sentence for supposedly revealing secrets to the enemy. There was an international mobilization through social media to force his release, which eventually worked when a judge recognized that Israeli journalists were writing the same thing as he was, and the only difference was that he was a foreigner. He said the U.S. Embassy did essentially nothing to help him, and that Israel is the only country where Washington does nothing to help U.S. citizens who are arrested.
Jason Ross, one of three EIR reporters who attended the BRICS Summit in Kazan, gave a report on the summit, which invited 13 new “partner nations” to join, bringing the total to 22. A more detailed report can be read on EIR.news. Ross noted that the other Western journalists who were there told him that the summit clearly shows that “Putin is isolated,” to which he laughed and replied that the summit included participation from most of the world. Instead, he remarked, it seems that it is the West that is isolating itself from the rest of the world.
Dr. James Cobey, a surgeon who is part of several peace organizations (Voices of the Holy Land, Holy Land Foundation Five, Palestine House for Freedom, and Physicians Against Genocide) said he had been working in Gaza since 1964, where he started as a volunteer for UNRWA (which the Israeli Knesset recently voted to shut out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories). He addressed the urgency for citizens to join the campaign to end the genocide against Palestine.
The meeting showed a two-minute video produced by Türkiye’s Anadolu Agency, titled “Israel Will Eventually Pay the Pprice for Gaza Genocide Going on for a Year: Turkish President Erdogan,” fictionally set in the year 2040 and looking back at the 2024 genocide in Gaza, in which children from around the world were asking their parents why they had done nothing to stop the slaughter of Palestinian children like them.
Jose Vega, LaRouche independent candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the Bronx (CD15), said that U.S. surgeon Mark Perlmutter, who has done extensive medical work in Gaza, had been scheduled to address a forum at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, but his address was cancelled supposedly due to threats of disturbances. Vega said he briefed a meeting of people who had come to hear a presentation by the UN Special Rapporteur to Palestine Francesca Albanese on what had happened to Dr. Perlmutter, and the people there rallied to help the situation. A new forum was set up for Dr. Perlmutter, and messages were sent out to inform the city.
Chandra Muzaffar, the Malaysian founder and leader of International Movement for a Just World (JUST), provided a video statement on the “root problem, the underlying cause” of the instability in the world, being the hegemonic power asserted by the U.S., which has driven all the wars of the past decades and the current danger of nuclear war from the wars in both Ukraine and in Southwest Asia. It is that imagined power over the world which causes the military disasters, the economic breakdown and the cultural disintegration, which comes from the population being obsessed with selfishness, over the greater good. He said there are “hopeful signs,” such as the growth of the BRICS, the rise of China and of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Strengthen those, he said, and we can get out of this.
The discussion period raised a number of questions. Ben Wesley, an independent Congressional candidate in Connecticut, described a debate he was in with the Democratic incumbent Jim Himes of the district and the Republican opponent. He directly challenged Representative Himes on his support for the war in Ukraine and for his support for the Israeli genocide against Gaza. Himes did not deny nor change his position, but the result of the debate was the exposure of his warmongering character. IPC Moderator Dennis Small pointed out that that is exactly the kind of action individual citizens should take to tell truth to power.
An African from Kenya brought up the multiple wars on the continent. Moderators Dennis Small and Dennis Speed addressed this, with Speed declaring that there are 35 conflicts currently in Africa, but that none can be resolved without a change in the system, pointing to the 1978 conference report “The Industrial Development of Southern Africa” by the Fusion Energy Foundation, and the Oasis Plan for Southwest Asia, as the physical economic development policies required to end the wars, especially as Africa will have two and a half billion people by 2050.
Zepp-LaRouche closed the meeting by promoting the Schiller Institute’s conference on Dec. 7-8. She said no election in any single country, including the U.S., will stop the drive for nuclear war. In response to a question about the concept that the Jews are the “chosen people,” she said that no race or nation can be considered superior to others—which is what had produced Nazism in her country of Germany. A new paradigm is required that puts humanity as a whole first, above any nation or religion. She elaborated the concept of the great German “Poet of Freedom” Friedrich Schiller, of self-perfection coupled to the development of the nation, overcoming the dichotomy between self and state.
