[2344] in peace2
Emergency coalition to stop US support for genocide in Palestine
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Wed Mar 12 18:56:17 2003
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To: peace-announce@MIT.EDU
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Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 18:56:04 -0500
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Hi Everyone,
SJC is part of an emergency coalition to stop US
support for genocide in Palestine. Well, genocide has been going
on for a long time in the region, and with extensive US support
since 1967. Currently there is a request for even more aid
from Israel, but the emergency here refers to the statements of
Israeli govt officials that lead many of us to fear that a mass
expulsion is imminent. Palestinians are asking us to prevent
the third Nakba, or catastrophe.
Please spread the word and spread the following flyer.
Even if we can't prevent or halt this crisis, at the very least, we
can say we were not silent as we watched it unfold.
http://web.mit.edu/mit-rnr/paw/3_22_new.pdf
Fisk on the topic:
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=344510
historian Benny Morris on the topic:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,803338,00.html
Silence = violence!
In hope,
Aimee
flyer text:
Stop U.S. support for genocide in Palestine!
What is taking place in Palestine today is genocide. Everything that
sustains the Palestinians as a people has been targeted for
destruction: schools, hospitals, businesses, cultural institutions.
And now, with the pending U.S. war on Iraq, Palestinians face mass
expulsions from the land on which they have lived for 2,000 years.
Israeli government officials have made no secret of their intention
to employ forced transfer of Palestinians into Jordan and Iraq.
What is genocide?
Article 2 of the First Geneva Convention defines "genocide" as "any
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial, or religious group, as
such: a) killing members of the group; b) causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group; e) forcibly transferring children of
the group to another group."
What does genocide in Palestine look like?
Each and every day, Palestinians are being targeted for destruction
as a people under cover of the "war on terrorism." The United
Nations, B'Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights),
the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, international
monitors, and NGOs report that:
* During the past two years, 3,000 Palestinians have been directly
killed and 40,000 have been seriously injured.
* Curfews are imposed by the Israeli Defense Forces shooting randomly
at Palestinian civilians with lethal ammunition. And even those who
obey are being shot through the windows of their homes.
* Travel bans are in effect between towns and even between
neighborhoods, making it impossible for Palestinians to get to what
few jobs are left. Palestinians at military checkpoints are subjected
to humiliation and violence, and are often shot to death.
* Hospitals are attacked and medical care is deliberately denied,
resulting in still-births and needless deaths of infants, pregnant
women, the sick and the wounded.
* Water and sewage systems are deliberately destroyed, and access to
food and medicine is denied - despite a USAID-funded Johns Hopkins
study reporting widespread disease and malnutrition.
* Palestinian farmers are prevented, under military threat of
physical harm, from harvesting their fields - depriving them of their
only means of livelihood.
* More than 10,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967.
Only 500 of them could have been connected to "security concerns."
* Palestinians are subjected to a deliberate campaign of
dehumanization. Israeli soldiers routinely vandalize Palestinian
homes, urinating and defecating on the furniture and spreading their
feces on the walls.
Our government is an active partner in genocide.
The bulk of the weapons used by Israel are made in and/or funded by
the United States. Israel receives more of our tax dollars than any
other foreign country.
Silence is complicity.
Don't allow the U.S. government to be a partner in genocide. Silence
in the face of injustice is complicity in that injustice. That is why
we are sounding the alarm. Don't be fooled into believing that what
you see in the media is the truth. It is not.
Stop U.S. Support for Genocide in Palestine!
Saturday, March 22 - Noon
Copley Square, Boston
Join us to help spread the alarm about the genocide against the
Palestinian people.
Emergency Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine
Boston to Palestine (www.bcpr.org/b2p)
Jewish Women's Action Group
MIT Social Justice Cooperative (web.mit.edu/justice)
Mystic River Green-Rainbow Action (www.massgreens.net/mrg)
New England Committee to Defend Palestine (www.onepalestine.org)
[contact the Coalition at peace-mideast@mit.edu]
For more information on the situation in Palestine, refer to these
websites from other organizations: www.electronicintifada.net,
www.iap.org, jerusalem.indymedia.org, www.palestinemonitor.org,
www.professorsofconscience.org, www.Palestineremembered.com,
www.palsolidarity.org, www.lawsociety.org
Emergency Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine
