And when the souls are recoupled with their bodies,
and when the female child buried alive is asked
for what sin she was killed.
—The Quran, 81:7-9
(WASHINGTON D.C., 8/7/22) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), an umbrella group of Muslim civil society organizations and mosques across the country, denounces with utter horror yet another Israeli massacre by missiles of innocent Palestinian children, women, and men in Gaza — and we loudly call it by its true name and condemn it for what it is: genocide, deliberately and systematically perpetrated by the Israeli government to destroy the people, culture, and religious institutions and presence of the Palestinians.
The contrast of U.S support for the freedom of European Ukraine against Russia’s aggression, while the U.S. blindly backs the ongoing slaughter and utter oppression of the Palestinians in an Israeli genocide and apartheid of the Palestinians that we Americans pay and provide the killing apparatus for is contemptibly immoral and untenable in our world today.
Among the very first victims of the current Israeli colonial settler assault on the Palestinians of Gaza is 5-year-old Alaa Qaddoum. Israelis cut off Gaza’s electricity in sweltering heat. So, the little girl went out to play in the shade of the mosque with her 7-year-old brother, Riyad. In seconds, Israeli U.S. made and paid for fighter jets swooped in and blew the densely crowded residential area apart. Our merciless metal fragments ripped into Alaa’s head, chest, and leg killing her instantly – and her cousin, and critically injuring her brother Riyad and her father.
Listen to Alaa’s grandmother:
“Alaa was very excited, preparing herself for pre-school. We were supposed to buy her a new bag and stationery. Was that her crime – dreaming of buying a new bag to go to kindergarten?”
Listen to her cousin:
“Alaa was an innocent 5-year-old playing in the street with her brothers and cousins. What did she do to be killed?”
These are the questions of Palestinians – Muslims and Christians, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, and in the Palestinian lands of pre-1948.
These are the condemning inquiries aimed at the Biden Administration and the American people, from all the moral hearts of this world.
Who will answer? A meaningful, lifesaving, freedom, and justice response that ends the attempted extermination of a people and culture is shamefully overdue from the U.S. government and the American media.
Palestine is the world’s longest-running genocide. The Israelis’ is the most brazen imposition of apartheid on a cultural, ethnic, religious group in history.
By the standards the Biden Administration and willing U.S. media now everywhere publicly judge and report on the Russian assault on Ukraine, we Americans ought to stop the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and end its apartheid over them immediately – and we have all the capacity and responsibility to do it, with the same political, economic, and strategic will we are now lavishing on Ukraine.
Genocide
The U.S. must cut its shameless military, diplomatic, and economic support for this rampaging Israeli genocide machine grinding the meat and the life out of the innocent Palestinians like little Alaa.
Look at this genocidal mechanism of Israeli destruction.
It is wiping out Palestinian utilities – drinkable water, sanitation systems, and electricity and gas production and delivery.
It is decimating the entire Palestinian medical infrastructure – bombing hospitals and clinics, deliberately killing clearly marked EMS workers and first responders, destroying ambulances, targeting physicians, confiscating medicines and barring life-saving medicines, machinery, and vaccines from entry into Palestine.
It is bombing out any media outlets perceived as even modestly impartial, while assassinating truth-telling journalists and activists, like American citizens Shireen Abu Akleh and Rachel Corrie.
All these decisive Israeli crimes against humanity are at least as egregious as Russia’s international offenses against the Ukrainian people and their country. They are arguably more grievous. The Israelis have perpetrated a systematic genocide against the Palestinians for three-quarters of a century in which their U.S.-backed and equipped colonial settler military has been killing, maiming, and besieging an indigenous civilian population. The Israeli military has killed 19 Palestinians for every 1 Israeli killed by Palestinians on average since the year 2000, according to B’tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. A horrific 1 in 5 of these Palestinians that this U.S.-funded-and-armed Israeli military kills are children. More than 1 in 10 Palestinians killed by this Israeli military are women.
The U.S. must cut its deeply cynical military, diplomatic, and economic support for this unprecedentedly virulent Israeli apartheid juggernaut run amok, crushing Palestinian lives, livelihood, culture, religious freedom, and political expression at every conceivable level and sphere of life.
Israelis force Palestinians to bear identification markers. Israelis bar Palestinians from free movement and erect notorious checkpoints between all points of egress and ingress, and spontaneously in countless locations. Israelis have designated roads that only Israelis can travel and on which Palestinians are forbidden to drive or transport themselves in any fashion.
Israelis wall and fence Palestinians off from their own land. Israelis confiscate privately owned Palestinian lands throughout the West Bank and categorize it into areas – A, B, and C, where Palestinians are disallowed from the free use of their own property.
Israelis have blockaded and besieged Gaza for 17 years. Israelis literally control the amount of calories that Gazans are permitted to consume per day by blocking food entrance into Gaza. Israelis control all products and materials, and their quantities, that enter Gaza, disallowing whatever they will for whatever reason. Israelis control all potable water, power and energy generation and use, medicines, and building permits. Israelis control all access to the holy sites of Muslims and Christians.
The shameful truth is the world has never seen a system of criminal apartheid of such iron-clad, soul-killing, utterly inhumane domination as the internationally illegal Israeli apartheid over Palestinians.
The U.S. lays moral humanitarian claim to its support of Ukraine against “Russia’s war of aggression” that has “displaced 7.7 million people” inside Ukraine and “6 million” to other countries.
The Israeli military has conducted dozens of actions and wars of aggression (supported by the U.S.) against the Palestinians that have displaced 7.2 million Palestinians. More than 2.7 million are displaced to the West Bank and Gaza. Some 1.08 million live in Syria and Lebanon (many Palestinian refugees in Syria have again become displaced refugees). At least 355,000 Palestinians are displaced in pre-1948 Palestine. Almost half of all the Palestinian displaced live elsewhere in the world, including Jordan and the Arab world.
A third of all Palestinians displaced live in 59 refugee camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. At least 57,000 more Palestinians have been displaced by Israeli punitive house demolitions, Israeli colonial settlements, and revocation of their residency rights in favor of Jews immigrating from elsewhere in the world. The Israeli Annexation Wall has dispossessed and displaced another 15,000 Palestinians.
Israeli historian Benny Morris documented no less than 34 massacres within just a few months of the 1948 atrocity of Palestinian dispossession. The Israelis have forcibly depopulated in total and destroyed 531 Palestinian villages to date, with no sign of cessation. Rather, the Israeli government is guaranteeing unbridled annexation.
By all these measures, the U.S. cannot justify support for Ukraine against Russia’s aggression and in the same breath support Israeli genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.
USCMO, and the American Muslim Community, condemn yet another unilateral aggression by the U.S. backed and equipped Israeli military against the displaced, besieged, and oppressed innocents of Gaza, deliberately targeting its civilians and their already shamefully meagre life-giving infrastructure and means. The fact that the Israeli government has undertaken this war of aggression as part of a political campaign strategy is unspeakably evil – and evil are all that support such lethally cynical strategies of public manipulation.
We call on the Biden Administration, the U.S. Congress, and the American people to end eight decades of growing Israeli genocide to save the children, women, and men of Palestine, and through policy fairness and diplomatic and economic consequences to force an end to the Israeli imposition of its demonic apartheid upon its long-beleaguered Palestinian victims.
In this sacred month in which God delivered Moses and the Children of Israel from the tyranny of Pharaoh, we pray for God’s deliverance of the Palestinians from their Israeli bondage.
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