(Washington, D.C. – 11/22/2023) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s leading umbrella group of national, regional, and local Muslim associations, and American Muslims welcome the Gaza truce (albeit just days in duration), and thank the Qatar government for its diligent and remarkable diplomacy that brought it about.
Like most of the world, USCMO laments the ceasefire’s wanton delay, enabling the ongoing Israeli mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the utter destruction of their homes, livelihoods, and infrastructure.
This is directly attributable to President Joe Biden’s misguided decision to believe the framing and fabrications of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist Jewish supremacist coalition government ministers. The horrific assault on Gaza (and the West Bank) shows an irrefutable intent and plan of an Israeli government, supported by much of its populace, to carry out an extermination campaign of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.
According to the most detailed estimates as of 17 November, by the respected governmental cooperative Euro-Med Monitor, the Biden-Netanyahu alliance has sanctioned the mass-murder of an estimated 20,000 Palestinians (including at least 4,150 missing under the rubble, 6,403 children, and 3,561 women, with other sources estimating an additional 2,500 elderly Palestinians) conducted by the Israeli Defense Forces using American-made, paid for, and supplied weaponry and ordinance.
In addition, this Israeli-American alliance has seriously wounded 32,310 Palestinian innocents. Many of these wounded may die of their injuries, given the Israeli army’s clear plan to systematically deprive the Palestinian population of healthcare by methodically attacking virtually all the hospitals and healthcare facilities of Gaza serving its innocent civilian Palestinians – a population that the Israelis themselves have blockaded and concentrated in Gaza for 17 years. They cannot get out.
IF GAZA WAS THE U.S.
Gaza’s land mass is less than a third the size of Los Angeles. This means the Israeli army is systematically displacing and driving an astounding 1.7 million Palestinians of Gaza into a geographic area just a third of that third.
To put this U.S.-supported Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza into proportional perspective, if Gaza was the U.S.:
— 248 million Americans would now be displaced
— 1.9 million Americans would be killed
— 827,000 American children would be dead
— 75% of the exterminated would be our children, women, and elderly
“THIS IS NOT WAR”
The international community has put off the Palestinian moral right to self-governance in their own homeland since the British League of Nations Mandate of 1920, before the birth of the UN, 123 years and counting.
The world, moreover, can no longer risk these increasingly rogue, frequent, and bloody Israeli aggressions that seem more and more likely to trigger a global war that could well be nuclear.
Pope Francis rightly acknowledged something Biden and the U.S. political establishment refuse to about this 75-year long Israeli genocidal attrition of the Palestinians, now flying at fever pitch in Gaza: “This is not war. This is terrorism.”
We can no longer fail to recognize and name the two crossed “Swords of Iron” now turning the Holy Land into a killing field of Palestinians. One sword is the rampant ambitions of a growing Israeli Jewish nationalism and its religious-supremacist ideology.
The other is the U.S. political-military-corporate establishment’s perpetual shielding of Israeli transgressions from any accountability for their repeated violation of now universally acknowledged standards of human rights and conduct of nations. The U.S. thereby abets and encourages these flagrantly illegal and immoral perilous Israeli actions carried out without consequence under the American diplomatic cloak of knowing Israeli impunity.
The U.S. can stop this emerging Palestinian holocaust, on a dime, if only our leaders muster the requisite moral fortitude and political will.
TWO MORAL PILLARS
The US Council of Muslim Organizations and American Muslims call upon President Biden and his administration to apply full force and through all the means at the president’s and the American people’s considerable disposal to achieve two necessary ethical objectives immediately:
1. Impose a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and oblige Israeli military and settler constraints in the West Bank, with their ultimate withdrawal and evacuation in accordance with international law.
2. Immediately engage the Israelis and the Palestinians in binding negotiations to bring about unconditional Palestinian freedom and equality throughout the land and unmitigated Palestinian independent self-governance, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolutions 242, 338, and UN Assembly Resolution 3236 (XXIX).
May God suffice the people of Gaza and the truly oppressed of the Holy Land.
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