(Washington, D.C. – 11/27/2023) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) calls on President Biden and the United Nations to forcibly and immediately stop the U.S. supplied and diplomatically shielded Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the massive Israeli military and extremist settler-colonist assault on Palestinians in the West Bank.
The genocidal Israeli war on Gaza – unprecedented in this century – and its concomitant colonial onslaught in the West Bank, as these tandem actions have unfolded these last 75 days, have drawn severe criticism from international observers and multiple human rights organizations.
The U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a staggering global moral catastrophe:
As of Thursday 14, December, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor staff in Gaza documented at least 24,711 Palestinians killed, 92% of them civilians, including 9,643 children, 3,109 women, 210 health personnel, and 90 journalists.
More than 52,000 Palestinians have been injured in Gaza alone, with hundreds critically wounded. Thousands remain stuck under the rubble of buildings. Hundreds more are still uncounted, likely buried under rubble or injured in the streets.
The unrelenting Israeli Gaza blitzkrieg has displaced more than 1.85 million Palestinians, whom it is systematically depriving of safe shelter while imposing inhumane living conditions on a population 47% of whom are children, another estimated 50,000 are pregnant women, not to mention countless elderly.
Some 62,990 housing units have been destroyed by this ceaseless Israeli attack that in explosive tonnage exceeds the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in volume-per-day far surpasses both World War 1 and 2. Another 172,055 have been partially damaged, along with 286 schools, 1,356 industrial facilities, 124 health facilities (including 22 hospitals), 142 mosques, and 4 churches.
These ghastly casualty and devastation figures do not include this week’s intensified Israeli military mass killings and wholesale destruction.
THE ISRAELI GENOCIDE ON PALESTINIANS IS A GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS CATACLYSM
A cadre of international human rights monitors – including 23 UN nongovernmental agencies – have warned that the continuation of Israel’s indiscriminate military attack on Gaza (and the West Bank) is nothing short of barbaric and an embodiment of savagery.
The deliberate targeting of civilian structures and essential infrastructure such as homes, hospitals, schools, and UN refugee shelters, as well as power plants, water filtration systems, sanitation systems, greenhouses, solar energy facilities, and even bakeries —places that should symbolize safety, refuge, health, and life, have instead become scenes of mass killings— raising serious concerns regarding war crimes, a sentiment echoed by United Nations agencies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous observers.
The cynical strategy employed by the Israeli military of forcing civilians to relocate to designated “safe areas,” only to then target these very locations, has been cited as proof of intentional attacks on civilians. “There are no safe zones in Gaza,” noted International Red Cross President Mirjana Spolijaric, to disabuse the world of this Israeli policy of hasbara, deceptive information warfare. Coupled with Biden’s acknowledgment of Israeli “indiscriminate bombing” with advanced weaponry supplied (both legally and without legally required Congressional authorization) by the United States, serious allegations of Israeli war crimes and testimony abound.
The Israeli army’s use of bulldozers to unearth graveyards is sickening enough evidence of internationally prosecutable barbarism, but its recent reported plowing under of displaced Palestinians alive in tents outside of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital would absolutely put the Israeli government and military in a category of Nazi war atrocities.
THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S ACTIONABLE COMPLICITY
The Biden administration’s approach to this clear Israeli genocide has also come under scrutiny and criticism not only from American Muslims but the entire world. Biden’s inexplicably malign refusal to call for a ceasefire is being perceived as tacit approval for the continuation of military actions led by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. His willful commitment of America to this genocide has sparked rebellion among White House staff, including its youngest cohort, interns, as well as at least 100 State Department officials and seasoned State Department specialists.
Evidence shows that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have demonstrated behavior incongruent with that of a disciplined army that can be legally funded by American taxpayers, likening it instead to the heinous tactics of early Jewish-Zionist organizations such as Haganah, Irgun Awai Leumi, and Lohamei Herut.
Furthermore, the perpetuation of a narrative that fails to bring peace and security to either Israelis or Palestinians has been attributed to the ideology driving Israeli leadership. There carefully constructed representation of the situational reality of the Holy Land consistently places American administrations in difficult positions internationally and undermines the United States’ standing around the world.
Indeed, U.S. polls show overwhelming support for a ceasefire now in Gaza (not to mention near global unanimity for it), with nearly three in four Democrats, the president’s own party, insisting on it, and they begin to hint at a coming tsunami of change in Americans’ attitudes toward the Israeli project in the Holy Land, particularly among the young.
Among voters 18-34, an unprecedented majority – 52% – said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, according to a Quinnipiac University pollreleased in mid-November.
In a recent NBC poll, an eye-catching 70% of voters ages 18 to 34 disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war on Gaza. A Pew poll published two weeks ago traced a similar swing, with a dwindling 19% of Americans under 30 approving of the president’s response.
Recent fabrications and falsehoods purportedly propagated by Israeli sources(beheaded babies, rapes, and the use of hospitals as resistance headquarters) have raised questions about the credibility of information used by the Biden administration in its policy decisions. Despite knowing that Israel’s stated war objectives – many of which are brazenly genocidal – are likely unattainable, the U.S. continues to support military actions that disproportionately and directly affect civilians in one of the most densely populated places in the world, now doubly and triply so as the Israeli military has force-herded Gaza’s bombed-out, starving, and besieged Palestinians into a fraction of the Strip in the south near Rafah.
Moreover, international media scrutiny and investigative journalism have consistently highlighted significant discrepancies in the narratives presented by the Israeli government and its military regarding the Oct 7 attack, along with the ongoing situation in Gaza. These reports suggest a pattern of misinformation that has not gone unnoticed by global observers.
Contrary to the positions adopted by the Biden administration and certain American media outlets, which appear to align with the official statements of the Netanyahu government, there is growing skepticism and criticism from around the world. This has brought the credibility of said claims into question, often being met with disbelief or even satire.
It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a disconnect between the official accounts and the realities reported by foreign correspondents and investigative entities. We continue to monitor these developments closely.
Experts and observers increasingly associate the unwavering stance of the Biden administration with what can only be described as willing complicity in the ongoing genocide. They rightfully ask why the administration so adamantly and alone opposes global calls for a ceasefire, especially when, as we have seen, a significant portion of the American public disagrees with current U.S. policies in Gaza.
The international community is left questioning the commitment of the U.S. to a two-state solution, given decades of failure to facilitate serious negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Heavy American investment in military aid to Israel belies the U.S.’s purportedly sincere desire to foster a mutual, just resolution to the problem of ongoing Palestinian dispossession by a historically self-described colonial Jewish state on Palestinian land. Rather, it speaks to a resolutely purposeful hypocrisy in favor of the Israeli Zionist dream of a Jewish supremacist state, either apartheid in civic nature or cleansed of its indigenous Palestinian population.
The Palestinian people’s plight is not new. It spans over 75 years, marked by Israeli ethnic cleansing and occupation, violence, land confiscation, and displacement, and 31 years of prior British occupation. Setting aside the Israeli siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million people (which actually began in 2005), each Israeli action in Palestine has been scrutinized for its compliance with international law and UN resolutions – investigations often concluded with findings of violations.
Historically, Israel’s track record of treaties and negotiations with Palestinians – including Camp David and Oslo – has been challenged for honesty and fidelity, as has America, its biased peace broker, with the Israeli security and diplomatic establishments’ remarkable hypocrisy, as Israeli journalist Amira Haas catalogs in writing that Oslo’s Israeli negotiators’ “intention was never peace or Palestinian statehood.”
For peace and security to be truly attainable for all parties involved, there can be only one path: an immediate ceasefire now in Gaza, followed by an immediate and sincere process, imposed on the Israelis by the U.S. if necessary, toward a just and equitable solution.
This must include a cessation of hostilities, comprehensive humanitarian aid to Gaza, an immediate halt of all settlement activities in occupied Palestine, and, crucially, total withdrawal from all illegal settlements. These steps are viewed as preconditions for meaningful dialogue toward a two-state solution, if that is what Biden and the international community truly desire.
Alternatively, the state in the Holy Land can operate as is minimally expected in every democracy – as a single anti-supremacist polity in which all people without exception have equal rights and an equal vote.
Without meeting these conditions, peace will remain elusive in the foreseeable future and the persecution of the indigenous Palestinians – and their resistance – will continue to escalate.
We ask God for His guidance for all and His mercy, aid, and vindication of the oppressed.
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