(WASHINGTON, D.C. – May 24, 2024) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) – the nation’s umbrella group of national, regional, and local Muslim associations – along with American Muslims, lauds today’s ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering the Israeli government to immediately cease its military offensive in Rafah and open the land crossing there for aid.
The whole world understands the international community’s High Court ruling is binding on the Israelis, and they must comply with their full and immediate implementation.
“This ICJ has given Biden the perfect opportunity to compel Israeli cessation of its onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza by issuing a ruling that states exactly what President Biden himself has been saying he wants,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO secretary general: “No Israeli Rafah offensive and the Rafah Crossing must remain open for aid transfers into Gaza.”
“Now we’ll see where Biden truly stands on the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians,” Jammal said, “because there is no moral or honest political way for him to pit America against the will of the entire world for the sake of Israeli bloodlust.”
The international community has evermore loudly made its will utterly clear. Stop this insupportable bloodbath in Gaza – the industrial child-killing and the wholesale slaughter of women, the elderly, and men.
Halt the forced starvation and water deprivation of an entire people, and the criminal withholding of its fuel resources, energy delivery mechanisms, and hygiene systems.
Desist from laying utter waste to Gaza to deliberately render it uninhabitable – razing to the ground its entire civil society: demolishing its homes, its basic life-supporting infrastructure, its medical, educational, religious, emergency, and service institutions, its agricultural lands and livestock, even its cemeteries.
The religio-fascist Israeli government, with the support of a virulently ethno-nationalist population, is doing all this for a singular, savage purpose: to exterminate and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their indigenous lands in order to usurp them.
We call on President Biden to uphold the World Court’s ruling and immediately bring the Israelis to heal and end all support for a genocide that can longer be denied.
If the Israeli government, in its astoundingly brazen arrogance, refuses to comply – as its officials have already declared – the U.S. should implement an immediate arms and materiel embargo against the Israeli government and military.
Should Biden fail to halt U.S. weapons transfers to the Israeli government and military, he puts the U.S. in willful defiance of the ICJ’s binding order and renders our nation – and himself, his administration officials, and other members of the U.S. political establishment personally – complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
No space remains for Biden’s lethal equivocation.
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