(Washington, D.C.; 05/18/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) expresses its deep dismay and aggrieved disappointment with President Joseph Biden and his administration for giving a beaming green light to the memoryless Israeli killing machine to continue their flagrant implementation of an arrogant apartheid, open ethnic cleansing, and blatant commission of war crimes in their ongoing, indiscriminate, monstrously disproportionate, savage mass slaughter of Palestinian babies, children, the elderly, women, entire families, and men in besieged Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and throughout the lands confiscated from the Palestinian people in the colonial project and aggressions of 1948 and 1967.
The whole world welcomed candidate Biden’s promise to revitalize the U.S. commitment to purposefully and impartially advance human rights and democracy across the planet after Donald Trump burned down America’s human rights edifice at home and abroad – befriending despots in the repression of their peoples, arming war-criminal governments militarily assaulting powerless ethnic and religious minority populations, renouncing international human rights agreements, and actively seeking to disestablish international justice institutions, destroy global public health efforts and organizations in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and devitalize life-saving climate change initiatives.
In the face of Trump’s domestic and international assault on human rights, Biden’s campaign and administration repeatedly promised to center its foreign policy around respect for human rights and international law. The talk of politicians is notoriously cheap, but Biden has absolutely devalued the already utterly debased currency of hypocritical American foreign policy when it comes to aiding, abetting, and actively perpetuating Israeli war crimes against the land’s native, first-nation population of Palestinians.
The horrifying fish-in-a-barrel shoot by Israeli land, air, and sea forces against the abjectly defenseless, trapped, and impoverished Palestinians of Gaza; the continued Israeli settler-colonist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem; and the lynching and beating of protesting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank – all these Israeli government-sponsored atrocities lay bare Biden’s utterly forked tongue regarding even the chimera of a U.S. human-rights-centered foreign policy. This Israeli genocide – fighter jets, tanks, and mortars – is absolutely paid for by hoodwinked U.S. taxpayers and its “smart” bombs, artillery shells, gases, bullets, and backdrop nuclear arsenal – is all shamefully made in America.
Biden – who in the face of a shocking Israeli determination to deal out indiscriminate Palestinian death and destruction – said there has “not been a significant overreaction” by the Israeli government and military, whose unrelenting acts of mass murder and devastation he has constrained the growing majority of unwilling and unwitting Americans to pay for. Here’s a glimpse of the American-made-and-paid-for atrocities and crimes against humanity the Israeli Palestinian persecution complex has committed in the American people’s name in just 9 days:
- Massacred 217 Palestinians in Gaza and counting, while wounding 1,500
- Slaughtered 63 children, including infants, and 36 women
- Displaced 52,000 Palestinians from their demolished and threatened homes
- Destroyed and damage some 450 buildings in Gaza
- Killed at least 26 Palestinians protesting in the Occupied West Bank and detained hundreds
- Murdered two specialist physicians in targeted killings intend to exacerbate critical shortages of doctors and medical expertise treating the massive influx of wounded from relentless Israeli Defense Forces’ attacks
- Bombed out the roads leading to Gaza’s major hospital, Al-Shifa’, and to other clinics
- Damaged the Doctors Without Borders’ Trauma and Burn Clinic, forcing its closure, along with bombing six other hospitals and nine primary care health clinics, while cutting off fuel to a seventh hospital
- Destroyed Gaza’s only coronavirus testing site
- Demolished Al-Jalaa Tower, which housed international media, including the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera, with a U.S.-made 2,000 lb GBU-31 bomb made by U.S. manufacturer Boeing, in order to disrupt news flow and send a taunting message to world journalists of Israeli impunity and their impotency
- Terrorized and displaced thousands of Palestinian families by dropping bombs near some of the 50 schools where the displaced have sought refuge, with the Israelis informing international organizations of its intention to blow up Al-Buraq School and Al-Aqsa School, now housing families whose homes the cruel Israeli onslaught has already destroyed, while actually damaging 41 education facilities, according to the UN
- Shelled Gaza’s power infrastructure – one single power plant – reducing power to Gaza to as little as 4 hours a day. The UN warns that in two days Gaza will have no electricity as fuel supplies dwindle.
- Hit Gaza’s food stores, reducing food supply to mere days, with the World Food Program trying to provide emergency food assistance for tens of thousands
- Destroyed 132 residential buildings, 621 apartments, and 316 houses, while damaging another 6,000 homes
- Demolished Gaza’s major desalination plant, some two-dozen groundwater wells, and Gaza’s major wastewater pumping station, with sewage now free flowing into drinking water supplies. Wastewater has flooded the streets of Beit Lahia, Gaza City, and Khan Younis. Gaza’s 1.9 million people are now without safe drinking water.
Here’s how Biden, with his imaginary “humanitarian-centered” U.S. policy, has responded on behalf of the Palestinians enduring 14 years of illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza, 73 years of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, religious persecution, occupation, and indiscriminate killing:
- Approving and seeking to rush through Congress a $735 million sale of “precision-guided weapons” to resupply the oversupplied Israeli killing machine.
- Blocking 3 UN Security Council attempts to call for a ceasefire in the past week, including yesterday.
- “Express[ing] his support for a cease-fire and discuss[ing] U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end” – only yesterday, after eight days of gruesome, one-sided bloodletting by Israelis against innocent Palestinians.
Note that Biden could not even bring himself to call for a ceasefire, but only suggest his tepid “support,” for it in humiliating deference to the Israelis. This, after 7 straight days of Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and Biden’s studied avoidance of his own or his administrative representatives’ utterance of the lifesaving word ‘ceasefire.’ Yet he and his surrogates have repeatedly – including yesterday – reiterated the Israeli “right to defend itself.”
Biden’s pusillanimous claim that Israelis – abject colonial occupiers – have a “right” to “defend” themselves against the native people whose land, lives, and God-given right they are usurping by carrying out mass murder against their victims, mass destruction against their property, and a self-arrogated right to desecrate the holy sites of Muslims and Christians – comes as a direct contradiction to UN Resolution 37/43, as Kenyan political cartoonist Patrick Gathara has written. Rather, it is the Palestinians who have the sole right of “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle,” according to this UN General Assembly Resolution.
Gaza, moreover, is more than 70 percent refugees, whom the Israelis continue to kill after stealing their land and driving them into this open-air prison – declared a “toxic slum” by the UN – from which they cannot get out, even in the face of cowardly murder by their over-armed, morally under-developed colonizing, Western-supported, oppressive killers.
What Biden instead called for yesterday is “sustainable calm,” what one Palestinian observer has aptly defined as a “euphemism for Palestinians quietly accepting continued subjugation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and persecution.”
Biden is gaslighting the American people and the world, to see an illusion of the right to defend freedom in egregious acts of gross inhumanity, theft, and bloody suppression. No one is fooled.
The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) and American Muslims demand that the Biden administration and the U.S., the United Nations (UN), and the European Union (EU) impose and enforce immediately:
- A halt to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the carnage it literally rains down upon its refugees and residents, with an internationally maintained removal of all Israeli military personnel and hardware from Gaza and a no-fly zone imposed over this densely populated, tiny strip
- An end to the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by colonist-settlers and the Israeli government, national and local, in Jerusalem and all the occupied territories of Palestine
- Protection guarantees of Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, and Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa, including the Dome of the Rock Mosque, for free, unfettered access for all Palestinians and a concomitant prohibition against all Israeli aggressions and incursions, governmental, group, and individual
- Lifting of the belligerent and illegal 14-year state of siege on Gaza by both Israeli and Egyptian governments and militaries and the removal of all local and international usurped authorities from the Israelis over Gaza and the occupied territories
- Cessation of all U.S. and all other international military and logistical aid to the Israelis indefinitely until proper independent international legal investigations and proceedings have been conducted and determined, with proper Israeli compliance enforced
- Commencement of formal international tribunals to hold Israeli political office holders, military personnel, colonial community groups and individuals, accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including targeting civilian infrastructure, residences, buildings, institutions, and all other human and property damage, with all due and appropriate reparations established and enshrined
The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), its member institutions, and American Muslims ask our institutional religious and civic counterparts, the American people, and the peoples of the world to organize and press to save the lives and vindicate the human rights and rightful redress of the Palestinians of Gaza, Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank, and throughout the entire land against Israeli “forever-aggressions.”
And we ask that we come together in a prayer of deliverance:
For the utterly helpless among the men and the women
and the children, who say:
Our Lord! Bring us out [from the persecution] of this city,
whose people are oppressive wrongdoers.
And appoint for us, from Yourself,
an invincible ally.
And appoint for us, from Yourself,
a mighty supporter.
– The Quran, 4:75
