The Peace Press — Wednesday, October 13, 2021 edition
“China is not our enemy. Russia is not our enemy. Diplomacy with Vladimir Putin and Xi JinPing is utterly necessary and the best way to help resolve issues of common global concern like climate change, nuclear proliferation pandemics and violent-religious extremism. We cannot afford to not engage in warm diplomatic relations with either of these nations. What kind of government the people in each nation live under is a problem for their own population to resolve — — -it is none of our business and we should keep our noses out of how they govern their respective nations.
Peace is best obtained through active diplomacy, ongoing warm talks and fostering understanding by exchanging views, perspectives and ideas and yes, making compromises too. Economic cooperation and integration is mutually beneficial too.
Being obsessed with diplomacy and dialogue is a prerequisite for perpetual peacemaking. Being obsessed with defining enemies and exaggerating threats is a prerequisite for perpetual war-making. Talking and exchanging ideas never hurt anyone whereas war has killed hundreds-of-millions.
It should also be noted that any kind of social conformity, particularly of the partisan variety, is antithetical to genuine independent thinking. These patterns of social conformity are most evident in how Russia and China are viewed by many Americans who are subject to incessant media propaganda.
If politicians in our country are devoted to war, warmaking and conflict with Russia and China, then it is incumbent upon ordinary citizens to undermine, subvert that policy by reclaiming information and methods to disrupt and fundamentally weaken war-making policy. Together, we can damage the drive to war. Together, we can destroy the American Empire. You simply have to believe and then demonstrate courage to take some action. Together we can do it. Acknowledge your power, know your power, embrace it, wield it without apology for peace, diplomacy and wisdom.
“Working together, they could exercise enormous influence in world affairs.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/11/imagine-world-us-china-cooperation
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“The statements coming out of the Department of Defense and the upper ranks of Congress these days make it seem that way.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/is-a-war-with-china-inevitable/
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“The Biden Administration and the U.S. military are sticking to old playbooks instead of understanding a new situation.”
“But there is unbelievable hypocrisy in America’s claimed role. Biden seems oblivious as the U.S. mowed down Muslims by drone even while self-righteously tsk tsk-ing China for abusing its Uighur minority. After our two-decade hissy fit of invasions and nation building brought kleptocracies to lead countries, we dare bark that China is not democratic. We seem not to notice our imperial lack of clothing when we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with tyrants and dictators strewn around Africa and the Middle East. We see no issues demanding democracy in Hong Kong while not having had much to say about it when the place was a British colony stolen by war from Chinese sovereignty.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/china-is-not-yesterdays-enemies/
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“Great-power competition” or “strategic competition” are just smooth, nice, bland ways of concealing a policy of military Imperialism and a perpetual quest for global domination that enriches the filthy cockroaches known as war-profiteers while continuing to savage the poor and the health of the planet too.
“For those of you who have lived off the planet Earth since 2018, defense officials have used the words “great power competition” to begin and end every one of their sentences for the past three years. That’s how the Pentagon can justify asking for more money while being unable to defeat the Taliban.”
https://taskandpurpose.com/pentagon-run-down/pentagon-china-strategic-competition/
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Did you know that every nation that joins NATO is then required to spend a particular percentage of their national budgets on U.S. weapons systems? That is another way that NATO is warmongering, war-profiteering organization that represents the Imperialist arm of the United States in the European theater in its continual quest for global domination and hegemony. Do the world a favor — — — — — — — -ABOLISH NATO NOW!!!!
“Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China and Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/08/nato-cognitive-warfare-brain/
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“America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan dominated headlines, but the larger issues of the war as a whole are ultimately more important and worthy of congressional scrutiny.”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/afghanistan-laid-bare-value-military-judgments-194911
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“We face a classical Thucydides Trap between rising and declining powers that too many times in history has climaxed in catastrophic wars. But now the stakes are existential.”
“We must do all that we can to prevent a catastrophic war and to build the albeit limited common security diplomatic collaborations that are essential to reverse the climate, nuclear, and pandemic threats that face all of humanity.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/09/geopolitical-earthquakes-increase-danger-catastrophic-war
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“Contrary to many sensationalist reports and social media posts, Chinese forces have not violated Taiwanese airspace, nor have they flown “over” Taiwan. In fact, these Chinese flights have mostly taken place in one corner in the southwest of Taiwan’s ADIZ hundreds of miles from the island, and they have all been operating in international airspace. Whether through sloppiness or a desire for clicks, media outlets and analysts that should know better have effectively misled their audiences into thinking that China has been routinely committing acts of aggression against Taiwan when it has not done that. Kevin Baron, the executive editor of Defense One magazine, claimed that the flights had gone “over” Taiwan, compared the flights to Russian military intervention in Ukraine, and then suggested that the Chinese government was “testing” the United States and preparing to do something similar here. “
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/10/08/lets-talk-about-those-chinese-incursions-into-taiwans-air-defense-zone/
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“Ukraine is Washington’s most worrisome security client in Europe. U.S. leaders are incurring grave risks to America in support of a country that is notoriously corrupt and increasingly authoritarian. Worse, Kiev engages in abrasive conduct toward its much larger, more powerful Russian neighbor, apparently assuming that Washington has Ukraine’s back. However, Ukraine is not the only client that belongs in the category of useless and potentially dangerous US security clients. An even smaller dependent, Georgia, also fits the description. And as with Ukraine, Georgia has the potential to entangle the United States in a needless armed conflict.
On October 1, former president Mikheil Saakashvili returned to Georgia after several years in exile. Even though authorities promptly arrested him because of his conviction for abuse of power during his time in office, Saakashvili remains a serious political player. That is not good news for the United States or for anyone that favors peace and stability in that part of the world. Indeed, during his presidency, he started a war with Russia and sought to drag the United States and NATO into the conflict. Any possibility that he might regain political power should be cause for concern.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Galen_Carpenter/2021/10/11/georgia-another-dangerous-loose-cannon-us-client/
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“Q. The U.S. always portrays itself as the greatest force on the planet for peace, justice, human rights, racial equality, etc. Polls tell us that most other nations actually regard the U.S. as the greatest threat to stability. What in your view is the truth here?
Yes, the U.S. is a major threat to world stability because the U.S. military has a vision of “global reach and global power” to support U.S. interests, which are primarily economic.The result is roughly 800 U.S. military bases scattered around the globe and an offensive posture for that same military.
Here’s a chicken-or-egg question: The U.S. accuses both Russia and China of rapidly expanding their military capabilities, claiming its own posturing and increase in weaponry is a response to its hostile adversaries, Russia and China. Both Russia and China claim they are merely responding to intimidation and military threats posed by the U.S. What’s your view? Do Russia and China have imperial ambitions or are they just trying to defend themselves against what they see as an increasingly aggressive U.S. military?
The U.S. is engaged in threat inflation to justify an enormous military budget that routinely exceeds a trillion dollars a year.
The U.S. always denies that it has imperial ambitions. Most unbiased experts say that by any objective standards, the U.S. is an empire — indeed the most powerful, sprawling empire in history. Does the U.S. have to be an empire to be successful in the world and effectively protect and serve its citizenry?
No. Indeed, by pursuing imperial ambitions, the U.S. is betraying its citizenry.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/12/what-are-the-prospects-for-peace-an-interview-with-william-astore/
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If the CIA has a right to assassinate those who tell the truth or those who reveal evidence of U.S. war crimes, then we share an equal right to assassinate CIA leaders or the President of the United States because what is good for goose is good for the gander. We should not fear the CIA or the President. In fact, they should fear us. But all kidding aside, murder is wrong no matter who is doing it, including the CIA or the military.
“One of the worst consequences of converting the federal government to a national-security state has been the stultification or warping of the consciences of the American people. With unwavering allegiance to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, all too many Americans have sacrificed their sense of right and wrong at the altar of “national security,” the two-word term that has become the most important term in the political lexicon of the American people.
The best example of this phenomenon is the CIA’s power of assassination. Most Americans have come to passively accept this power, with nary a thought as to the victims against whom it is carried out and under what what circumstances it is carried out.
Consider recent revelations that the CIA was planning to assassinate Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, for disclosing dark-side secrets of the U.S. deep state to to the world.
That’s why U.S. officials have pursued him with a vengeance — not because he lied about the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s dark-side activities but rather because he disclosed the truth about them.
That’s why they were seeking to murder him — to silence him, to punish him, and to send a message to other potential disclosers of dark-side secrets of the national-security establishment.
But anyone with a conscience that is operating would easily see that assassinating Assange would be just plain murder. And at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the murder of an innocent person is just plain evil.”
https://www.fff.org/2021/10/05/the-cia-has-stultified-american-consciences/
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“Though District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States’ extradition request, she rejected the argument from the legal team for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that hostility within U.S. intelligence agencies “translated into improper pressure on federal prosecutors to bring charges.”
However, a Yahoo! News report on the CIA’s plans to kidnap or kill Assange contains some of the strongest evidence yet that Assange was only charged with crimes because of their thirst for vengeance.Assange was charged by the U.S. Justice Department with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense.
The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in journalism, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world.Assange is detained at Belmarsh, a high-security prison in London where he has been held since he was expelled from the Ecuador embassy in April 2019 and denied bail.”
https://shadowproof.com/2021/09/30/yahoo-news-report-shows-improper-pressure-prosecute-as/
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“Of the estimated 1.4 million top security clearance U.S. personnel employed by one or another of the government’s 18 braches of its $81 billion annually budgeted “U.S. Intelligence Community,” perhaps one or two individuals each year are designated as “whistleblowers” and persecuted to the high heavens. These include heroes like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning today and Daniel Ellsberg, the renowned Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers defendant of yesteryear, whose revelations educated millions about the U.S. horrors committed against the Vietnamese people. Four million Vietnamese were murdered in this ten-year genocide, begun with the CIA’s lie that a U.S. destroyer was attacked in Vietnam’s Tonkin Bay by the equivalent of a Vietnamese sampan or small fishing boat.
Another handful of heroes, like WikiLeaks founder and journalist/publisher Julian Assange, are similarly persecuted when they exercise their right to publish what the whistleblowers have revealed about U.S. war crimes around the world. In addition to the 1.4 million top secret U.S. government spies, another 4.25 million “Intelligence Community” employees have some type of special clearance but don’t necessarily work in secure and undisclosed locations. That’s a total approaching some six million people in the U.S. spy business, not to mention the tiny proportion in the business of directly ordering and planning assassinations, kidnappings, death squad wars, covert and overt wars, drone wars, regime change military coups, cyber wars, media disinformation wars, industrial spying wars and all the rest.
Jim Lafferty’s October 5 Los Angeles Progressive article entitled, “With Military Actions in 159 Countries, America is Now the World’s Police Force,” adds yet another dimension to the U.S. national and international war crimes horrors.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/12/julian-assange-and-the-cia-usa-daily-wars-against-humanity/
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““The American Civil Liberties Union shared the article and reiterated its past call for the US to drop the charges against Assange on press-freedom grounds. The Freedom of the Press Foundation described the story as ‘shocking’ and ‘disturbing,’ and the CIA as ‘a disgrace’; Jameel Jaffer, the director of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute said that the story was ‘mind-boggling,’ adding, “the over-the-top headline actually manages to capture only a small fraction of the lunacy reported here.” Many media-watchers shared the story on Twitter, and numerous major news outlets, at home and abroad, covered or at least noted it.””
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/11/who-will-step-up-in-bidens-doj-to-save-julian-assange/
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“Biden wants to keep secret what is already well-known, that Abu Zubaydah was tortured, reports Marjorie Cohn.”
“The torture of Abu Zubaydah is thoroughly documented in the 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In fact, several of the justices at the October 6 Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Zubaydah referred to his treatment as “torture.”
https://truthout.org/articles/biden-tells-supreme-court-that-publicly-documented-torture-is-a-state-secret/
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“On his show Live on the Fly: Countdown to Freedom, Randy Credico interviews Nils Melzer, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, about Julian Assange in light of the Yahoo! story on CIA plans to kidnap or kill the WikiLeaks publisher.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/10/randy-credico-interviews-nils-melzer-on-julian-assange/
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“As I write in the article, when I met him I could not believe Mike was an American politician. Here was a former United States senator questioning the most fundamental and seemingly unshakeable myths that underpin a brutal status-quo. The central myth, affecting foreign and domestic policy, is that U.S. behavior abroad is driven by an altruistic need to spread democracy and that its vast military machine is defensive in nature. Mike believed that if Americans would be convinced that the opposite is true, the edifice of lies that supports an imperial house of cards could crumble.”
“It is suicidal for a politician to tell American voters that America’s motives are impure, that they are not the “good guys” in the world, and that money that should be spent on them at home is wasted destroying innocent lives abroad.
But that is what Mike did.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/12/a-tribute-to-the-late-sen-mike-gravel/
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The 1917 Espionage Act — — a worthless law worthly only of open disobedience. Break this law and break it often thus rendering it moot.
Violate this law!!!!
“Violation of the 1917 Espionage Act is the law that Julian Assange faces if he is extradited to the US from England. If found guilty of the charges under this violation, Assange faces up to 175 years in a US supermax prison. For what? many people ask. This is where it gets tricky. The 1917 Espionage Act is vague. It was called for in president Woodrow Wilson’s 1915 State of the Union Address.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/08/end-the-1917-espionage-act/
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“Nevertheless, the indictment which is probably as they say going to get the least support of anybody you could find for a journalist or for the case, does put a bullseye on the back of any investigative journalist in America, and one could even say the world. Julian, after all, is not an American. He’s Australian. He did not do this in America. They’re still trying to get him back here to charge him with an extremely questionable unconstitutional charge of violating the Espionage Act which as I’ve said earlier, I think would not stand up constitutionally.
But it threatens every journalist in the country who might do something classified, put out something classified, which happens all the time, every day really, it threatens them with imprisonment and some with prosecution for the first time in our history. So the press has — they say want to be something other than a source of handouts from the government, something other than a spokesperson for the government, has extreme interest in supporting and protecting the First Amendment which protects them, and to do that you have to support Julian Assange and do everything you can to see the faults, the wrongness of the effort to indict him and the effort to extradite him and the actual indictment of him.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/11/daniel-ellsberg-on-the-cia-plan-to-kidnap-and-possibly-kill-julian-assange-the-end-of-the-afghanistan-occupation-and-the-ongoing-us-drone-war/
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“In his 1996 article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” arguing for “Benevolent Global Hegemony,” my opponent wrote that John Quincy Adams was wrong that the U.S. should not go abroad seeking monsters to destroy. “Why not?” he asked. For the exact reasons that Quincy Adams delineated:
Our principles would turn from liberty to force. We would become the dictatress of the world, but no longer the ruler of our own spirit, he said.
Adams was right. Wars did not make America great.”
https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2021/10/10/against-intervention-and-regime-change-a-debate-with-bill-kristol/
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“The permanent crisis of the neoliberal economy demands a far more versatile empire than one that gets bogged down in any single country”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/afghanistan-amorphous-american-empire-alive-and-well
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“Washington should not have this much authority over the people in Afghanistan. Sadly, America, in large part, played a critical role in putting them in this situation. This relationship isn’t one of benevolent aid, but one of domination. Governments, including the United States, can continue committing large sums of aid to help stifle the humanitarian disaster, but those fruitful endeavors, which hopefully don’t enrich the pockets of racketeers and warlords, serve as only stepping stones from which more aid can be distributed.”
https://original.antiwar.com/Brett_Kershaw/2021/10/08/washington-demands-acquiescence-in-afghanistan/
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“The Taliban’s cruelties are horrendous, but withholding international support and maintaining blanket sanctions will only hurt the long-suffering Afghan people.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/09/failure-untenable-we-must-avert-afghanistans-economic-and-food-crises
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“As transnational feminists united against militarism and war, we call for a new U.S. foreign policy that recognizes interdependence and prioritizes connection and cooperation, reparations for historic and systemic harms, valuing people and the planet over profit, and protecting everyone, especially those made most vulnerable.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/07/open-letter-biden-feminists-call-end-war-terror
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“Saving a trillion dollars that could be devoted to preventing pandemics, addressing climate change, or reducing racial and economic injustice is no small matter.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/07/cbo-shows-how-cut-1-trillion-pentagon-progressives-urge-spending-true-security
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“On October 5th, Robert Reich tweeted out “We just ended the longest war in U.S. history, yet we’re still increasing the Pentagon budget. Could there be any clearer sign that congress is in the pockets of the defense industry?” It is not often that I find myself agreeing with Robert Reich, but I must admit that on this one he hit the nail right on the head. Why is it that this extensive war ending did not see a decrease in military spending along with it?”
https://original.antiwar.com/Connor_Mortell/2021/10/08/the-defense-budget-should-shrink-in-response-to-the-end-of-the-war-but-we-are-seeing-an-increase-instead/
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“The Congressional Budget Office’s study should start a debate not on whether to make cuts at the Pentagon, but by how much.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/10/08/new-cbo-report-dod-can-cut-budget-by-1-trillion-without-changing-us-strategy/
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“While taking aim at special interest lobbying and corporate profits that impede “sensible” policy, the author argues the “only way to be truly safe from nuclear weapons is to eliminate them altogether.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/12/profiteers-armageddon-report-reveals-who-benefits-us-nuclear-modernization-plan
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“The US is by far the world’s cruelest and most prolific practitioner of economic warfare, which these days mostly means starving desperate civilians under impoverished dictatorships. “
“Washington is deadly serious about sanctions. They are sometimes presented as a moderate, peaceful alternative to war, yet their consequences can be as lethal as war. Which is why US officials have turned to sanctions as the new normal. Their very harshness makes them attractive to policymakers.
This was illustrated by the infamous exchange between Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes and America’s United Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright. When asked to justify the death of a half million Iraqi children due to sanctions, Albright’s response was chilling: “We think the price is worth it.” She later acknowledged that her words were impolitic in the extreme — she won few friends in the Mideast by admitting that Washington knowingly killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim kids to advance US policy — but she never repudiated the notion that she and other US policymakers were entitled to casually sacrifice the lives of others for American geopolitical objectives.
This attitude lives on with the architects of today’s starvation sanctions most brutally applied to Syria and Venezuela.”
“Supposedly “independent” website Bellingcat raked in money from scandal-ridden Western intelligence firms that wreaked havoc — and reaped massive profits — in Syria.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/09/bellingcat-intelligence-contractors-extremists-syria/
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“Many would-be migrants, like the Garifuna, would love nothing more than to stay in our homes. It’s Washington that’s making it difficult.”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/10/11/us-must-stop-backing-regimes-displace-indigenous-peoples-their-homelands
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“Once upon a time, speaking out against Israel in Congress generated a massive and well-organized backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that, in the past, ended promising political careers, even those of veteran politicians. A combination of media smear tactics, support of rivals and outright threats often sealed the fate of the few dissenting Congress members.
While AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to follow the same old tactic, the overall strategy is hardly as effective as it once was. Members of the Squad, young Representatives who often speak out against Israel and in support of Palestine, were introduced to the 2019 Congress. With a few exceptions, they remained largely consistent in their position in support of Palestinian rights and, despite intense efforts by the Israeli lobby, they were all reelected in 2020. The historic lesson here is that being critical of Israel in the US Congress is no longer a guarantor of a decisive electoral defeat; on the contrary, in some instances, it is quite the opposite.”
https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2021/10/08/racial-justice-vs-the-israel-lobby-when-being-pro-palestine-becomes-the-new-normal/
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While some may bristle with offense at such a comparison, I think it is apt to sometimes compare Israeli Settlers with the Nazis. I sometimes imagine what Israeli settlers would look like wearing swastikas as armbands — — — — because that is who these scumbags remind me of.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israeli-media-attack-journalist-who-exposed-settler-violence
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“We cannot look the other way as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes, and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
“We call on global technology workers and the international community to join with us in building a world where technology promotes safety and dignity for all.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/12/huge-deal-amazon-google-workers-demand-companies-sever-ties-israeli-military
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Kudos to Senator Bernie Sanders — — foreign aid to Israel should be matched by equal aid to the Palestinians, or else, both should be equally denied all foreign aid funding. Equality in funding is one way to demonstrate an even-hand.
““If the goal of this supplemental funding is to help Israel replenish Iron Dome after the war that took place in May, it would be irresponsible if we do not at the same time address the enormous destruction and suffering that that war caused the Palestinians in Gaza,” Sanders wrote in the letter. “Just as we stand with the Israeli people’s right to live in peace and security, we must do so for the Palestinian people as well.””
