Black Alliance for Peace Welcomes Amnesty International’s Report on Genocide in Gaza

Black Alliance for Peace Welcomes Amnesty International’s Report on Genocide in Gaza

For Immediate Release

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December 5, 2024 — The Amnesty International report unambiguously recognizing the barbaric assault on the occupied and oppressed people of Palestine and Gaza specifically as a genocide is a welcome departure from many of the tentative and unprincipled allusions to genocide without calling it genocide issued by a number of other human rights organizations and United Nations bodies, including the International Criminal Court.

According to Ajamu Baraka, director of the Black Alliance for Peace’s forthcoming “North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, “The deliberate, systematic degradation and dehumanization of Palestinians resulting in the physical destruction of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children have all occurred right before the eyes of the world. As we watched the wholesale obliteration of their cities, refugee camps, hospitals, civilian infrastructure, cultural and religious sites, food storage facilities and schools, the starvation policy, blockage of medical supplies, murdering doctors and medical workers, torture chambers where prisoners are raped and tortured to death, the Western world not only turned away from the horrific suffering of Palestinians but rationalized and cheered it on. That is why we say that the racist crimes of the fascists in Israel are also the crimes of the “collective West,” who fled to protect the fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people,” 

The Amnesty International report states that the government of Israel “imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” These actions by the Israeli regime correspond precisely with three of the definitions of genocide reflected in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; “a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

However, something significant about the Amnesty report is that it concludes that the actions by the Israeli authorities did not merely “appear to be genocidal” or “be perceived to be corresponding to genocide,” but declares definitively that there was “genocidal intent.”

“Palestinians are human and have human rights, but the vaulted “responsibility to protect” asserted by the liberal Western human rights industry and Western states was not executed to protect Palestinians. Why? The Black Alliance will say what the report and others will not say. The genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States is supported because the Palestinians have been racialized as non-white, and, therefore, “killable.” This crime is the crime of the century and makes all who did not actively oppose it, rationalized it, or voted for it, morally complicit” says Mr. Baraka.

The Black Alliance for Peace “North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights will launch on December 10, 2024. 

Banner photo: Woman standing amidst rubble (courtesy Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The Meaning of October 7th: An Oppressed People Will Always Find a Way to Resist Oppression

The Meaning of October 7th: An Oppressed People Will Always Find a Way to Resist Oppression.

Black Alliance for Peace will never abandon the Rights of Palestinian People to Resist Zionist Colonialism “By Any Means Necessary” 

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle of … the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.” (BAP Principle of Unity)

Today, October 7, 2024, the world commemorates – some in horror, others in celebration – a full year of a genocidal war, prosecuted in real time in occupied Palestine. In spite of the commonly accepted lie that the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7 was the beginning, this “war” actually began on November 29, 1947, with the passing of the UN resolution that led to the creation of the Israeli settler colonial state. For the next seventy-six years, with the backing of Western governments the state of Israel would lead a war of conquest, ethnically cleansing and massacring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, displacing and maiming millions, and establishing an apartheid state. Therefore, the Black Alliance for Peace views the Al-Aqsa Flood as a legitimate resistance operation by the besieged Palestinians – the only party with an internationally recognized right of resistance. We support Palestinian resistance against the violent military domination by white supremacist imperialism and colonialism that began, first in the form of British colonialism, and continues in the form of zionism.

In response to the prison breakout of October 7, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IDF) unleashed a horrific wave of state terror with indiscriminate bombing, targeting of civilian infrastructure, rape, torture and starvation with an obvious and specific target – the non-combatant civilian population. The result – a second Nakba – another catastrophe for the Palestinian people, with tens of thousands slaughtered with impunity. This systematic state terrorism has now engulfed Lebanon, with Israel replicating its depraved, anti-human tactics from Gaza. It began with an attempt to terrorize the resistance group Hezbollah including the killing of the group’s revered leader and anti-colonial fighter, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah. This terrorism has continued with the indiscriminate massacre of civilians in an attempt to force the Lebanese people into submission. 

Over the last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) along with all the other Western-run international bodies that claim to defend human rights have proven themselves complicit, acting as mere puppets of U.S. imperialism. As global protests erupt in fury, Israel continues its slaughter, understanding clearly that the U.S. settler-state and the white West will continue to provide it protection.  

What the last year has reconfirmed for BAP is that the violence we have witnessed is part of a global system of white supremacism dependent on unrestrained state terror in order to continue the extraction of value from still colonized and oppressed non-European peoples, working classes and nations.  The militarization of police, from the Israeli Occupation Force in Gaza to the deadly exchange programs in domestic colonized communities, is the extension of fascist settler colonialism. If we understand the U.S. as a settler project, then its global expansion can only result in one thing – replicating systems of dominance and repression everywhere. Here, we must also recognize that the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon mirror the looming assault on Haiti. Both represent the deep-rooted racist violence that has always been at the core of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy since this system of oppression emerged in 1492.

Speaking out against this system of global white supremacy, whether here or abroad, is met with criminalization. From resisting austerity and Cop Cities in the U.S., to the prosecution of the “Uhuru 3” as agents of Russia, to curtailing speech and protest in hopes of dismantling the ‘student intifada’ across campuses, to the Palestinians and Lebanese fighting occupation, the message is clear: dissent is dangerous. But we must stand firm in truth. The real terrorists are those upholding the illegal zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime. The Black Alliance for Peace condemns Israel's decades-long barbarism and fully supports the Palestinian people’s right to resist occupation. Decolonization and self-determination are not simply demands – they are central to the realization of human rights. And since there is no real justice for Palestinians in Western-controlled international laws, we stand by their right to fight for their humanity. Collective resistance is a central principle of the People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework that guides BAP’s approach to the human rights issue. 

Fifty years into the future, the zionist massacre of Palestinians and invasion of Lebanon will be widely recognized for the war crimes that they are. But in the same way that it takes little courage today to oppose the segregation of the 1950s, the time to stand up against genocide and colonialism is right now - today. And we do not have the luxury of waiting for history to vindicate the Palestinians’ just struggle; we must act to help end the zionists’ ever-expanding genocidal war now, once and for all.

 Our struggles are intertwined: we are bound by the shared reality of living under white supremacist, settler-colonial states. When one of us suffers, we all do. And together, we will resist. Long live the resistance. Glory to the martyrs. Palestine will be free – and so will the world once our peoples unite to defeat the U.S./EU/NATO Axis Domination. 

Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination

Defeat the war in the U.S. being waged against the resisters

Smash the Duopoly

No Compromise! No Retreat!

Banner photo: Palestinian young men hold a Palestinian in celebration around a destroyed tank of Israeli forces in Gaza City: (courtesy - Hani Alshaer – Anadolu Agency)

NYT: Black Pastors Pressure Biden to Call for a Cease-Fire in Gaza

Black Pastors Pressure Biden to Call for a Cease-Fire in Gaza

Black congregants’ dismay at President Biden’s posture on the war could imperil his re-election bid.

By Maya King - Reporting from Atlanta and Columbia, S.C.

Jan. 28, 2024

As the Israel-Hamas war enters its fourth month, a coalition of Black faith leaders is pressuring the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire — a campaign spurred in part by their parishioners, who are increasingly distressed by the suffering of Palestinians and critical of the president’s response to it.

More than 1,000 Black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants nationwide have issued the demand. In sit-down meetings with White House officials, and through open letters and advertisements, ministers have made a moral case for President Biden and his administration to press Israel to stop its offensive operations in Gaza, which have killed thousands of civilians. They are also calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

…Full article con’t