Gabriel Miller Explains Why We Need to Make Leaders Listen

Video Transcribed:

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At a time when the rest of the world is condemning Israel for committing war crime after war crime, Chicago is fiddling around on whether to condemn Hamas. By doing so, Chicago will be doing its part in enabling the genocide of Palestinians, and this resolution acts like it’s on the side of innocent civilians.

 

So, in that case, I’d like to add, are you considering a resolution condemning Israel for using white phosphorous against a civilian population? Are you considering condemning Israel for its planned war crime of forced removal of one million Palestinians from northern Gaza? Are you going to condemn them for cutting off food, water, and electricity to Gaza (another war crime called Collective Punishment)? Did it ever cross your mind to ever condemn Israel when they assassinated Palestinian journalist Shereen Abu Akleh in broad daylight or when they brutalized the people carrying her coffin peacefully? Or when Israeli snipers killed innocent peaceful protesters throughout the March of Return? Did the people in office before you ever consider condemning Israel at any point since its inception when it crams a country full of people into a 60-mile corner of their own country, creating the largest concentration camp in history, the largest open-air prison in the world?

 

The answer is a resounding NO. You never considered it, nor did your ancestors. But unfortunately for you, times have changed. The world is increasingly aware of the crimes of Israel and increasingly aware of the framework of politicians who enable their continued apartheid by resolutions such as these. And in a city like Chicago, with a majority Black and Brown people who have experienced the apartheid-like conditions of oppression in the United States, a generation of young people have emerged to understand immediately we have everything in common with the Palestinian people and nothing in common with the brutal Zionists under who they suffer.

 

A generation of people who are not surprised when we found out that our politicians, up to our president, spread lies about 40 babies being beheaded in order to rationalize genocide. We’re only surprised that they’re forced to walk those lies back, but of course, the damage is done. People are still spewing the debunked lies about rape and massacre of babies even here in this very meeting, when actually there is endless evidence of Israel having killed over 500 babies in the last 48 hours alone, having dropped more bombs in 24 hours than the US dropped on Afghanistan in one year.

 

And finally, let it be known that condemning the attack as the actions of some fringe group misses the point of what’s going on. The attacks were carried out by a broad coalition of groups from every section of Palestinian society, not just Hamas. That coalition represents a people determined to attain freedom at any cost, and they have arrived at this point in the face of a broad coalition of right-wing Zionists and their supporters, like those in the city council who would start a meeting with a prayer calling for their attempts at freedom a second Holocaust, were so silent you could hear a rat piss on cotton, when innocent, peaceful Palestinians are annihilated day in and day out, like the Native Americans of this country. If it were another time, these same people would be condemning Africans for rebelling against their slave masters and slavery, such as Nat Turner or the Haitian Revolution.

 

Thank you.

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