[Peace-discuss] Draft: AWARE weekly letter to gov/press

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Text for consideration at the regular AWARE meeting, 5pm Sunday 2 Dec. --CGE]


TO: President Barack Obama
Senator Richard Durbin
Senator Mark Kirk
Representative Timothy Johnson
Representative-elect Rodney Davis
Editor of the C-U News Gazette
The Public Square, WILL-AM580


Fifty-two international notables are calling for "a mandatory, comprehensive military embargo against Israel."

The call is occasioned by Israel's recent attack on the 1.6 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip - as well as Israel's decades-old military occupation and persistent denial of the UN-sanctioned rights of the Palestinian people. Expressing horror at Israel's latest bloodbath in Gaza - which claimed 160 Palestinian lives, including 34 children - the statement argues that this recurring brutality should not be allowed to continue.

The statement is signed by among others Nobel Peace laureates Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Perez Esquível; author and senator Walden Bello of the Philippines; US academic Noam Chomsky; former UN Assistant Secretary-General Denis J. Halliday; Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker; writer and activist Naomi Klein; and co-drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Holocaust-survivor Stéphane Hessel. It says that "Israel's attempt to justify the illegal use of belligerent and disproportionate military force as 'self-defense' does not stand up to legal or moral scrutiny, as states cannot invoke self-defense for acts that serve to defend an unlawful situation which they have created in the first place."

AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort, is a group of C-U citizens who have been opposing the Bush-Obama wars for the control of Mideast energy resources for more than a decade, since the US invasion of Afghanistan. We insist that the president and our congressional representatives heed this call for a military embargo on America's chief client in these wars.


--C. G. Estabrook, for AWARE
<http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/4740-52-leading-international-figures-call-for-a-military-embargo-on-israel>

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