May 8, 2024 –An Important Message from Peoples Forum
Israel is currently initiating a full-scale invasion of Rafah, scuttling the internationally negotiated ceasefire agreement and defying the demands of all of humanity. Rafah is the most densely populated place on the planet, where for months one million Palestinian civilians have been systematically deprived of food, water and medicine. The whole world knows that if Biden wanted to actually stop this catastrophe — as he claims — all it would take is one phone call to Netanyahu to deliver his ultimatum.
This is the genocide that the student encampments have been ringing the alarm about for the last two weeks. All the elite institutions that choose to remain invested in the Israeli military are complicit in its killing machine. Everyone who is silent must speak up.
If you have been following the far-right media conglomerates, and the Murdochs in particular, the real problem is not this catastrophic invasion or the murder of 40,000 Palestinians, but the students who are fighting to stop these atrocities. And the real problem with the student movement, they claim, is … “outside agitators.”
It is absurd to reduce the students’ courage, on display in over 100 campuses nationwide, to outside instigation from either TPF or of any Palestinian solidarity organizations that are rallying to support them. The students are risking suspension, expulsion, arrest, loss of housing and so much more based on their own convictions and sense of outrage. They are seeing their own schools and tuition money supporting an ongoing genocide and doing everything they can to stop it.
The People’s Forum has been the subject of a slew of defamatory articles and video segments in the New York Post, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal. Reporters are secretly recording our volunteers’ meetings and our staff have been ambushed at their apartments. The escalating smears are part of a coordinated campaign that clearly involves the right-wing media, far-right members of Congress, and police officials. They want to deny the reality that the cause of Palestine is now the cause of a generation, and instead try to discredit the movement as “foreign-funded” or “outsiders.” All these smears have already been answered before. Since the days of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, the state has attacked movements in this way, to go after its institutions, funding, leaders and reputations. We call on everyone to be on guard against these tactics and stay united and focused on what matters now: to stop the genocide against the people of Palestine. Gaza is calling and the world must answer.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity