If you wonder why the antiwar movement is corrupted beyond redemption & has lost the capacity, with its present misleaders, to transform itself, it can only be explained by white supremacy & acceptance of the Islamophobic ideology of the so-called ‘war on terror’. How else do you explain that they are holding forums on how persecuted Putin & Russia are or on the legal problems of a handful of grandstanders who occupied an abandoned embassy in Washington DC rather than organizing rallies against the slaughter of children & civilians in Idlib? In fact, there isn’t a single recorded objection to the bombing of Idlib by those long associated with the antiwar movement.
This sketch by artist Marc Nelson is a tribute to five-year-old Riham al-Abdullah who died last month trying to save her baby sister after a Syrian or Russian airstrike on their residence in Idlib province. She died along with her mother & three-year-old sister. May they Rest In Peace.
The most imperative mission of our times is to rebuild an international antiwar movement on a principled basis. When we see the absolute silence on the carpet bombing of Idlib, the relative passivity on the genocide in Gaza, & note that there is no antiwar response in India to the massive buildup of troops in Kashmir, we can see the problem is not just with western political forces but is an international problem. There needs to be an assessment about how this corruption of principles came to be & that analysis will be part of rebuilding a movement rooted in long-established antiwar principles, including the principle that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’
(Sketch of Riham al-Abdullah by artist Marc Nelson)