What are you doing to stop West Asian war and genocide?

To the editor:

What are you doing to stop West Asian war and genocide? This past year has been a horror show from both, capitalist Republicans and Democrats. They increase endless war budgets with constant funding of Israel’s terror at the expense of basic needs for U.S. voters. They give our tax dollars to war profiteers causing genocide in Palestine and attacking Lebanon, Syria, Yemen—with targeted assassinations, bunker busting bombs, rape, starvation, torture, exploding personal electronics and nonstop terror.

The torture-loving, war-hawking, neo-conservatives have left the Grand Ol’ Party and are backing the Democratic National Convention in their goal for regional war on Iran and the resistance. I’ve watched Gaza and now, the West Bank and Lebanon, blown to bits. Along with daily photos and video of families obliterated and children in tatters, almost 200 journalists and hundreds of health care workers, teachers, professors and students were murdered by Zionists backed by the USA.

Meanwhile, free speech, academic freedom and freedom of assembly are under attack in the U.S. A tenured Jewish professor was fired by an Iowa college for a pro-Palestine tweet and a Cornell University doctoral student from Africa is facing deportation because he went to a campus career fair and challenged war profiteers peacefully. 

There are alternatives to the endless military-industrial complex—that former President Eisenhower warned us about— backed by Vice President Kamala Harris, President-elect Donald J. Trump and Mayor Eric Adams, a corrupt capitalist cop-mayor indicted for bribes and overfunding cops, while underfunding human needs and illegally attacking anti-genocide protesters.

I donate to Palestine Children’s Relief and Palestinian mental health relief and will soon be teaching an online course on counseling theories to Palestinian students whose universities and faculty have been blown up by U.S. bombs delivered by Israel. I am organizing with Bronx Greens, Green Party of New York and Socialist Alternative to fight the corporate duopoly. We must act electorally and, in the streets, to end the outrageous violence and trauma. 

What are you doing to stop it?

Stuart Chen-Hayes
The author is a professor at Lehman College