Maguire is a gentle soul, in character and her activism, guided by her genuine faith in the Christianity of love and non-violence, not the version which has served as an ideological justification for both the mass-murderous Civilization Mission of the Old Europe and the White Christian Supremacy of the new neo-Fascist West.
On Western politicians milking Christianity of love and forgiveness, Gerry Grehan, Chair of the Peace People House, said to the visiting FORSEA activist Maung Zarni last year, “Joe Biden is an Irish Catholic, only when he wants Catholic votes in the US election times.”
In this short address at the Northern Irish protest rally organized by Belfast Palestine Action, Maguire also reminded the world that the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly characterized his own country as “the greatest purveyor of violence in history”.
Watch on Facebook: Mairead Maguire speaking at the rally in front of the US Consulate General, Belfast
In his then “infamous” speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, delivered at the Riverside Church in NYC (4 April 1967), the Southern Baptist pastor and civil rights leader, Dr King connected the dots of the deprivation of civil rights and equal humanity to African Americans at home and the American War (invasion, really) in Vietnam with its attendant war-profiteering by the American “military-industrial complex”. This influential web of corporations typically rake in their quarterly earnings as millions of human lives are destroyed including the young American soldiers, largely drawn from the multi-skin-coloured working classes, and who came home in body bags. For his un-minced words of truth-telling the New York Times led the public denunciations of MLK Jr, for mixing the American anti-war movement with his civil rights activism.
On the eve of Christmas last year, Mairead Maguire sat down with FORSEA’s Maung Zarni and shared her incisive analysis of the US-armed Israel’s genocide in the comprehensive 30-minutes interview here.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in pursuit of its calibrated Hitlerite “depopulation” policies in its Occupied Territories, using the “acts of resistance”, as Judith Butler put it reportedly, on 7 October by the Hamas, the United States has been a key target for worldwide mass condemnations, including by the Americans of conscience , from Kuala Lumpur to London.
Israel’s genocide has deployed, among other Lemkinian methods, mass starvation as both a weapon and policy of population destruction of Gaza under “total siege”. Israel’s “collective punishment” harks back to the Nazi era where millions of Jews in the Nazi-occupied Europe were herded to various ghettos and eventually to mass extermination camps, most infamously Auschwitz where the SS devised the policy of “(racially) organized underfeeding” of largely their Jewish victims, including babies, pregnant women, and the elderly.
The “moderate” President Herzog has told the Israeli public that “no one in Gaza is innocent” (including 1 million children and babies) while influential rabbis have publicly portrayed Palestinian babies as “terrorists of tomorrow”. In a chilling reminder to the rest of the world, like all genocides, from the Holocaust to Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide, Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza enjoy popular backing. In addition, led by Joe Biden’s Washington, all “allegedly Christian” governments of the West, to borrow Maguire’s characterization of pseudo-Christian regimes and states, (save Spain and Ireland) have aided and abetted directly and indirectly Israel’s genocide, ongoing.
Maung Zarni
