Anti-War

There is a great opportunity coming up to build the peace movement by supporting or creating anew a powerful local event on the International Day of Peace. We’ve got all the resources you could want below — and if something is missing, let us know!

September 21 is the International Day of Peace, first celebrated in 1982 and recognized annually by many nations and organizations, including day-long pauses in wars that reveal how easy it would be to have year-long or forever-long pauses in wars.

This could not be more critical than at this moment of escalating genocide in Gaza, the ongoing devastation of the war in Ukraine, horrific militarized violence in Sudan and the Congo, and military spending skyrocketing across much of the globe.

This is a good day on which to work for permanent peace and to remember the victims of war. Below are events you can join, and resources you can use to support those events or to organize new ones.

Is it finally happening? Is the West turning against Israel? Or are we, whether motivated by hope or driven by despair, simply engaging in wishful thinking? The matter is not so simple.

 Last July, a significant number of countries and organizations signed the 'New York Declaration,' a strong statement that followed a high-level meeting titled, "Conference on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine."

Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

August 21, 2025

Have you read “The Case for Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide“? I don’t mind promoting it to you, since I agree with most of it (and also consider most of it to do absolutely nothing to advance any case for military intervention to stop the Gaza genocide).

The enormous problem we face is not the people who care enough and are desperate enough to make this misguided proposal. The enormous problem is the usual one: corrupt, evil, malfunctioning, and sadistic governments abetted by great masses of people too busy, distracted, ignorant, or uncaring to try anything at all.

The first eight pages of 23 in the document linked above simply tell us that there is a genocide happening and that nothing thus far has worked to stop it. On this there can be no dispute, and anyone unaware or unengaged should immediately read those eight pages five times.

US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has urged the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to launch an investigation into the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is a leading Muslim-American civil liberties group, claiming the largest Muslim organization in the US has terror ties.

Look who is talking! Ever since he became a U.S. Senator, Cotton put the interests of Israel ahead of the good old USA.

* First, he called Biden last year a "coward" if he does not unleash "devastating military retaliation" both inside Iran and across the Middle East (on behalf of Israel, of course). I have no clue how bombing Iran benefits the American people or the people of Arkansas? 

* Would Sen. Cotton care to tell us what he gets out of lobbying on behalf of a foreign lobbying organization that is not even registered in compliance with US law? 

“Judaism is to do justice and to have mercy and to walk humbly with God; and all the rest is commentary and of secondary importance”.

So wrote Rabbi Elmer Berger, a leading Jewish thinker of the 50’s and 60’s, who opposed what he called Israeli-style “Jewish nationalism”.

Another renowned Jewish thinker, Arthur Koestler, warned that Israel was becoming “a nasty little Sparta”.

This past week, much of the rest of the world, sickened by the mass slaughter and destruction in Gaza wrought by Israel, joined in calls for creation of a Palestinian state. This obvious solution to the agonies of five million stateless Palestinian refugees would be a start to making whole one of the world’s largest refugee problems. Over 147 nations have recognized the Palestinian state. But until now, the United States, France, Britain and Germany have refused to heed the cries of the savagely abused Palestinian refugees.

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.

I always looked at Sen. Bernie Sanders as the voice of reason and held him in high regards when it comes to the plight of the Palestinians. However, I was shocked and saddened that he had recently referred to Hamas as a terrorist organization. In March 2024 Sen. Sanders said that Hamas and Israel Crime Minister Netanyahu must go. (CBS News interview)

To Hamas or Jihad fighters, the people of Gaza are their parents, wives, sons, brothers and sisters. Those are freedom fighters and not a bunch of mercenaries like those serving in the Israeli Death Forces (IDF). If they were not present in Gaza, the IDF would have committed far worse crimes and killed more Palestinians than they already did.

Those courageous Palestinians fighters will not bow their heads or bend their knees except for Almighty God. Their logo is: “It’s jihad until either victory or martyrdom."

Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it.

Donald Trump has opened the military door to an atomic apocalypse.  

But it’s likeliest to come through the “Peaceful Atom Window.”

The 400+ atomic power reactors (94 in the US) now operating worldwide are all sitting ducks for low-tech attack.

Iran or any other nation or terror group, with or without a nuclear warhead, can blow apart any commercial reactor with a single drone.

The resulting apocalypse can be spreading as you read this.  

Commercial atomic power makes nuclear warheads ridiculously obsolete.  The Trump/Netanyahu attacks on Iran’s alleged bomb factories ae marginal at most to today’s atomic reality.  

Once blown apart by a drone, earthquake, tsunami, human error, equipment failure or simple sabotage, any atomic reactor can irradiate a continent, an ocean… the planet as a whole.  

All commercial reactors operating in the world today are without comprehensive private insurance.

They are sitting naked ducks…absurdly vulnerable to a simple low-level attack from a single combatant with a drone, mortar, instrument of sabotage.