I want to offer a challenge to Milwaukee’s Jewish community: Join me and thousands of other Milwaukeans in opposing President Bush’s impending war on Iraq.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Now is the time to speak up, before it is too late.
What might you be betraying in your silence? Your Jewish values.
Judaism states that to save a life is to save the world, and conversely to take a life is to destroy the world.
As Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center, pointed out in a statement “Silence is Betrayal” on the center’s web site (www.shalomctr.org):
“A war against Iraq would endanger many Iraqi, American, Israeli and other lives. It would also endanger Israel by bringing on, as U.S. intelligence experts have confirmed, the sharpest danger of a last-ditch chemical/biological attack upon the people of Israel.
“It would take hundreds of billions of dollars from America’s own people — from health care for our seniors, schools for our children, healing for the earth. It would increase the unaccountable power of the oil companies and regimes that have provided money to both the Al-Qaida terrorists and the Bush Administration, that have corrupted American politics and robbed American stockholders, that poison the air and befoul the seas and scorch the earth.
“It has already deeply wounded human rights and civil liberties not only for Arabs and Muslims in America but even for Persian Jewish immigrants who along with Muslims were rounded up, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation to the regimes they fled. It has occasioned (as reported by the Washington Post, Dec. 26) the torture of U.S. prisoners held overseas by the CIA.”
Cannot stand silent
For those who would argue that President Bush has made a case that Iraq is a dangerous enemy, I would counter: Have we been threatened by Iraq, or only by North Korea? Why are we not lining up to make a pre-emptive strike on North Korea instead?
Because North Korea does not have 9 percent of the world’s oil reserves that “we” would like to control.
Bush continues to have difficulty getting the international community behind him in this conflict. Not only the governments, but also the people of Europe are 60 percent opposed to a war with Iraq.
In the last Gulf War, the U.S. had international support, both financially and militarily. If we go into this war without broad support, who will bear the cost?
Bush has already predicted a $300 billion dollar deficit for the next year, without including the cost of the war. How much will that go up if we do go to war?
What will happen to Medicare, education, social security, transportation and all the other things that this country so desperately needs to protect? Who will suffer the most? The poor and underclass, who are already struggling in this recession economy from lack of jobs and services.
And what of the cost to the Iraqi people? During the past 12 years we have had economic sanctions against Iraq that have contributed to the death of millions of ordinary Iraqis, many of them children.
Now President Bush proposes to drop 30,000 tons of bombs in the first 48 hours. U.N. humanitarian aid agencies estimate that up to 500,000 Iraqis will be injured in the first stages of the war, and up to 9.5 million Iraqis will become dependent on aid agencies for food and medicine.
The U.N., however, cannot take care of that many people. The aid agencies project millions more will die from malnutrition and disease from lack of access to clean water after we have wiped out Iraq’s “infrastructure,” which includes water purification plants.
I know that I cannot stand silent as the president of the United States plans to bring our country into war. I will march as a Jew, “praying with my feet,” as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel did when he marched against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. Please join me.
Gigi Pomerantz is a member of Peace Action Wisconsin’s Mideast Peace Committee.
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