On St Patrick’s Day, Mairead Maguire Led Public Condemnation of the Irish American President Joe Biden’s Genocidal Role in Gaza

NOBEL LAUREATES, 18 Mar 2024

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

17 Mar 2024 – Quoting St Patrick of the 3rd Century AD who preached, “in Christ, there is no killing”, the TRANSCEND Member, Northern Irish Nobel Peace Laureate, peace activist, and co-founder of the Peace People grassroots movement, delivered a scathing indictment of non-stop killings over centuries by the “allegedly Christian” West.

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.

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Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book, The Vision of Peace, (edited by John Dear with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni s the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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