We, the membership of an academic, cultural, artistic, sporting, professional, recreational, or social organization with no prior history of issuing statements on matters of international humanitarian affairs, wish to issue the following statement on a matter of international humanitarian affairs.
Over the past two weeks, our entire academic, cultural, artistic, sporting, professional, recreational, or social organization has witnessed the unfolding humanitarian crisis among Gazans in the wake of Hamas’s horrifying massacre of innocent Israelis with dismay. Our organization, which has no direct connection to Israel/Palestine and has, if we’re completely honest, only taken a serious interest in the 70+-year-old conflict since everything blew up over there a couple of weeks ago, demands an immediate cease-fire, the restoration of the flow of goods into Gaza, and respect by Israel for the human rights of Palestinians.
Of course, that having been established, our organization is also cognizant that there are many other humanitarian crises in the world right now of equal scope and urgency. We as a group of academics, artists, athletes, professionals, hobbyists, or fan club members have no desire, in our inaugural statement on humanitarian issues, to participate in mere performative virtue signaling around the one humanitarian crisis that happens to be blowing up our socials at the moment.
Therefore we also wish to take this opportunity to strongly condemn the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. As we write, millions of innocent Uyghurs suffer under a brutal state-directed program of ethnic cleansing including forced labor, mass arbitrary detention in internment camps, torture, physical and sexual abuse, mass surveillance, family separation, and repression of cultural and religious expression that the UN confirms may constitute “crimes against humanity.” We demand an end to Uyghur persecution and colonization, and we deeply regret that it has taken us until today to say so publicly, although in our defense it hasn’t exactly been burning up our newsfeed.
We also deeply regret not speaking out earlier in support of the brave women in Iran who have been risking their lives this year to protest abuses by the country’s draconian “morality police,” in particular after the death of Armita Geravand and subsequent imprisonment of Iranian rights lawyer Nasrin Sotouda, who was arrested at her funeral. We stand in belated but very real solidarity with the tens of millions of women not only in Iran, but across the Middle East whose basic rights are unjustly curtailed -- and also with members of the LGBTQ community who face persecution and even death just for being who they are. To do otherwise in a statement critical of Israel – the country in the region where the rights of women and the queer community are most protected – would be moral hypocrisy of the highest order – a point we expect is too obvious to need mentioning.
Of course, no debut humanitarian statement would be complete without a full-throated condemnation of the recent slaughter of hundreds and possibly thousands of innocent Ethiopian migrants, including many women and children, gunned down earlier this month in cold blood by Saudi Arabian border guards. This outrageous atrocity, horrifying in itself, is merely one example of a far larger crisis affecting climate, conflict, and economic migrants across the globe which directly implicates the wealthy Western countries, and which have utterly failed to address. We demand that this complex humanitarian catastrophe be solved immediately and comprehensively in a way that we will have to get back to you about as far as the specifics go. This is all pretty new for us.
Finally, our organization rather mortifyingly admits that we totally dropped the ball on condemning Russia’s brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and standing strongly for Ukrainian freedom and self-determination. We mean, like, how did we miss that one? Talk about low hanging fruit! That ongoing humanitarian crisis has it all: Imperialist colonial aggression by a fossil fuel funded superpower, the commission of mass atrocities and indiscriminate bombing of innocent civilians asserting their right to live in freedom in their own country, conscription of prisoners and minority populations for use as cannon fodder while the privileged white, elite majority stayed safe in their urban enclaves, gross environmental depredations, and the imminent risk of a nuclear meltdown. We deeply regret not grabbing the moral high ground on that one when we had the chance, but better “statement” than never! Vladimir Putin is bcc-ed.
For far too long, our academic, cultural, artistic, sporting, professional, recreational, or social organization has remained silent on issues we have only the most basic understanding of from stuff we read online, and about which nobody particularly cares to know our views. That ends today. We can no longer sit here safe in the US and/or Western Europe and pretend that we ourselves, by our silence, are not complicit in the suffering of the people in the above-mentioned regions and also the suffering of the people of, in alphabetical order, Afghanistan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Mexico, Nagorno-Karabakh, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tibet, and Yemen.
Therefore we (oh, and Myanmar) speak out today to demand swift action in all of these crises without singling out any one of them in particular just because it’s trending or involves Jews.
Because in the end, this statement is not about posturing, slogans, jargon, or empty gestures. It is about our organization’s newfound but indelible commitment to the long, difficult, painful but essential cause of global human rights.
In Solidarity
The Membership, Collective, Faculty, Team, or Fandom
