Cornel West calls for end to Palestinian occupation at Dearborn visit

Independent 2024 presidential candidate Cornel West made his first campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday evening. A crowd of dozens roared with applause and cheers at Dearborn’s Greenfield Manor banquet hall as West condemned the Israeli occupation in Gaza and called for all cultures and faiths to stand together.

West spoke at “Gaza Endures,” an event hosted by the Michigan Task Force for Palestine and sponsored by the Michigan Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Islamic Center of Detroit, and Pax Christi, among others.

He’s running on a platform of economic, environmental, and transformative justice including reparations for African Americans, a national $27 minimum wage, universal basic income, and banning “Don’t Say Gay” and other anti-LGBTQ laws.

Watching him speak feels like attending a spirited church sermon.

“Yes, it’s a vicious Israeli occupation. Yes, it’s 75 years of vicious ethnic cleaning and an apartheid regime, but it’s also spiritual and psychological,” West said about the Israel-Palestine conflict. “We all know if there was a Palestinian occupation of our precious Jewish brothers and sisters and nearly 8,000 Jewish babies were killed in 50 days, the U.S. government, the corporate media, would be crying out. Well, I’m here to tell the world, and especially straight to Gaza where they are dealing with a genocidal assault, we believe a Palestinian baby has the same value as any baby in the world. I don’t care what color.”

While West called out genocide and ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza with no holds barred, he also emphasized that criticizing Israel does not equate to antisemitism. Instead, he preached the importance of love and unity across all cultures at the interfaith event which featured opening prayers by a Christian pastor, Jewish rabbi, and Muslim imam.

“The challenge becomes can we respond to hatred without hating others?” he said. “I hate the Israeli occupation. I hate the Israeli domination. I hate the Israeli genocide. I’ll go to my death hating it… That doesn’t mean that I hate all my Jewish brothers and sisters.”

click to enlarge

Randiah Camille Green

Watching Cornel West speak feels like attending a spirited church sermon.

He added, “I keep track of the Jewish thugs and gangsters who [have lost] sight of the precious humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters, who think they can go through life with impunity, no accountability, no answerability, [and] absolving responsibility. How in the world you gone have 20,000 precious Palestinians as ‘human shields?’ Only a sick corporate media would accept that kind of lie.”

He also blasted President Joe Biden’s administration for vetoing a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The U.S. was also one of only 10 countries to vote no on a similar U.N. resolution calling for a ceasefire that passed with 153 votes last week.

“[I’m] just calling for the New York Times to use the word ‘occupation.’ How impoverished and decimated can your vocabulary be? Even the Democratic Party today won’t use the word occupation in their platform,” he said to boos from the crowd. “That’s a disgrace, and we are simply here to say that the truth crushed into the earth will rise again… Sooner or later you gone have to come to terms with the precious humanity of Palestinian brothers and sisters in the face of overwhelming hatred.”

West said at the event a two-state solution for the conflict is “dead.”

“There was a time when we could aspire to a two-state solution but the right wing in Israel continued the expansion [and] the settler colonial project continued to gobble up the territory. So they undercut the very possibility of a two-state solution,” he said. “And you ended up with what? You ended up with a river to the sea apartheid regime, which is what they have right now. That’s one of the hypocrisies of talking about the river [to] the sea [saying] brothers and sisters in the street [are] talk​​ing about the annihilation of Jews. What a lie.”

He continues about the controversial phrase, which has been misinterpreted by some as antisemitic, “I have never heard at all of my rallies one Palestinian call for the annihilation of Jews… I don’t like violence. I don’t like the killing of any innocent person, no matter who it is, no matter what color, ethnic identity, or religious identity. But I do support resistance that focuses on the transformation of occupation and domination.”

U.S. Rep Rashida Tlaib, who is the only Palestinian in Congress, was censured after defending the slogan.

At the event, West called for a “spiritual and moral awakening,” referencing philosopher Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonialism book The Wretched of the Earth.

“Look at the world from those Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the Earth, where decolonization in various forms is unleashed in such a way that those who had been degraded and demeaned, themselves undergo a spiritual and moral awakening,” he said. “That’s what we need today. Not just in the American empire. We need it in Dearborn and Detroit. We need it in New York and Chicago. We need it in Haiti. We made it in Mexico. We made it in Ethiopia. It’s a global thing grounded in the local.”

He continued, “So let us say to our precious brothers and sisters and siblings in Gaza and the West Bank, we see you [and] we love you. We are attending to you. We are not just raising our voices. We are putting our bodies on the line.”

Often called “Brother West,” he is a former professor at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. West was reportedly the first Black person to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and has written 20 books on race, democracy, philosophy of religion, and African American visionary thought.

More information about the West campaign can be found at cornelwest2024.com.

Related

Why Marianne Williamson is running for president again in 2024: The former Detroit-area pastor is once again campaigning on a message of love and peace — and a sharp critique of Biden and ‘corporatist’ Democrats

Subscribe to Metro Times newsletters.

Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

Slideshow

Thousands march in Detroit demanding ceasefire in Gaza [PHOTOS]

Click to View 101 slides