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On a beautiful afternoon in 1959, Coretta and I journeyed from our hotel in Beirut to take a plane for Jerusalem. After about two hours in the air we were notified to fasten our seat belts -- we were beginning to descend for the airport in Jerusalem. Because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this city has been divided.
And so this was a strange feeling -- to go to the ancient city of God and see the tragedies of man’s hate and evil which causes him to fight and live in conflict.
Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is incontestable. At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony. Until a concerted and democratic program of assistance is affected, tensions cannot be relieved. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.
At the heart of the problem are oil interests. As the American Jewish Congress has stated, “American policies in the Middle East have been motivated in no small measure by the desire to protect the $2.5 billion stake which U.S. oil companies have invested in the area.” Some Arab feudal rulers are no less concerned for oil wealth and neglect the plight of their own peoples.
The solution will have to be found in statesmanship by Israel and progressive Arab forces who, in concert with the great powers, recognize that fair and peaceful solutions are the concern of all of humanity. Neither military measures nor a stubborn effort to reverse history can provide a permanent solution.
As I said in my Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: Nations are not reducing, but rather increasing, their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted. The fact that most of the time human beings put the risk of nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful does not alter the risk of such a war. Man’s proneness to engage in war is still a fact, but wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.
If we assume that life is worth living, that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative. In a day when guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil and political disillusionment. A world war, God forbid, would leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony to the human race whose folly led to ultimate death. If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must shift the arms race into the peace race.
In 1967, when I took my stand against the war in Vietnam, I recounted that I had lived in the ghettos of Chicago and Cleveland, and I knew the hurt, the cynicism and the discontent. As I walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I told them Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I tried to offer my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. This need to maintain social stability for our investments . . . tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. . . .
It is with such activities in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. He said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
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On a beautiful afternoon in 1959, Coretta and I journeyed from our hotel in Beirut to take a plane for Jerusalem. After about two hours in the air we were notified to fasten our seat belts -- we were beginning to descend for the airport in Jerusalem. Because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this city has been divided.
And so this was a strange feeling -- to go to the ancient city of God and see the tragedies of man’s hate and evil which causes him to fight and live in conflict.
Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is incontestable. At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony. Until a concerted and democratic program of assistance is affected, tensions cannot be relieved. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.
At the heart of the problem are oil interests. As the American Jewish Congress has stated, “American policies in the Middle East have been motivated in no small measure by the desire to protect the $2.5 billion stake which U.S. oil companies have invested in the area.” Some Arab feudal rulers are no less concerned for oil wealth and neglect the plight of their own peoples.
The solution will have to be found in statesmanship by Israel and progressive Arab forces who, in concert with the great powers, recognize that fair and peaceful solutions are the concern of all of humanity. Neither military measures nor a stubborn effort to reverse history can provide a permanent solution.
As I said in my Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: Nations are not reducing, but rather increasing, their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted. The fact that most of the time human beings put the risk of nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful does not alter the risk of such a war. Man’s proneness to engage in war is still a fact, but wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.
If we assume that life is worth living, that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative. In a day when guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil and political disillusionment. A world war, God forbid, would leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony to the human race whose folly led to ultimate death. If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must shift the arms race into the peace race.
In 1967, when I took my stand against the war in Vietnam, I recounted that I had lived in the ghettos of Chicago and Cleveland, and I knew the hurt, the cynicism and the discontent. As I walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I told them Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I tried to offer my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. This need to maintain social stability for our investments . . . tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. . . .
It is with such activities in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. He said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
On a beautiful afternoon in 1959, Coretta and I journeyed from our hotel in Beirut to take a plane for Jerusalem. After about two hours in the air we were notified to fasten our seat belts -- we were beginning to descend for the airport in Jerusalem. Because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this city has been divided.
And so this was a strange feeling -- to go to the ancient city of God and see the tragedies of man’s hate and evil which causes him to fight and live in conflict.
Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is incontestable. At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony. Until a concerted and democratic program of assistance is affected, tensions cannot be relieved. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East.
At the heart of the problem are oil interests. As the American Jewish Congress has stated, “American policies in the Middle East have been motivated in no small measure by the desire to protect the $2.5 billion stake which U.S. oil companies have invested in the area.” Some Arab feudal rulers are no less concerned for oil wealth and neglect the plight of their own peoples.
The solution will have to be found in statesmanship by Israel and progressive Arab forces who, in concert with the great powers, recognize that fair and peaceful solutions are the concern of all of humanity. Neither military measures nor a stubborn effort to reverse history can provide a permanent solution.
As I said in my Nobel Peace Prize Lecture: Nations are not reducing, but rather increasing, their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted. The fact that most of the time human beings put the risk of nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful does not alter the risk of such a war. Man’s proneness to engage in war is still a fact, but wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.
If we assume that life is worth living, that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative. In a day when guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil and political disillusionment. A world war, God forbid, would leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony to the human race whose folly led to ultimate death. If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must shift the arms race into the peace race.
In 1967, when I took my stand against the war in Vietnam, I recounted that I had lived in the ghettos of Chicago and Cleveland, and I knew the hurt, the cynicism and the discontent. As I walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I told them Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I tried to offer my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.
But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. This need to maintain social stability for our investments . . . tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. . . .
It is with such activities in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. He said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him "bad press" may have their broadcast licenses taken away.
The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressured ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel's show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
"I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me," Trump told the press gaggle. "I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they're 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity... I mean, they're getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away."
"When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do," the president continued. "If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called "distorted" content.
It is unclear where Trump's statistic that networks have been "97% against" him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks "haven't had a conservative on in years."
But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says "the FCC doesn't have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content."
In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was "weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel," as part of a "campaign of censorship and control."
National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC's decision to ax Kimmel.
Gomez said that with Trump's intimidation of broadcasters, the "threat is the point."
"It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it's so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable," she said. "And so they don't want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation."
Democratic lawmakers are vowing to investigate the Trump administration's pressure campaign that may have led to ABC deciding to indefinitely suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) announced on Thursday that he filed a motion to subpoena Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr one day after he publicly warned ABC of negative consequences if the network kept Kimmel on the air.
"Enough of Congress sleepwalking while [President Donald] Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance shred the First Amendment and Constitution," Khanna declared. "It is time for Congress to stand up for Article I."
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, also said on Thursday that he was opening an investigation into the potential financial aspects of Carr's pressure campaign on ABC, including the involvement of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is the network's largest affiliate and is currently involved in merger talks that will need FCC approval.
"The Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into ABC, Sinclair, and the FCC," he said. "We will not be intimidated and we will defend the First Amendment."
Progressive politicians weren't the only ones launching an investigation into the Kimmel controversy, as legal organization Democracy Forward announced that it's filed a a Freedom of Information Act request for records after January 20, 2025 related to any FCC efforts “to use the agency’s licensing and enforcement powers to police and limit speech and influence what the public can watch and hear.”
After Hamas urged international support for the Global Sumud Flotilla, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday signaled another potential attack by claiming on social media that the peaceful humanitarian mission to feed starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip "is a jihadist initiative serving the terror group's agenda."
While Israel has not taken responsibility for recent drone attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla—whose name means perseverance in Arabic—the incidents have raised eyebrows, given the country's history of attacking previous ones. The foreign ministers of 16 other nations on Tuesday implored Israel not to target this flotilla, which involves activists and political leaders from dozens of countries, including eight US veterans.
As Middle East Eye reported Thursday, Hamas—which Israel and the United States designate as a terrorist organization despite its governance of Gaza—called for escalating the global movement in solidarity with the strip "in rejection of the [Israeli] occupation's aggression, crimes of genocide, and starvation."
"We call for mobilizing all means to support the Global Sumud Flotilla heading to Gaza, and we warn the occupation against targeting it," Hamas also said in a statement, part of which was quoted in the Israeli ministry's post on X.
Responding on the same platform, journalist Séamus Malekafzali said: "Past comments from the Israeli government about the aid flotillas focused on celebrity vapidity or didn't mention their aim at all. Now, they're honing in on it being a supposedly terrorist instrument. Feels like the response is being set up to be more severe than in the past."
The post came two days after Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism published a report titled "Global Sumud Flotilla": A Humanitarian Cover With Documented Links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
As Brussels Signal reported Thursday:
Flotilla representatives and critics dismissed these claims as Israeli disinformation, echoing accusations leveled at prior missions, and called the report a case of "guilt by association," reliant on photos and unverified affiliations rather than evidence of operational control.
Organizers emphasised transparent crowdfunding for aid, with no terror funding, and framed the convoy as a grassroots response to aid blockages.
Earlier this week, a commission of independent experts at the United Nations concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and an investigation from The New Humanitarian found that Israeli forces have killed nearly 3,000 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded almost 20,000 others since October 2023. As of Thursday, the overall death toll has topped 65,000, though experts warn the true tally is likely far higher.