“This is my response to the many media requests as to what my aim would be as president in regard to the catastrophe in the Middle East,” Professor Cornel West, an activist and thinker who is running as an independent candidate for U.S. president, wrote on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack in Israel.
“I would stop the killing of innocent people—be they Palestinians or Israelis—by calling for an end to the vicious U.S.-supported Israeli occupation,” West wrote. “This violent resistance to oppression is the desperate language of an occupied people. And as Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us, only a genuine peace with justice can stop the barbarism of war and domination.”
West, who supports the anti-Israel BDS movement, added that “the U.S. government, the Israeli government and the occupied Hamas forces have blood on their hands.”
Earlier this month, West—a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York—issued a statement calling for the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate what he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s and the IDF’s “likely war crimes.”
“I have seen enough, the global community has seen enough, and people of conscience have seen enough evidence of intentional barbaric and genocidal crimes committed by the Israel Defense Force at the behest of Prime Minister Netanyahu against the Palestinian people,” he wrote.
“In addition to the nearly 20,000 murders of civilians, almost half of them children, the IDF’s indiscriminate killings now include three precious Israeli hostages who were clearly waving a white flag of surrender before they were taken out,” West added.
Israel has expressed “deep remorse” for the latter event. It said it mistook the hostages for terrorists and that Hamas is known to use human shields.
“Instead of rushing to send more money to fuel the IDF’s genocidal war machine, the Senate should be rushing to prevent the loss of more innocent Palestinian and Israeli lives,” West said. “Moreover, until the ICC completes their investigation, the U.S. must cease all military aid to the State of Israel—I believe that most U.S. taxpayers don’t want to be associated with funding war crimes, spiritual obscenity and moral bankruptcy.”
West’s “policy pillars for a movement rooted in truth, justice and love” include “end Israeli apartheid of Palestinian people and press the U.N. to establish a program for Palestinian dignity and liberation.”
According to RealClearPolitics data, West polls between 1% and 3% in a matchup with U.S. President Joe Biden, former U.S. President Donald Trump, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
