The cover story in the Nov. 1 edition of the Black Commentator praises United for Peace and Justice’s (UFPJ’s) Open Letter to President Obama and the U.S. Congress in support of a UN conference on establishment of a zone free on nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. In his essay, entitled, “This Election is Not a Pathway to Accomplishment,” the author, Wilson Riles, makes that case that “progressive activists must know that it takes concerted action from the bottom to make sustainable change happen.”
Riles writes: “Regardless of political Party, no U.S. President will change course unless made to do so from the grassroots. Like South African Apartheid, the issue of Middle East peace is ‘touching’ enough folks whereby a spurt in bottom up organizing could produce the necessary shift in direction. You name it – gas prices, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, religious fundamentalism, ‘Defense spending, racism and antisemitism and anti-Islamism, colonialism and ‘exceptionalism,’ wars and the potential of wars – all these issues and more are all entangled in the dynamics around the Middle East.”
He cites the UFPJ Open Letter as a positive example of the “rising tide of organizing,” that will be needed tochange U.S. policy in the Middle East and avoid war with Iran. Sign the letter here.
