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DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING’S PROPHETIC WARNING, DENOUNCING THE
MERCHANTS OF DEATH  
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Kathy Kelly
January 13, 2025
ZNet
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_ Who are the criminals? News coverage of five former or current
presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never
hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in
weapon sales had marked the administration of each. _

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Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers,
lawyers, and commentators created _The Merchants of Death War Crimes
Tribunal_,
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to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in
the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a
company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing
war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference will announce the
Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international
jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them. 

Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range
of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and
needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on   specific U.S. war
crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and
aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.

What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes
occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time
on our phone and computer screens?

Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan
Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify
his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege
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which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial
bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing
assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people
clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s
forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and
girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational
capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production
equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking
towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The
Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without
charge by Israel’s military. 

Our tribunal would surely turn to three of the world’s most crucial
international human rights groups for testimony. 

On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International
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Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Its
research documents how, during its military offensive launched in the
wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October
2023, “Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in
Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.” 

On December 19, 2024  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors
Without Borders) stated
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“repeated Israeli military attacks on Palestinian
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over the last 14 months, the dismantling of the healthcare system and
other essential infrastructure
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the suffocating siege, and the systematic denial
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humanitarian assistance are destroying the conditions of life in
Gaza.” The report says there are “clear signs of ethnic cleansing
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by Israel as it wages war in Gaza
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Also issued on December 19, 2024 was a report from Human Rights Watch
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and Acts of Genocide,” stating that Israel has killed thousands of
Palestinians in Gaza by denying them clean water which it says legally
amounts to acts of genocide and extermination. 

Corroborating the testimony of health care workers and human rights
advocates in Gaza would be Pope Francis’s January 9, 2025, message
to international diplomats
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Pope Francis denounced
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ongoing war in Gaza, calling the humanitarian situation in the
Palestinian enclave “very serious and shameful.” Pope Francis
referenced the deaths of children who froze to death because of
Israel’s destruction of infrastructure: “We cannot in any way
accept the bombing of civilians. We cannot accept that children are
freezing to death because hospitals have been destroyed or a
country’s energy network has been hit.”

Screengrab from Al Jazeera

Recommendations made by jurors in the Merchants of Death War Crimes
Tribunal call for major weapon makers to pay reparations
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suffering caused. They echo the words of Pope Francis, whose message
to the assemblage of diplomats made this appeal
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“With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures,
let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger
and favor development in the most impoverished countries, so that
their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions, or
have to leave their countries in order to seek a more dignified
life”.  

Considering such testimony from so many diverse sources, one might
expect that U.S. lawmakers would re-evaluate their murderous,
unwavering support of Israel. Instead, on January 9th, 2025, the U.S.
House of Representatives voted to sanction
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International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense
minister.  

Who are the criminals? U.S. news coverage of five former or current
presidents gathered for the funeral of President Jimmy Carter never
hinted that hideous wars of choice along with massive increases in
weapon sales had marked the administration of each of the five. There
was no mention of President Biden’s order to send eight billion
dollars of weapons to Gaza. This gathering of U.S. presidents is
referred to as “The World’s Most Exclusive Club.”  Exclusive
indeed. What other club of so few has caused so much suffering to so
many?

On April 7, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famously
insightful, prophetic speech about another illegal U.S. war of choice
– “Beyond Viet Nam: A Time to Break the Silence
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said:  “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role
our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful resolution
impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures
that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” 

Dr. King’s verdict, in this speech, on the momentous first
anniversary of which he was taken from us, was that “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.”

The four defendants before our Tribunal certainly did their part to
pressure these five other criminals toward their varied crimes, but we
all have a choice to hold ourselves accountable in the face of Dr.
King’s warning that we are approaching spiritual death. One step
toward reconciling with wisdom, justice and love would be to demand
the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from an Israeli prison so that we
could humbly learn from him about war crimes and reparations. 

_Kathy Kelly ([email protected]) is World BEYOND War’s board
president and one of three rapporteurs who helped coordinate formation
of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal._

_ZNetwork aims to contribute original work that is needed for activism
and organization across a holistic view of life, giving attention to
gender & kinship relations, culture & community relations, polity,
economy, ecology, and international relations.
We prioritize an overarching focus on vision and strategy, as well as
on analysis that can contribute to either vision or strategy.
Critique is often an essential component of our content. However, our
goal is to advance the discussion beyond all that is wrong towards all
that might yet be right, and to highlight diverse efforts towards this
goal. We don’t just oppose, we propose._

* war crimes
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* Gaza
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* military weapons
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* Martin Luther King Jr.
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