No War in Iran, Free Palestine – Organise Now!
Over the last two and a half years, our city has come together in opposition to the ongoing genocide and apartheid in Palestine. We’ve done this in the knowledge that these horrors are not simply a ‘humanitarian crisis’, but are a result of political choices by Western leaders who protect the rich and powerful. We know that if we push together we can force different choices.
However, just as with the genocide in Gaza, our leaders are again making those same depraved choices. In refusing to condemn the war on Iran, and by allowing the use of British air bases, our government has once again come behind US-Israeli slaughter and destruction; this time consenting to a murderous provocation that has already taken countless lives and that endangers millions more.
Among those lives: 160 schoolgirls massacred in Minab in a single US/Israeli strike – an atrocity that has been met with near silence from the same media that gives blanket coverage to a single Israeli casualty. That is not accidental. It is a political choice about whose lives are made to matter.
This war will not only have catastrophic effects on the people of Iran: in pushing up the cost of heating, food and other essentials, this war also represents an attack working class people across the world – including us here in Britain. In serving the US and Israel, Starmer has deliberately chosen a strategy that will brutalise abroad and immiserate ordinary people at home.
We must all oppose war on Iran.
We must also oppose sanctions on Iran. Because sanctions and war are not two separate issues. They are two instruments of the same violence, and opposing one while accepting the other is not opposition at all. Sanctions do not target regimes, but the most vulnerable people in Iranian society: the sick, the poor, the elderly. Sanctions are not an alternative to war. They are war by other means.
Our leaders must choose a different path to genocide and war – and we must force them. That needs organised, popular pressure; to make it impossible for any politician who speaks in our name to support imperialist aggression and violence.
BAFZ was born out of an urge to build that pressure – to inspire people in our communities to push together against the systems that rely on genocide, war and immiseration, and the politicians who support them.
War on Iran proves just how urgently we need to push. A mass movement that forces our leaders to no longer support US-Israeli terror and destruction must emerge – for the people of Palestine and Iran, and for us all.
That movement needs you – not only to oppose genocide and war, but to organise against it.