My name is Peter LaVenia, and I am the co-chair of the Green Party of New York. I'm here with the rest of you to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the end of the ongoing genocide being conducted against the Palestinian people!

What the United States is doing is shocking to many because we live in an era when images and video can be shared immediately. But it is also surprising because for most in the United States, we do not learn that it has always been this government's policy to back its client states when they conduct wholesale murder against an entire population.

In Haiti during the 1960s, the American government helped put in place and back the Duvalier regime, which went on to murder 100,000 of its own citizens. A few years later it backed a coup against the government of Indonesia, which then conducted a genocide against its own population - estimates vary between 500k and 1.2 million murdered. That same Indonesian regime would invade and flatten the small island of East Timor in the late 1970s when it dared declare independence from the rotting Portuguese Empire, and armed and backed by the United States and the West kill 150,000 people. The US overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and for twenty years the right-wing government it installed murdered 200k Guatemalans, displacing 1.5 million people. This is just a sample of the murderous international regime the United States has created, the so-called "rules-based international order."

This is what capitalism, and imperialism, do to the world. It is time for us to organize to build a safe, equitable, eco-socialist world instead.

The media and partisan hacks like to tell us not to make foreign policy a litmus test. They are wrong. Foreign policy should be our primary litmus test. If you want to see who is on the side of the anti-imperialist forces, who wants to see a Free Palestine, they need to declare that openly.

Because, you cannot be for a free Palestine or an end to imperialism in an imperialist party like the Democrats or Republicans! Laugh in the face of anyone that says they can be. Tell them to break immediately with and resign from the Democratic or Republican parties, from a city council candidate to Presidential. Get out. Refuse to vote for any party that has blood on its hands!

We in the Green Party believe it is time to build a truly mass, eco-socialist, internationalist anti-imperialist party and movement. We must actively challenge the capitalists, run our own candidates against them and refuse to vote for them when we cannot, at all levels.

Because we are all Palestinians. Our air is poisoned, our climate destroyed, our bodies sacrificed on the altar of profit, and our government run by genocidal maniacs.

Let's never forget who Joe Biden, the Democratic and Republican parties are.

Free Palestine!

Address to Ceasefire Now! Rally
Troy, NY October 30, 2023