First up, Ralph welcomes the co-founders of Doctors Against Genocide, Dr. Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle and Dr. Nidal Jboor, to discuss their dedication to succeeding where global governments have failed in confronting genocide—particularly the acute genocide in Gaza. Then, Ralph speaks to Marcus Sims, who turns felled and fallen trees into sustainable-harvested lumber with his company Treincarnation. Finally, Ralph has co-written an open letter to Barack Obama, urging him to step up and do his part to fight against Donald Trump.
Dr. Karameh Hawash-Kuemmerle is a clinical pediatric neurologist who specializes in traumatic brain injury and epilepsy at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Nidal Jboor is a doctor of internal medicine and geriatrics working in Michigan. They are co-founders of Doctors Against Genocide.
We think: as American people, we are good people. We don't stand for these crimes. We don't accept that any child, any mother, any father, any elderly in the world will be starved to death—no matter where they are, no matter who they are, no matter who is committing this crime. And we are especially appalled to know that all these crimes are being done in our name, with our tax money. They are cutting the funding from our basic programs here, from our neighborhoods, to send more billions to mass slaughter children. So that's why we're going to DC. We're going to talk to the people who are enabling this. We think they already failed their constituents, they failed their country, they are putting our country on the wrong side of history.
Dr. Nidal Jboor
Anyone who did not call this a genocide yet—and did not demand full accountability for genocide, both for the United States and for Israel—is enabling and allowing this crime to continue further.
Dr. Nidal Jboor
We are committed to having our eyes open whenever and wherever there is a genocide or there are war crimes, crimes against humanity—no matter who commits them. And it's very important for us to stand with the victims, with the community that is suffering, and never take the side or give a platform for the perpetrators.
Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle
Our focus on the situation in Gaza comes from the simple fact that our country is complicit. And because of that, we actually have the moral obligation and the practical obligation to speak up. So it is not because we think that other genocides are not happening or are not important. We actually think every genocide should never happen. It's anti-human to commit genocide. And we always ask our colleagues to come to us to help uplift the voices of the communities of genocide and hopefully we will have more bandwidth to do a lot more. But the situation in Gaza is unique because there is almost a collusion of all these powerful players to complete this genocide in Gaza and basically oppress every resistance to it. There are many things that make what is happening in Gaza unique—for example, the inability to leave, using food as a weapon, having complete siege on the population, having a major superpower supported by another major superpower bombing a population of two million people in a very small area, constantly, nonstop for two years.
Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle
All professions have their own specialized civic duties…And I want to tell the listeners that the people who are peace-loving all over the world vastly outnumber, vastly outnumber the warmongers and the cruel and vicious interests that have taken advantage of the situation.
Ralph Nader
Marcus Sims is the owner of Treincarnation, which creates sustainably-harvested lumber and builds custom furniture from trees felled by storms or removed to make way for development.
I think there's a lot of support for what I'm doing, but my work is contrasted to the industrial lumber system, which is “chop them down and cut them up,” a lot of it done by huge machines. So it takes a lot more attention and care to do the kind of work that I'm doing. And of course the finances—as you know, finances play a big part in any kind of industry and how they can manage to make money. So I'm certainly making a living, a good living with what I'm doing. I don't know exactly how we can get from the current system into one that was probably used in the past, where
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