[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 51 (Friday, March 22, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H1495-H1496]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 PREVENTING GENOCIDE IS ACHIEVABLE GOAL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from New York 
(Ms. Ocasio-Cortez) for 30 minutes.
  Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Mr. Speaker, I know a man, a decent man, who said 
that preventing genocide is an achievable goal, a goal that requires a 
level of government organization and engagement that matches in its 
intensity the brutality and efficiency required to carry out mass 
killing. Too often, these efforts have come too late, after the best 
and least costly opportunities to prevent them have been missed.
  The man who said that was then-Vice President and now-President 
Joseph Biden, and he was right.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise to say that such a time is now. As we speak, in 
this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine's door, a 
famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of 
food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli 
Government.
  This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated, 
following the killing of another 30,000, 70 percent

[[Page H1496]]

of whom were women and children. There is hardly a single hospital 
left.
  Much of this was accomplished with U.S. resources and weapons. If you 
want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It 
looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like 
thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves 
while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks 
like good and decent people who do nothing or do too little, too late.
  It is against United States law to provide weapons to forces who 
block United States humanitarian assistance. That is exactly what is 
happening right now, so much so that the President himself stated 
during the State of the Union that the United States must and will be 
building its own port to let aid through.

                              {time}  1315

  It will be too late. The time is now to force compliance with U.S. 
law and the standards of humanity and fulfill our obligations to the 
American people to suspend the transfer of U.S. weapons to the Israeli 
Government in order to stop and prevent further atrocity.
  Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing. We 
cannot hide from our responsibility any longer. Blocking assistance 
from one's closest allies to starve a million people is not 
unintentional. We have a responsibility to prove the value of global 
democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law, 
and commitment to human and civil rights.
  This is not just about Israel or Gaza. This is about us. The world 
will never be the same and we will never be the same, and we must write 
our story in this moment of what it means and who we are as Americans.
  Our story must be not that we were good men who did nothing, but that 
we were a committed democracy that did something, and we must prove 
that now.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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