IN THE SPAN OF ONE DAY, President Donald Trump threatened to enforce his Easter threat and wipe out the Iranian civilization by an 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline before pulling back after Pakistan intervened with a cease fire proposal.
On Tuesday morning, Trump continued to demand that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic and threatened that if it did not, he would bomb bridges, power plants and other civilian infrastructure.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he said in a social media post.
Throughout Tuesday, Bay Area activists, elected officials and others pushed Congress to end the war, urged military leaders to refuse unlawful orders and demanded Trump’s removal from office.
Several officials and advocacy groups criticized the president’s rhetoric throughout the day.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk issued a statement Tuesday calling for a stop to the incendiary rhetoric.
“Under international law, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure is a war crime,” Turk said. “Anyone responsible for international crimes must be held to account by a competent court.”
U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, D-Fairfield, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a statement calling the president “unhinged and completely out of control.”
“Trump is clearly unfit to serve as President of the United States and it is time for him to be removed from office, either by impeachment or by invoking the 25th Amendment of the Constitution,” said Garamendi. “I call on every congressional Republican to put country over party and help stop this insanity before it is too late.”
“Donald Trump’s instability is clearer and more dangerous than ever,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said. “If the Cabinet is not willing to invoke the 25th Amendment and restore sanity, Republicans must reconvene Congress to end this war.”
U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Santa Cruz, said the president’s threat “reeks of desperation and depravity.”
Donald Trump’s instability is clearer and more dangerous than ever.
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi
“That is why I call on Speaker Mike Johnson to immediately call back Congress into session so that we can properly debate a war powers resolution and exercise our constitutional authority over the Iran war,” Panetta said. “Unfortunately, Speaker Johnson has yet to stand up to this president and his secretary of defense who continue to impose the power of the U.S. military selfishly and capriciously without a coherent or consistent strategy.”
The San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Muslim civil rights group, urged Congress to reconvene and vote to end the war and urged military leaders to refuse any unlawful orders targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.
“Nothing in U.S. law, military law or international law would authorize the president to attempt to destroy another civilization by rendering their nation uninhabitable through indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure,” the statement said.
CAIR San Francisco Executive Director Zahra Billoo called the rhetoric reckless.
“It is the language of dehumanization that precedes mass atrocities: the killing of thousands of civilians, the destruction of homes, hospitals, and essential infrastructure, and the displacement of entire populations. Public officials at every level should be unequivocal in rejecting calls for collective destruction and the anti-Iranian, anti-Muslim hatred driving them.”
A protest on the campus of University of California, Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza had a low turnout after the president’s decision to pull back, but speeches were made by a two-person group called the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary.
“There are no rational reasons for this war at this time,” said the group’s spokesperson Ronald Cruz. “It is deeply unpopular in America, even among Trump’s own supporters. This fascist president’s only purpose in going to war at this time is to demonstrate to the world the unrestrained power of inhuman, fascistic destruction, to demonstrate not only to enemies, but to unhappy former supporters that their views are of no account.”
