 This country, we have a right to protect, this is a brick building, sir, this is not a child, but you're being bombed and destroyed right now. This is a brick building. We're talking about 5,000 children who've been killed in the last month. And that's Bernie's fault? Yes. It's all of our government's fault. We can't do anything about it neither can you. Who can do anything? Bernie can call. Bernie, you don't care. I don't care for Bernie. No look, we're nothing against him. I don't say nothing to him. Bernie, in a way. We're nothing against him. Okay, if my son is both out of term and out of service. And that's good. But we're here because Bernie is the only senator in Vermont. There are two who have not signed on to a ceasefire. There are 5,000 to 6,000 children whose lives have been ended. Some of their wings, many of them, they have been decapitated and other issues. Just like the Israelis, they have lost their lives. It's time for that to end. So Bernie can end it, he said. Bernie is one of the most powerful people in the world. The veteran right here, talk to him. I understand. No. It's the only way to reach the senator. All the other senators, the representative that's valid and Senator Welch, have both agreed to a ceasefire. And Bernie Sanders is the only one who has not. Talk to him. No, sir. Okay. You know. I've been to jail before for the right, and you may as well. We all have that right. We all have that right, sir. Where would we put it? We're here to make a point. We don't know if it's there. Is it one o'clock? We'll ring his buzzer at once. Did you get down from there? No. I've been trying to keep you from climbing the ladder. Okay, physically. Right. Now, if something is a serious crime that's being committed, you make a point. You don't stand around with your hands in your pocket, sir. Bernie Sanders has sat on his hands. He's saying very nice things, but he's not calling for a ceasefire. And he's voted. He continues to vote for the armed. He's going to keep going over there. Where are you guys? When Hezbollah was killed in 1400 years. We're not here to argue a military. You would have prevented that if you had. We're here to prevent 20,000 humanity. We're killed. This is not a military demonstration. Were you in the military? No, but he was. And I think I didn't hurt your nervous right now. If you were third generation, 70 or third generation, going in a mouthful prison camp, they can't come to go without this military demonstration. I know of one case. You're not going to solve anything at the library, sir. Yeah. Well, are you going to solve anything, sir? We're trying to get Bernie. Yeah. Call for a ceasefire. No hard feelings, sir. We're doing what we have. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to ask Bernie Sanders to call for a ceasefire. He has not done that. For six to seven weeks, the bombs have been falling nearly nonstop. The city the size of New York who are not able to leave that city. They are trapped. And yet our money and our bombs continue to ravage that population. Now that is a war crime. Half of those people are children. So we're here to put up a ladder at the inconvenience of the store owners. I apologize. But they are not losing their children right now. And we are not either, but we are paying our taxes. We pay our taxes. We fund the Israeli military and all militaries. Russian people are funding their military and we're funding ours. The Israeli people are funding. Those bombs are manufactured and they are manufactured by the millions, okay? So it's up to us to tell our senator and our representatives that we will not tolerate civilians being destroyed. It's a war crime. It's against all international norms. There's no question the whole world is asking us to stop this because we fund the Israeli military. Now, I would like to invite anyone else who's here to speak. They can come to the ladder and speak. They're being filmed. If they have something to say about what they feel, it can be in any opinion because this is a democracy. So, but we feel that we need to protest this. Thank you. I have a question. I follow the news very carefully. I'm a two-tour Vietnam combat medic with an infantry. So I know what war is. I've seen the dead kids collider with them. I've seen people burn to death. My friend is in Iraq. My best friend is an asylum person from Iraq. I have friends now in Palestine. I just took a chunk of my savings and sent a friend of mine to Palestine two months ago or so. This man was in Vietnam, by the way. He's with a group called Veterans for Peace. And there's a very large organization in the United States of Vietnam Veterans. They're speaking from experience. They've seen what it's like to be inside of an attack of heavy munitions. So, go ahead. I'm sorry. No. There is a thing. The American Revolution, you know what King George said about the Americans who revolted? They're terrorists. They're traitors. What's going on right now? All this news I hear. How long? An illegal organization. Illegal of this. The Houthis. And they're illegals. What the hell is legal? Israel. A legal country. Israel is a bastard child of France and England on her agreement. The end of World War II. We're all these Jews going to go. And the Zionists, they wanted to go to a post-academic gas or some other place. Basically, they wanted to go to Israel. And the whole thing was people without a land for land without people. Maybe at that point, they already considered the Palestinians one of the people. They bought up a lot of property. And for generation after generation, Jews, Muslims, Christians, they got along fine off same neighborhoods. Hey, David. So who makes, so what? Hamas? The Houthis? Everybody else? They're illegal organizations? Who made Israel a legal country? Who gave them the right to come in and start displacing people? And right from the very beginning, they started taking things home. This home's been assigned to you. Just take your stuff and go. You know, there's no morality in this. If anybody's in a legal country and they're legal military, it's just really, maybe they ought to go take a bunch of tents and live out of Zion. What they're doing now is concluding or trying to conclude something that's been in their works, climbing off 50 people year after year after year. The genocide in the Palestinian people, removal from the Palestinian people from the land that God gave Israel. God didn't give Israel anything. Go ahead. My name is Crystal. We have some signs, if anyone wants to stand with us, they're basically the message of ceasefire. And so if you want to stand with us with your signs, we're not going to leave this space until Bernie Sanders talks to us seriously about stopping the bombing immediately. Bombing where? In Gaza, sir. How is Bernie going to be able to do that? Bernie needs to make a phone call. Bernie needs to call for a ceasefire now. If Biden makes a phone call, it's over. My name is Crystal Zevon. Go ahead. My name is Crystal Zevon. I don't want you to fall that way. Thank you. Sorry, go ahead. My name's Crystal Zevon. I first really understood about what's happening in Palestine when my daughter, who is now 46, was five years old. We were living in Paris, France. She had a girlfriend who was Palestinian. I didn't know that. We took her out for an afternoon. We were late getting back. Sabra and Chantilla had just been destroyed. Her grandmother and two cousins were killed there. They didn't know that yet. I was late getting back. I came and I'll never forget the look on the mother of this girl's face. She fell to the floor in tears. She figured out that my last name was probably Jewish and was worried that I had taken her child. Later, she found out her grandmother and two of her cousins were killed there. So I became an advocate and activist for Palestine. People, the media is calling Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas. This isn't about Hamas. This is about ethnic cleansing. This is about genocide. This is about getting the Jews I'm sorry, getting the Palestinians out of the territory. I was writing a letter to the editor the other day. All of a sudden, I thought about it. I said, I have two 21-year-old grandsons, twins. Have they been raised in the conditions of Gaza? Have they been raised where water is controlled? How much food they get to eat is controlled? Where they can listen to that festival across the way, but they can't go there. How there's 50% unemployment yet they can't leave to get a job. If they had been raised and the soldiers can come into your house can shoot your father in front of you but you throw a rocket at a tank and you are in jail. 7,000 Palestinians are in Israeli jails. If my grandsons had been raised there I have to ask myself would they be Hamas? Would they be fighting against this repression? I'm sick of the whole Hamas thing. They're killing babies. Babies, infants. Israeli drives the doctors out of the hospitals and leaves these infants to die. How anybody can call that humane how anybody can call it anything but genocide is beyond me. It's evil. I watch every day. I cry every day. When they restarted the bombing I literally cried the whole thing. It's just beyond comprehension to me that anybody that anybody could treat another human being. Any human being that I could treat you that I could treat you or you in a way that these people are being treated how is that possible? Anyway that's it. Cease fire now. Would someone else like to speak? Come right up and face out. If we could hand those signs out to anyone who will take one. There's one that says American majority 68% of Americans want to cease fire. It's a recent poll. I left your signs in the car because I didn't want them to get ready. No but there's some more. We can hand them out and then we'll hear from this person. So just to thank you for your sign ma'am. So American majority of 68% it's a very solid majority. There's a poll that says that they support a ceasefire. They want the bombing to end. They know that children that half of the population of this city that's being bombed are children and they know that 5 to 6,000 of those children have now been killed along with their families. So join us. Please call Senator Sanders we have information on his phone number. It's very easy to find he needs to hear from you. Okay I'm sorry. Now totally. So I just wanted to share a little bit of history and specifically some of Bernie's own voting history. What I'm seeing right now is Bernie has repeatedly affirmed Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas. He keeps going back to focusing on Hamas. In recent days he has acknowledged that some of the retaliation that he's calling it have resulted in many innocent deaths. But the fact of the matter is he's not calling for a ceasefire. He openly said I don't see how we can have a ceasefire with Hamas. And finally he's saying nothing about military aid and stopping military aid to Israel. So I want to talk about some things that Bernie has supported in the past under very similar sentiments and how they didn't end up very well. In 1999 some of you might not remember this he voted to support the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was under much the same like circumstances. He said that Kosovo should be its own state. He talked about what was going on in there. To this day the result of the Yugoslavian bombings by NATO have polluted the Danube. Millions of southeastern Europeans have polluted water. There's oil. There's sludge. There's uranium there. There's been no cleanup of infrastructure. No cleanup by the river. Bernie Sanders supported this. Another thing in let's see in 2006 there was the gang rape of an Iraqi woman. This was widely believed to be and said to be the result of Iraqi soldiers. It later came out and thankfully the people responsible were prosecuted. Bernie supported increasing funding to the Iraq invasion. The same thing happened in Afghanistan. Were similar events such as the death of Pat Tillman took place. As we now know that has been covered up as well. They burned his jersey. He died by friendly fire that didn't stop him from being a murder to the American people. I'm seeing history repeat itself and many others are as well. We are seeing these same narratives about these to use the words that others are using about savages, about Arabs being wantonly discriminant, like indiscriminate, violent. We're seeing this same rhetoric used and hyper focused on to continue justifying the military support for Israel as it attacks Gaza. Now I'm certainly not saying that someone who lost family members in the attacks of the 7th has any reason to be like doesn't deserve to be upset. And there is no doubt that this was in fact an attack. Well, what we are seeing right now is Israel has refused to cooperate with the United Nations when they wanted to launch an investigation to look at the killings killing themselves. We've seen now 3,300 cars are being burned by Israel. We're seeing many of the same things that took place 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Back then, they were used to justify military aggression. We're seeing that again and they were later proved to be false or at the very least misrepresented. But today we're seeing the exact same things take place uncritically, unquestionably. I don't support that. I'm not willing to enter my third decade being alive seeing America believe claims that will later turn out to be false in the Middle East to justify the killing of tens of thousands of Arabs. I will not support that and neither should you. As was said before two-thirds of Americans support a ceasefire. We should encourage Bernie to join us in doing the same. Thank you. Demand. Demand, that's right. Does someone else have a message they'd like to say something at the bottom of the ladder? Join us. I think that we have, we see a lot and we saw it in Iraq and Afghanistan innocent people are killed people demand revenge understandable but then it gets to the point where ten times more people on the other side have been killed and supposedly progressive senators are still saying Israel has a right to defend itself. Does it have a right to go into Iraq and kill a million people? No, we don't. No matter how much revenge we want it doesn't make any sense and it's it's genocidal already 20 times more Palestinians have been killed and were killed on October 7th in Israel. So what is the message besides killing innocent people and we hear from Bernie to Anthony Blinken to Biden people say we have faith that the Israelis will follow humanitarian law and how can they possibly say that? It's been a month every single day except for four or five days civilians on purpose because they have a system that they have a map of who lives in which building they know there are civilians in apartment buildings they've bombed hundreds of apartment buildings not hundreds of little homes hundreds of apartment buildings that have collapsed the city of Gaza is destroyed already and they continue to bomb for what reason they say they're hitting Hamas probably they are but can you really feel that there's a military solution at this point that is better than asking both sides to come to negotiating table there may be more deaths when they come to the negotiating table but I don't see how you can expect that killing 700 people every single day is better than trying to negotiate and that's something that we've seen from America for a long time and now you see it's more open than ever where the Israeli government almost every top official has said that there is no innocent civilians in Gaza which is genocidal language explicitly and so I don't know how Bernie Sanders could go on every day saying that there's nothing you can't have a ceasefire okay Robin would you like to speak Robin Lloyd will have a few words but I just want to repeat the issue here that our senator the second senator and our senior senator in Vermont Bernie Sanders has not signed a ceasefire Becca Ballant signed a call for a ceasefire took a great risk to do that as a Jew and Peter Welch just called for an extended or comprehensive ceasefire Bernie Sanders as progressive as he is continues to support a genocide we are amazed and that's why we're here because we want Bernie to finally act in concert with everyone else in America two-thirds of America supports a ceasefire those are reliable polls so let's do what the people say sorry I just wanted to make the point ceasefire now and I would like to expand the demand that Bernie support and invoke the genocide convention genocide convention the 75th anniversary is coming up Saturday we haven't been planned in the Federal Free Library on Saturday about the universal declaration of rights and the convention says any nation now it's not likely to be this nation but Bernie could perhaps appeal to a friendly nation like Denmark or or other sympathetic countries to demand that the genocide convention be implemented okay I have all the information is a country to invoke the genocide convention at the international court of justice we have to stop this this is so appalling that Israel has reignited the bombing of Israel and now it's the southern part of Israel of Gaza the people have fled from the northern part now they're in the southern part and now they're being bombed there we must stop this carnage happening thank you ceasefire now ceasefire now ceasefire now ceasefire now ceasefire now ceasefire now ceasefire now text me when he can he's got four children and a wife he lives in the north he moved to the south he's in CUN right now I last heard from him yesterday during the day he spent 80 dollars to get enough wood for them to build a fire he says don't believe the humanitarian aid that it comes in it goes to certain people they go into the market places and charge an exorbitant crisis he sent a picture of me with a donkey cart and a tonic amount of wood in the back I haven't heard from him last night they bombed Kanyunas where he is he was in an unrun shelter where he was supposed to be safe but I don't know if he's safe every day I think am I going to hear from Yosef and I don't know why is this why is this happening why is our country not saying that stop it ceasefire now a lot of people might remember the case of Jessica Lynch in the early 2000s she was a US soldier she was kidnapped and her story of being kidnapped was used as a lot of a routing support for the military and our presence in Iraq and it came out from her words herself let me back up and tell you the story the story was that she was kidnapped she got shot in the leg when she kept firing she fired until her gun ran out of bullets she was heroically rescued after that was the story that was told the only problem was that was completely false she said herself that she was not tortured she said herself that she did not fire any bullets her gun jammed the reason I mention this is to say that we're hearing very similar things right now in the news who have been released by Hamas now again I'm certainly not saying that it's fun to be kidnapped and I'm certainly not saying that nothing happened but what I am saying is that despite clear overwhelming proof of crimes against humanity what literally the UN said or crimes against humanity in Gaza we're having a hyper focus on what is happening and specifically on Hamas to say we need to keep doing this oh yeah it's bad that some people are getting hurt in Hamas despite the fact that hostages themselves are saying this is not true so once again this hyper focus is used just as it was in the past to say oh you know casualties are bad civilian casualties are bad but we shouldn't stop that's BS we should stop and we should demand that Bernie say cease fire now thank you cease fire now cease fire now in Vietnam we had free fire zones this is just an area on a map they draw a circle or square around and they simply say there's nothing in there but the Viet Cong so that was an area constantly send in bombers send in artillery shells just civilians just regular people in a regular little village trying to grow enough to keep alive we covered the place with depleted uranium which has led to all sorts of birth defects we wiped a lot of stuff out the crops a lot of the forest areas with agent roots also agent white and blue and the result of that has been horrible horrible birth defects and the life percentage of small kids now in Iraq where we used a lot of depleted uranium there's a whole see the whole areas where people are afraid to have children because some of the children in Iraq that have birth defects directly attributed to the use of depleted uranium it's a deadly, it's not just a bullet it's the uranium and it's highly radioactive and it's causing all sorts of birth defects and problems in the other age groups as well the final thought was I was over there in the afternoon I went to the very first part of it we had tanks we had cannons we had bombers we had fighter jets we would basically fight a bunch of people with rifles and rock them and build grenades that was pretty much it I mean even in Ukraine it's so that the Ukrainians wouldn't shoot down a Soviet parachute for a long time they didn't Hamas how many fighter planes do they have how many tanks do they have how many artillery it's totally asymmetrical it's just like when we fought the Vietnamese they had almost nothing to fight with except their indomitable spirit to win their freedom of their country and that's what I see of Hamas so whatever sins they're committing what I'm also seeing is a hard generation people in a concentration camp how the hell they win and the things that I carry out of the Israeli government my government I'm ashamed of the American I really am it's just you know I start shaking how much of this can you pull up with one war after another America's business is war it's all this beautiful military stop we we sell it to other people and the money comes right back to America because you gotta pay the people to make all the bombs and gunners so we're a war industry when you really look at it who's making all the stuff you're buying at the war market it's instead of the little local store you used to go buy stuff we put them out of business what you're doing is getting all the Chinese stuff it's all made in China or it's made in Vietnam ironically or Malaysia or lots of other places Japan, Korea pretty much what it's coming down to is America's mostly just making war material and it's a great part of business being because you blow up a bomb you take a rocket you take a $300,000 rocket you blow it up and guess what another one it generates its own environment for replacing the product and Vermont's a part of that we've got our F-35B we've got Vita technologies just to sign the deal with the army we're a part of that war machine Israel has F-35 Israel has F-35s yes, Israel has F-35s very soon it might even send Vermont's F-35s it's a target we want no part in this war machine and as the Vermont's are burning should be saying the same thing we don't want a welfare to be based on the military industrial complex not in any way this is Vermont we have a huge, we have F-35 funding for our airport again we have Vita technologies we don't want any of that here in Vermont look at the homeless we can afford to spend billions, trillions on war but what do the homeless people get maybe they get a tent on a block for a while and then a city will come along with bucket loaders and scoop up a few things they have a little tent a few family memories, scrapbook with the baby's pictures off to the dump we can't even afford to take care of our own people but our government keeps going into like extending the federal debt raising the federal debt we're spending money we don't have we're giving it to people who do anything but benefit from it I mean nothing for our people at all this whole country has gotten lost in point that's it, I'm done if anyone else would like to speak who hasn't spoken sorry Dave anyone else who hasn't spoken would like to speak are they coming I don't know to call Bernie Sanders and ask him to join the other delegation members in Vermont Beck or Sam excuse me is to demand that Bernie Sanders join Rebecca our representative and Senator Welch in calling for a ceasefire he's not yet done that it's very easy to call his office it's very easy to email him he needs to hear from you his constituents we are paying for this war we're asking that the funding be cut off immediately until Israel stops bombing civilians that's the message he's spreading Dave and I were ready to spend a little time in the Burlington jail but in Burlington people are generally not arrested because there's real crime well there is a real crime happening with our tax dollars and so we are here to put some things in perspective a lot of the homelessness and drug addiction you see in our country is because we spend half of our taxes on the military on munitions that are anti-personnel munitions and bombs and we say let's bring it home and take care of each other thank you the number you can call if you want to call Bernie it's 202-224-5141 again we're imploring everyone to call Bernie in demand call it 202-224-5141 in demand ceasefire now