Editor,
I found in the Daily Lobo on Friday a statement by UNM President David Schmidly on the University being obligated to lead by example on environmental issues.
I would like to see UNM offer the same leadership for human rights issues as well.
Currently, Israel is conducting a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, where people have been without fuel, food and electricity in this long winter and have suffered daily air and land attacks from Israel.
The brutal occupation of West Bank and Gaza Strip and the parallel war against Lebanon would not be possible without the help of American corporations that supply Israel with the latest in high-tech weapons to defeat what is a broad anti-colonial movement among the people of the Middle East.
UNM has profitable contracts with corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, which supply Israel with high-tech weapons.
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Lockheed Martin is the largest arms manufacturer in the world and supplies Israel with missiles and bombs. It is the manufacturer of the child-killing F-16 combat aircraft that Israel uses against civilian populations in the occupied territories. Some 2,000 F-16s have been put in the hands of dictators around the world to bomb and attack people seeking liberation and control of their own countries.
Lockheed Martin makes some of the anti-personnel cluster bombs used by Israel against civilians and children. Four million cluster bombs were dropped in the last days of Israel's 34-day war against Lebanon in 2006.
These evil bombs were used not to achieve a military objective - Israel had already lost the ground war and was in retreat - but to terrorize the civilian population of Lebanon. Often, children step on cluster bombs, which can be set to act as a land mine.
At least two of Israel's cluster bomb and launch systems are manufactured by Lockheed
Martin.
UNM could step out on the right side of history by providing the same leadership on human rights as on environmental issues. A reasonable step would be to renounce all contracts with arms-manufacturing corporations, starting with Lockheed Martin as an example. Doing this would put UNM on the right side of the worldwide anti-colonial movement.
Bob Anderson
Daily Lobo reader
