Tallahassee says, “Hands off Iran!” at emergency rally

Tallahassee, FL – On June 24, community members rallied at the Florida State Capitol to denounce the latest wave of U.S. and Israeli aggression in the Middle East. Called by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization the morning after the U.S. military launched an unprovoked attack on three Iranian nuclear sites, the protest brought together students and workers from across the city to condemn the U.S. attack and complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The protest came in response to an unprecedented and illegal attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, carried out with the participation of the Trump administration and the Israeli military.

“My entire childhood was willed with patriotic stories about the United States being the best and freest country in the world,” said Lain Dorsey, a member of Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society. “I believed it, because I was a child. What I learned coming into adulthood and seeing the reality of things is that those stories were the U.S. government spreading racist lies to justify wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can see that the same people who were lying to us then are lying to us now!”

An organizer against police crimes with the Tallahassee Community Action Committee, declared that “Donald Trump is once again warping our military into a deadly and aggressive global police force, that, like police in our own country, is built on racism, is built on white supremacy, is built on turning working-class people against each other while funneling body after body into the insatiable mouth of the U.S. war machine.”

Organizers emphasized that this latest escalation is part of a decades-long pattern of U.S.-backed sanctions, assassinations and military aggression aimed at weakening resistance movements and propping up the apartheid regime in Israel. They pointed to the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians already killed with U.S. support and warned that this new war with Iran would lead to even more suffering abroad and the deaths of working-class Americans dragged into another deadly conflict.

“Why is it that this country has billions of dollars to fund wars, occupation, genocide, but I know that there are people here who are food insecure, who don’t know if they’ll be able to make rent, who have been looking for job after job and they can’t find one?” asked Regina Joseph from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. “Because what do the 1% and the multibillionaire and multimillionaire class really care about? They care about profits. They don’t care about us! And because we know they don’t care about us, we need to be organized to fight against them!”

The organizations that participated in this rally will be having a march against Trump from the Florida State Capitol on July 17, at 6 p.m. To find more information, and to stay up to date with future events, follow @frso_tally on Instagram.

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