An Interview with Dorothy Day

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David”.
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us now to say
Run.

You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.

We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.

It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

https://wbg.freedomflotilla.org/womens-blog/running-orders

WBG.FREEDOMFLOTILLA.ORG

Today in the US Congress, Pope Francis spoke of Dorothy Day

Women Organizing for Peace in the Philippines

Speech delivered as a part of Women Cross the DMZ events at the Women's Peace Symposium on May 26, 2015, in Seoul, Korea.
	Lisa Maza speaking at Women Cross the DMZ walk in Pyongyang, North Korea with 7,000 North Korean women, Niana Liu ,
	Greetings of peace to all especially to the  courageous and joyous women who are gathered here today calling for Peace and Reunification of Korea! Let me also convey to you the warm wishes of solidarity from GABRIELA Philippines and the International Women's Alliance (IWA), a global alliance of grassroots women's organizations.     I am honored to speak before you today to share the experiences of Filipino women in organizing for peace in my country. I have been with the parliament of the state as representative of the Gabriela Women’s Party to the Philippine Congress for nine years and in the parliament of the streets as a feminist activist of the GABRIELA Women’s Coalition for half my lifetime. I will talk about the work of peace building of my organization, GABRIELA. Having been colonized by Spain for 300 years, by the US for more than 40 years and occupied by Japan during WWII, the Filipino people have a long history of struggle for peace that is inextricably linked to the struggle for national sovereignty, social justice and genuine freedom.  The Filipino women were at the forefront of these struggles and played important and leading roles. Despite formal independence in 1946, our country remains a neo-colony of the US. The US still dominates our economic, political, and socio-cultural life. One of the most telling manifestations of such control was the US occupation for almost a century of our prime lands to maintain its military facilities including two of its largest military bases outside its territory - the Subic Bay Naval base and the Clark Air base.  These bases served as springboard for US interventionist war in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. The sites of these US bases became haven for the 'rest and recreation' industry where women and children's bodies were sold in prostitution for a price of a hamburger; where women were viewed as mere sex objects and the culture of violence against women pervaded; and where thousands of Amer-Asian children were left impoverished and abandoned by their American fathers.     In addition to these social costs, the US has not owned up responsibility for cleaning up the toxic wastes left after the bases were removed in 1991 and for the health hazards these wastes continue to pose to the people in the community. And like in the camp towns in South Korea, innumerable cases of crimes  including murder, rape and sexual abuse were committed with impunity by US troops with many of these cases not even reaching the courts.       These compelling realities are the very reasons why we oppose the presence of US military bases and troops in the Philippines and beyond. We believe that there can never be long and lasting peace as long as we are under the control of the US or any other foreign power. And we cannot have a free and sovereign state with the presence of foreign troops on our land. The women brought into the anti-bases argument the discourse on the social costs of the bases and why the removal of the US bases and troops is important for women.  GABRIELA, the biggest progressive alliance of women’s organizations in the Philippines which was organized in 1984 at the height of the anti-Marcos dictatorship movement brought the issue of prostitution of women around the base areas and the puppetry of the dictator to US interests. Marcos was deposed in a people power that became a model to the world. The Philippines subsequently passed the 1987 Constitution with clear provisions against the presence of foreign troops, bases and nuclear weapons on our soil.     The historic Senate rejection of a new treaty that would extend the Military Bases Agreement with the United States beyond 1991 was another victory for women.  Leading up to the Senate vote, women conducted massive information campaigns, held pickets, demonstrations, caravans, die-ins, lobby work and networking both locally and internationally to pressure the government to reject the treaty. The efforts of the women and the broad anti-bases movement finally led to the termination of the bases agreement.       But our struggle continues. In flagrant violation of our Constitution, the US in collusion with the Philippine government was able to reassert its military presence through the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1998 and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement of 2014, agreements that are more dangerous than the previous agreement they replaced. These agreements allow the US military free and unhampered use of virtually the entire Philippines for its basing needs and for rapid forward deployment of its forces as part of the US pivot to Asia policy. This heightening US military presence is also happening here in South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Australia among others.     Filipino women at the grassroots - the rural and indigenous women, workers, youth and students, housewives, professionals, religious and other sectors continue to organize. The women are aware that massive poverty and hunger and the marginalization, discrimination and violence against women are intensified by the policies of imperialist globalization which is carried out, propped up and sustained by militarization and war.     Furthermore, the policy of militarization and war diverts the much needed funds and resources that could have been used to create jobs for the 10 million unemployed and underemployed; to build homes for the 22 million homeless; to build school buildings, day care centers for children and crisis centers for women, and hospitals and health clinics in remote villages; to provide free education, health and reproductive care and other social services for the poor; and to develop our agriculture and industry.     We build long and lasting peace that is based on social justice and where women participate in the process and not the peace based on silencing the poor and powerless that militarist and war \mongers do.   In conclusion, let me take this opportunity to convey the Filipino women's solidarity with the women of Korea. Our fathers and brothers were also sent to fight the Korean War and our grandmothers and mothers were also victims and survivors as comfort women during the Japanese occupation.  We share this memory of war and women's exploitation, oppression and abuse. But today we also affirm our collective memory of struggle against all these as we persist and continue to work for peace in both our countries, in our Asian region and the world. Liza Maza is a  former Congresswoman representing Gabriela Women’s Party to the Philippine House of Representatives, and Chairperson of the International Women’s Alliance (IWA). She has been a key part of  GABRIELA’s Purple Rose Campaign, a global campaign to end sex trafficking in Filipino women and children.

Women Unite to Stop War

Looking Back at the First Invasion of Iraq in 1991

From the historic Gulf Crisis TV Project. Before "social media" youTube and before Indymedia, this was a key example of community media sharing around the globe. Grace Paley speaks about three minute into this tape. Next is one of the many presentations at the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul.

From Dissent: Dear Nick Kristof: Your Palestinian Gandhis are Already Here

Weekly protest in Bil'in, June 2011 (Anna Paq, courtesy of ActiveStills.org)

By Sam Sussman - July 26, 2014 

Writing on July 19 in a column intended to “correct a few common misconceptions” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nicholas Kristof perpetuated one of his own. Offering unsolicited advice to Palestinian political leaders, Mr. Kristof wrote: “If Palestinians turned to huge Gandhi-style nonviolence resistance campaigns [sic], videos would reverberate around the world and Palestine would achieve statehood and freedom.” Mr. Kristof’s sentiment is admirable. His glaring ignorance of ongoing Palestinian peaceful grassroots campaigns is not.

At a time of colossal regional violence, the growth of peaceful grassroots campaigns for Palestinian statehood and civil rights is one of the few uplifting stories in Israeli-Palestinian politics. Over the past decade, these campaigns have originated in communities with particular grievances, and slowly transformed into weekly marches for civil rights and statehood. In Bil’in, Palestinians have marched every Friday since February 2005, when community members first organized in defiance of the expropriation of half of the village’s farmland by the neighboring Modiin Illit settlement (the Israeli High Court returned one-half of the stolen land in 2007). Those demonstrations were featured in the Academy Award–nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras, one of the few instances of global media attention on Palestinian peaceful protests. In Nabi Saleh, weekly marches have protested a similar expropriation of land, and the denial of basic civil rights by military rule. Other active villages include Budrus, Jayyous, Beit Surik, Biddo, Al-Wlajeh, Ni’lin, Ma’sara, Beit Ummar, and Iraq Burin, among others. Weekly demonstrations include anywhere from several dozen to several hundred protesters.

Weekly marches have not been the only Palestinian peaceful campaigns. Other methods include barricading roads on which Palestinians are not permitted to drive, mass prayer events, and hunger strikes. The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee serves as an umbrella organization for these efforts, coordinating “marches, strikes, demonstrations, direct actions and legal campaigns, as well as supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions,” according to its website. Some peaceful protesters have also worked with American and European counterparts to organize international demonstrators, such as a series of demonstrations on April 15, 2014, to protest use of U.S. tax funds to support the Israeli occupation.

The leaders who have emerged from these movements speak the Gandhian language of transformative nonviolence that Mr. Kristof implores them to employ. When I was in Bil’in last month, leading activist Iyad Burnat explained his philosophy of nonviolence to me: “I want my freedom, and I am not free if I harm another person.” Another activist in Bil’in, who preferred not to be named for fear of reprisal, told me: “If you want to visit my home, I do not care if you are Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. But you cannot bring violence with you, you cannot solve disputes with violence. That is our message to the Israelis who occupy us.”

While Mr. Kristof is wrong that Palestinians have yet to learn the value of peaceful grassroots campaigns, he is right that the Gandhi-like Palestinian movement is not “huge.” Why haven’t more Palestinians joined the movement? One theory is that Palestinians refuse to reject militancy. Another is that they fear the draconian violence visited upon peaceful protesters by the Israel Defense Force.

To understand why more Palestinians haven’t joined weekly peaceful protests, it’s important to consider something that Mr. Kristof likely overlooked in formulating his advice: Israeli Military Executive Order 101 outlaws political gatherings of more than ten Palestinians in the West Bank, meaning that Palestinian peaceful gatherings inherently amount to illegal civil disobedience. Unsurprisingly, the Israel Defense Forces responds to these protests with force as a matter of policy. Nearly every Friday in the Palestinian villages in which demonstrations occur, the IDF unleashes an occasionally lethal, always perilous, combination of tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, water cannon–fired “skunk” liquid, and—sometimes—live fire. Onestudy found that between 2004 and 2011, thirteen Palestinian civilians were killed in nonviolent demonstrations; Iyad Burnat, the Bil’in organizer, puts the overall figure at closer to forty.

The IDF also punishes villages known for nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns in other ways. Nonviolent demonstrators have been arrested and imprisoned for “incitement”; children can be detained and processed in the IDF’s notoriously gruesome military court system, whose treatment of children UNICEF has called “cruel, inhumane and degrading”; and permits for work in Israel can be revoked. The IDF has confirmed that it uses collective punishment against villages in which these protests occur. It turns out that there are substantial costs to even peaceful resistance against the state that controls your access to water, electricity, transportation, employment, and freedom of mobility. In this context, what seems remarkable is not that more Palestinians do not join the demonstrations, but that so many have persevered over the past decade.

These harsh IDF responses are not provoked by Palestinian violence. A leaked 2010 U.S. State Department memo records Israel’s top military official in the West Bank, General Avi Mizrahi, promising to use skunk water and mass arrests to quell “even demonstrations that appear peaceful.” As one senior Israeli military official told an American counterpart in 2011: “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”

While Israel’s response to Gandhi-style tactics has been utterly condemnable, Palestinians have certainly not perfected the tactic. Kristof writes that “too many Palestinians define nonviolence to include rockthrowing. No, that doesn’t cut it.” Mr. Kristof is right that occasional rock-throwing does occur, but he is thoroughly wrong to define and dismiss the movement by this practice. Stone-throwing is not employed as an organized strategy of demonstrators, who use marches and sit-ins to make their point; those who throw stones tend to act alone or in small groups, and often after the IDF initiates violence against peaceful demonstrators.

The relentless emphasis on stone-throwing cedes any sense of proportionality, ignoring the egregious violence with which the IDF crushes Palestinian demonstrations by official policy. As Iyad Tamimi, a leading organizer in Nabi Saleh, told me when I visited the village last month: “After one day of protest, we pick up 1,500 tear gas canisters. Are the Israelis nonviolent?”

To substantiate his claim about rock-throwing, Mr. Kristof turns not to a third-party report, but instead links to the official IDF blog. On that page, the IDF misleadingly boasts of “protecting the right of Palestinians to protest peacefully,” despite the fact that Israeli military law explicitly denies Palestinians the right to political demonstration.

Of course, it would be ideal for no rock-throwing to occur, just as it would be ideal for the IDF not to resort to violence in crushing popular demonstrations, just as it would be ideal, writ large, for the IDF to withdraw from the West Bank, which it occupies in contravention of international law. But demanding that Palestinians absorb the tremendous personal costs of nonviolent civil disobedience, then dismissing the promising movement because of marginal stone-throwing, all while ignoring the vast IDF violence against Palestinian civilians—this is not the empathy Mr. Kristof has offered to others struggling for human rights around the globe.

This brazen disproportionality is precisely why Mr. Kristof’s advice is so insulting. In the past decade, Palestinians living under a grinding military occupation have undertaken profound personal and community sacrifices to organize peaceful demonstrations for civil rights and statehood. Instead of empowering these courageous moderates by sharing their stories, Mr. Kristof turns a blind eye, dismissing the cost of their courage while arrogantly suggesting that he will pay attention when Palestinians learn to behave perfectly.

It’s this type of superficial media coverage that makes so preposterous Mr. Kristof’s prediction that “the resulting videos [of nonviolence resistance campaigns] would reverberate around the world and Palestine would achieve statehood and freedom.” Thevideos are here, here, here, and here, among other places, Mr. Kristof. Will you start sharingthem?

---

Sam Sussman co-directs Extend, an American start-up non-profit organization that offers five-day educational tours of the West Bank to young American Jews. He is an M.Phil. candidate in International Relations at Oxford. He tweets @SamSussman1.

The War Economy

When you are the New York Times, or in this case, one of the only real liberal columnists working for the Times anymore, there are apparently some things you just cannot mention.

How else to explain how a seemingly intelligent economist like Paul Krugman can scorch the Republicans in Congress and President Obama for failing to deal with the crisis of joblessness and deepening economic collapse in the U.S., but never once mention the endless and pointless wars into which the country is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year?

Here's Krugman:
"I don't mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising healthcare costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we're running right now--deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy -- are no threat at all."


What planet is Prof. Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, living on?

The U.S. has over the past decade spent some two trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the so-called "War" on Terror. The actual spending has been much higher (as the honest Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has explained), because only about 50% of the U.S. budget each year, including expenditures for "intelligence" and the military, is covered by tax collections from individuals, corporations, import duties and other federal fees and collections. The rest is financed with borrowed money, all of which has to be repaid in later years with interest. This country has spent another $5 trillion or so on the bloated military budget over the last decade, to finance a military complex that costs as much as the rest of the world combined spends on war and preparing for war. And again, only half of that amount was actual tax revenues. The rest has to be paid back over coming years with interest, because it's all been borrowed.

Hey Krugman! Why don't you tell people the real reason why the U.S. has a "deeply worrying" fiscal problem looming over the next couple of decades? Isn't it really because we've got to pay for all these wars and all the militarism that we've been buying on credit? Be honest. It's not future health care spending that's the problem. It's current and future military spending.

But that's only half of it.

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/757


for a chart from the War Resisters League:
http://www.warresisters.org/sites/default/files/FY2012piechart-color.pdf

Shouting in the Dark

This exquisite program by May Ying Welsh shows the terrible repression against peaceful protesters in Bahrain.