Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sign for Haiti: Food Not Troops - End the Military Occupation
Food Not Troops - End the U.S. Military Occupation
Send a message to President Obama, former Presidents Clinton and Bush: "The People of Haiti need food, water, and medical aid, not military occupation"
Sign the Petition at http://iacenter.org/haitipetition/
According to news reports the Pentagon has been given complete control over the Port-au-Prince airport and is responsible for all air traffic control. There are increasing reports that aid organizations have accused the U.S. military "of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops installed and lifting their citizens out." (New York Times, Jan. 17, 2010)
Under the pretext of stopping alleged looting, the U.S. has now forced the government of President Rene Preval to pass emergency measures that would delegate all security to the Pentagon.
The U.S. military presence has expanded from 3,500 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division, 2,200 U.S. Marines, to an estimated 10,000 troops. It is outrageous that the Haitian people are being forced to endure even greater hardship so that the U.S. can expand their military occupation.
According to Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for World Food Organization: "There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti. But most of those flights are for the U.S. military. Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed."
A plane from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF) carrying medical supplies was denied permission to land on Jan. 16. After Red Cross flights were continually diverted they choose to attempt to enter with a truck convoy via the Dominican Republic. The news media has reported that France, Brazil and Italy along with major international relief agencies were so upset by having aid shipments diverted that they have lodged formal complaints. Argentine, Peruvian and Mexican flights filled with rescuers and supplies were also turned back. The Caricom, the Caribbean Community's emergency aid mission to Haiti, was refused landing.
French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet told reporters he had lodged a complaint with the United States over its handling of the Port-au-Prince airport. "I have made an official protest to the Americans through the U.S. embassy," he said at the Haitian airport after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away. (AFP Jan. 17) After two relief flights were turned away the French ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret, said that the Port-au-Prince airport has become "not an airport for the international community. It is an annex of Washington." (The Guardian UK Jan. 17)
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez on Jan. 17 said the United States was using the earthquake in Haiti as a pretext to occupy the devastated country and offered to send fuel. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega says that the United States has taken advantage of the massive quake in Haiti and deployed troops in the country.
Haiti is the poorest and least developed country in the hemisphere, everyone repeats. That is true, but it is because Haiti has been occupied by U.S. military forces again and again. This is what makes the latest U.S. troop deployment to Haiti so ominous. As in the past, it will not help Haiti.
>From 1804, when the first successful slave revolution in history drove out the French colonialists and slave masters, until the present, Washington has continually imposed sanctions, debt repayments and military intervention in an attempt to crush Haitian independence. The U.S. directly occupied the country from 1915 to 1934 and again in the last 20 years.
In 2004 in a coup, planned from Washington and supported by troops from France and Canada, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a president democratically elected by over 90 percent of the vote in the last election was kidnapped and removed. The U.S. still prevents President Aristide from returning to Haiti from South Africa, where he is exiled. The U.S. set up an occupation of Haiti under UN command. Six years of this UN occupation has done nothing to develop Haiti or improve its infrastructure. Instead it has led to still greater poverty and hunger and unsustainable debt.
This is an important time to oppose to all forms of U.S. military occupation of Haiti. The peoples movement must demand that Haiti's airport be used for flights carrying desperately needed medical aid, food and water, not U.S. troops.
Your message to U.S. officials, U.S. and international media and to UN officials is an important step to call for international humanitarian assistance and to show international opposition to continued U.S. occupation of Haiti.
PETITION
To President Barack Obama, former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush:
The People of Haiti need food, water, and medical aid, not military occupation.
According to news reports, the Pentagon has been given complete control over the Port Au Prince airport and is responsible for all air traffic control. There are increasing reports that aid organizations have accused the U.S. military "of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops installed and lifting their citizens out." (New York Times, Jan. 17)
Under the pretext of stopping alleged looting, the U.S. has now forced the government of President Rene Preval to pass emergency measures that would delegate all security to the Pentagon.
The U.S. military presence has expanded from 3,500 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division, 2,200 U.S. Marines, to an estimated 10,000 troops. It is outrageous that the Haitian people are being forced to endure even greater hardship so that the U.S. can expand their military occupation.
Haiti's airport must be devoted to humanitarian relief flights. Haiti needs food water and medical aid, not a U.S. military occupation. Haiti's sovereignty and democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide must be restored.
Sign the Petition at http://iacenter.org/haitipetition/
Friday, January 15, 2010
EMERGENCY RELIEF FOR HAITI
To make a tax-deductible financial donation to help with immediate delivery of first aid relief to Haiti, send checks to IFCO/Haiti Relief, 418 West 145th St., New York, NY 10031. See www.IFCOnews.org to get more information and/or to donate by credit card.
To donate first aid supplies and personal hygiene goods, contact Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees at 718-735-4660.
MLK: Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence
By Martin Luther King, Jr.
Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
(Go here to listen http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm)
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 19541; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of -- in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred -- rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.
I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing -- Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile -- Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.
If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
Jan. 16: March In The Charlotte MLK Parade for Jobs Not War!
Meet on the Corner of N. Tryon and Pfifer Ave. Check in is at 9:45. Look for Elaine with CODEPINK. The parade steps off at 11am at 9th St. and N. Tryon St. We will make a left turn onto 3rd Street and end at Davidson St.
Join CODEPINK & Action Center For Justice to celebrate the life of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and work to fulfill his dream of jobs at a living wage for all.
Bring The Troops Home Now! Jobs Not War!
End The Occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan, Palestine…
Lift The Blockade Of Gaza & Let The Aid In!
Emergency Relief for Haiti Now!
Rollback The Attacks & Cuts On Education!
Stop the War On Youth & The Racist Prisons/Prisons For Profit System!
For more info:
CODEPINK Charlotte
codepinkcharlotte@gmail.com
Action Center For Justice
charlotteaction@gmail.com
http://charlotteaction.blogspot.com
704.759.6529
Saturday, December 19, 2009
March 20, 2010: National Anti-War March On Washington DC On The 7th Anniversary Of The War On Iraq
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a mass National March & Rally in D.C. We will march together to say “No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!” We will march together to say “No War for Empire Anywhere!” Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march. There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Cindy Sheehan and a coalition of groups has announced a new initiative set to begin in March 2010 called Peace of the Action, an integral part of which will be a camp that will be set up beginning March 13. This camp will be a staging area for people coming to DC to take part in anti-war activities.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
The initiators and endorsers of the March 20 National March on Washington (preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Debra Sweet, Director, World Can’t Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of “Born on the 4th of July”; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright (ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; MANA - Muslim Alliance in North America; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty; Michael Berg; Action Center for Justice - Charlotte, NC; Bay Area United Against War; Casa las Américas; Community Organizing Center, Columbus, Ohio; CT-SAW (Connecticut Students Against the War) ; Delaware Valley Veterans for America; Hawai'i Solidarity Committee; Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination; Texans for Peace; and many more.
For more information & to become an endorse see:
ANSWER Coalition
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Anti-war protesters arrested outside West Point
AP, WCAX.com, Dec. 1, 2009
WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) - Six anti-war protesters were arrested outside the U.S. Military Academy during President Barack Obama speech outlining his planned troop buildup in Afghanistan.
Highland Falls Police Chief Peter Miller said Tuesday the protesters were charged with disorderly conduct for blocking the roadway.
More than 200 protesters had marched a half mile to a rally at the military academy's gates before Obama's speech Tuesday night. They carried candles and protest signs saying "The audacity of torture," "Get out now," and "How many lives per gallon?"
The group included people of all ages, from young children to seniors hobbling with canes, as well as war veterans and family members with loved ones fighting overseas. Many said they had voted for Obama and were disappointed with his decision to add 30,000 troops in Afghanistan.
A Year After The Gaza Massacre: The Struggle For Palestine - pt. 1
Dr. Adel Samara, Editor-In-Chief of the quaterly magazine Kanaan
Introduction by Joyce Chediac, International Action Center
A Year After The Gaza Massacre: The Struggle For Palestine - pt. 2
Dr. Adel Samara, Editor-In-Chief of the quaterly magazine Kanaan
PROTEST OUTSIDE DEC. 3 WHITE HOUSE JOBS SUMMIT
UNEMPLOYED AND COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS TO DEMAND
MONEY FOR JOBS NOT WAR
AT 12 NOON IN FRONT OF WHITE HOUSE
“Fund A REAL JOBS PROGRAM instead of sending MORE TROOPS TO AFGHANISTAN!”
Unemployed people, along with groups representing the homeless and the poor from Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Detroit, Providence RI, Raleigh-Durham, NC, Cleveland, Baltimore, Virginia and elsewhere will protest directly in front of the White House at 12 noon on Thursday, Dec. 3 to declare the White House Jobs Summit too little and too late in the battle against depression level joblessness.
At 12 noon directly in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Ave. between 15th and 16th Streets, women and men suffering from the 'jobless recovery' will call for a real jobs program that is as ambitious in scope as the Work Progress Administration (WPA) established during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The Protest will also draw attention to the sad and disappointing fact that the Government is perfectly ready to waste billions more dollars on the war in Afghanistan, but can only offer talk when it comes to the number one crisis in the country, rising joblessness.
In addition to the Bail Out the People Movement, the primary sponsor of the protest, other groups participating in the Jobs Summit protest are: The Rhode Island Unemployed Council; Picture The Homeless, NYC; The Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut Offs, Mich.; Peoples Organization for Progress, N.J.; Rev. Graylan Hagler, Pres., United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice; Rev. Tom Smith, Pres., Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization; Anti-war Activist Cindy Sheehan; The National Network to Stop Foreclosures and Evictions; The Cleveland Family Center Connections; Charles Barron, N.Y. City Council Member; Chris Silvera, Sec.-Treas. Local 808 IBT, N.Y.; and the Rosa Parks Committee, Boston.
Sharon Black, jobs campaign organizer said, "We do not accept the argument that there is no money for a real jobs program." Black continued, "A government that can find literally trillions of dollars to bail out greedy and criminal bankers, and more money to fuel terrible wars, cannot maintain that there's no resources to bailout the unemployed. We must fund a real jobs program, not send more troops to Afghanistan."
A major jobs protest planned for spring will be announced.
For more information:
Bail Out the People Movement
Solidarity Center
55 W. 17th St. #5C
New York, NY 10011
212.633.6646
www.BailOutPeople.org
Email: http://bailoutpeople.org/cmnt.shtml
Sunday, November 29, 2009
"Killing is right and proper" (What happened at Travis AFB, yesterday)
“The Killing is Right and Proper”
By Cindy Sheehan, Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox Blog, Nov. 29, 2009
Yesterday, Bay Area CODEPINK and I, started our caravan to Creech AFB in Nevada with a morning peace rally at Travis AFB in Fairfield, CA.
After we got there we were informed that we had to move off the base and were shown by MPs where we could protest. As good warriors for free speech and peace, we groused about it and we were moving forward to where we were supposed to go, when a very angry older man pulled up and started yelling at us to: “Don’t go, I want to counter protest you.” I told him, first of all, he shouldn’t be drinking so early in the morning, and secondly not to worry, that we were going anywhere, we were just moving about 100 yards away.
We decided to just stop and take a picture by the Travis AFB sign and then we were going to get back in our cars to caravan down to Lemoore NAS because it was extremely windy and we were running a little late anyway.
I was giving a little speech denouncing the drone-bombing program and the upcoming 50 percent troop escalation to Afghanistan, when the angry old man, now dressed in a military uniform, charged around the corner and got right into my bullhorn—I told him to get out of my face and he very violently slaps the bullhorn away from me.
Everything happened so quickly: I was so shocked that I was actually physically assaulted that I just turned away from him and that’s when my colleague, Suzanne immediately jumped to my aid and got between the man and me. He swore profusely and pushed her—and then a mini-melee ensued. The numerous MPs and POs that were there finally intervened after I asked them to stop the man from assaulting my friends. I touched no one even though I was within my rights to defend myself. The video clearly shows that the aggressor and the person who brought unreasoning anger and violence to the rally was Sgt. Phil Ward
After the mini-melee, a Fairfield Police Officer, told Suzanne and I that we couldn’t press charges against the man who physically assaulted us because it was a “he-said, she-said” situation, when at least one dozen law enforcement officers were standing around and witnessing the events AND if we did press charges, then Suzanne and I would also have to go to jail until things got sorted out! Complete bullshit.
After all that, when we were leaving, like we were asked to, I got about 2 feet out of the parking lot and I noticed one of the CODEPINK women was not in the van, so I pulled over to the side of the road to wait for her and as soon I we got rolling again, to add insult to injury, I WAS PULLED OVER and detained for about one-half hour and kept isolated in my car from the others until I was presented with a ticket for “impeding traffic!”
We dropped my daughter’s car off and I hopped in the van with a group of desperadoes, (with me being the third youngest, at 52, and six out of eleven in the van being over 70), and we headed down to Lemoore NAS and a National Guard post in Fresno. After another three- hour drive from Fresno, we landed at a cheap motel in Mojave California and I was shocked to open my email and see that I had received numerous emails attacking me for essentially “bullying” a poor, old military veteran.
I watched the news videos to confirm my recollection, which was 100 percent correct. I got to watch an interview that Phil Ward did after his attack on us and he says that the killing in the wars is “right and proper” and was exceedingly upset with Obama because he is only sending 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan when the generals asked for 40,000 more. During an interview with me, I am clearly shaken, but I say, “no matter how much violence they bring to us, we will bring them more peace.”
A thing to think about in this whole episode, is that at least one area newspaper posted that we were going to be at Travis AFB, and it only drew ONE person out to protest us who was unreasonably aggressive and almost comically out of control? Hmm—it makes one wonder what Phil Ward was up to. He charged out of his car at us from the second he got there and felt it was okay to be physically aggressive towards me and the other protestors and he did get away with it with impunity?
We will bring them more peace, but we will also bring them justice, too, as we are planning on pressing charges against Phil Ward as soon as we return from Creech AFB.
There’s scum that attack and more scum that protect those attackers.
There’s scum that take away our rights to peaceably assemble and to freedom of speech, and more scum that protect those who try to steal those rights.
We the People need to be the ones to vigorously defend our rights and defend peace on earth from everyone from Sgt. Phil Ward to President Obama who think that killing is “right and proper.”
Video of Phil Ward attacking our protest:
http://cbs13.com/video/?id=64185@kovr.dayport.com
Getting up early to stop at Edwards AFB and Nellis AFB on our way to Creech in Nevada---the other stops yesterday were uneventful and we just want to peaceably protest without any further assaults.
Response to Obama’s planned Afghanistan ‘surge’: Cindy Sheehan, CodePINK head to military bases
Cindy Sheehan, CodePINK head to military bases in California, Nevada protest escalation of the war
BERKELEY – With anti-war Mom Cindy Sheehan on board, a CodePINK “NO DRONES/NO SURGE Bus” heads to Indian Springs, Nevada Saturday – with more than a half dozen demonstrations at military bases along the way – to protest President Obama’s plan for a surge against Afghanistan and the administration’s use of assassinations by “drone warfare” that kills civilians at high rates.
A NEWS CONFERENCE will be held at the bus send-off at the Marine Recruiting Station (64 Shattuck Square) in Berkeley SATURDAY at 7-7:30 a.m.
The bus, and its cadre of demonstrators from Northern California, will hold the following actions:
SATURDAY:
8:30-9:30 a.m. - TRAVIS AFB (main gate), Fairfield.
2-3 p.m. - LEMOORE Naval Air Station (main gate), Lemoore..
4-5 p.m. - FRESNO Air National Guard (main gate, Fresno.
SUNDAY:
7:30-8:30 a.m. - EDWARDS AFB (main gate), Edwards.
11-12 Noon - Marine Corps Logistics Base (main gate), Barstow.
1-2 p.m. - Ft. Irwin Army Military Reserve (main gate), Ft. Irwin.
5-6 p.m. - Nellis AFB (main gate), North Las Vegas.
Once at Creech AFB (just out Las Vegas, NV) demonstrations are planned in conjunction with International Climate Justice Action Day to protest the environmental disaster caused by wars (e.g. 51 percent of fossil fuels in the world are consumed by the U.S. military) on MONDAY.
On TUESDAY, timed to coincide with Obama’s expected announcement to increase U.S. troops against Afghanistan, Dawn to Dusk protests will be held at the front gate at Creech AFB.
“President Obama was elected to end war. We are still occupying Iraq, drone bombing against Pakistan for the past 6 months has been more than all the drone bombing under Bush and we’re escalating against Afghanistan. We have one message for U.S. troops: RESIST, REFUSE, DON’T GO, NO SURGE; and one message for Obama: Troops Home NOW” said CodePINK in a statement.
Protest Escalation of War On Mon. & Wed. in Charlotte
From CODEPINK Charlotte:
Hi Codepinkers and others. We will have a Monday action at the Square at 12 noon (Trade St & Tryon St, Charlotte, NC).
Rather than wait to react, we will pass out the White House phone number and ask people to ACT!
Our message will be: WAGE PEACE, with hand outs of the White House comment line, with why surging troops in Afghanistan is the not the way to go, and what we suggest as an alternative. Some suggestions are: MORE WAR=MORE SUFFERING FOR AFGHAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN, DOLLARS, LIVES & HUMAN NEEDS DOWN THE DRAIN! WE NEED AN EXIT STRATEGY NOT AN ESCALATION. GROUND THE DRONES, STOP THE SURGE-START RESPONSIBLE WITHDRAWAL
Then on Wed at 6pm at The Square:
We will wear black, and head coverings, and possibly death masks (whatever they are) and holding "babies" (or candles?) at an event to protest any decision to escalate the troops and violence. That will be at 6pm Wednesday at the square.
Please bring you own messages if you like. We want this to be big!
Peace,
Elaine
CODEPINK Charlotte
codepinkcharlotte@gmail.com
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Israel Restricts Palestinians’ Access to Water in Gaza and West Bank, Says Amnesty International in New Report
Australians For Palestine, Oct. 24, 2009
Amnesty International Press Release - 24 October 2009
Download report: Water-Gaza Report Oct 09
(New York) — Amnesty International accused Israel today of denying Palestinians the right to access adequate water by maintaining total control over the shared water resources. Discriminatory and restrictive policies leave many Palestinians with access only to poor quality subsistence levels of water, causing hardship and health risks, while denying them a basic need and a right, the human rights organization said.
“Israel allows the Palestinians access to only a fraction of the shared water resources, which lie mostly in the occupied West Bank, while the unlawful Israeli settlements there receive virtually unlimited supplies. In Gaza the Israeli blockade has made an already dire situation worse,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Amnesty International report, “Troubled Waters: Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water,” says Israel uses more than 80 per cent of the water from the Mountain Aquifer, the main source of underground water in Israel and the OPT, while restricting Palestinian access to a mere 20 per cent.
The Mountain Aquifer is the only source for water for Palestinians in the West Bank, but only one of several for Israel, which also takes for itself all the water available from the Jordan River.
While Palestinian daily water consumption barely reaches 70 litres a day per person, Israeli daily consumption is more than 300 litres per day, four times as much.
In some rural communities Palestinians survive on barely 20 litres per day, the minimum amount recommended for domestic use in emergency situations.
Some 180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water and the Israeli army often prevents them from even collecting rainwater.
In contrast, Israeli settlers, who live in the West Bank in violation of international law, have intensive-irrigation farms, lush gardens and swimming pools.
Numbering about 450,000, the settlers use as much or more water than the Palestinian population of some 2.3 million.
The report describes the hardships, both physical and financial, that Palestinians face due to water restrictions — for example, the population has to reuse water for cooking, washing and sanitation, and bathe, wash and flush toilets less frequently.
An Amnesty International delegate on March 11, 2008 witnessed the destruction of a Palestinian farm on the West Bank by Israeli soldiers. In addition to uprooting crops, the soldiers tore apart the farm’s costly drip irrigation network. Samar Da’ish, mother of seven, told Amnesty International: “What harm have we done by cultivating this small bit of land, so that we can feed our children?”
In the Gaza Strip, 90 to 95 per cent of the water from its only water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Yet, Israel does not allow the transfer of water from the Mountain Aquifer in the West Bank to Gaza.
Stringent restrictions imposed in recent years by Israel on the entry into Gaza of material and equipment necessary for the development and repair of infrastructure have caused further deterioration of the water and sanitation situation in Gaza, which has reached crisis point.
To cope with water shortages and lack of network supplies many Palestinians have to purchase water, of often dubious quality, from mobile water tankers at a much higher price.
Others resort to water-saving measures which are detrimental to their and their families’ health and which hinder socio-economic development.
“Over more than 40 years of occupation, restrictions imposed by Israel on the Palestinians’ access to water have prevented the development of water infrastructure and facilities in the OPT, consequently denying hundreds of thousands of Palestinians the right to live a normal life, to have adequate food, housing, or health, and to economic development,” said Rovera.
Israel has appropriated large areas of the water-rich Palestinian land it occupies and barred Palestinians from accessing them.
It has also imposed a complex system of permits that the Palestinians must obtain from the Israeli army and other authorities in order to carry out water-related projects in the OPT. Applications for such permits are often rejected or subject to long delays.
Restrictions imposed by Israel on the movement of people and goods in the OPT further compound the difficulties Palestinians face when trying to carry out water and sanitation projects, or even just to distribute small quantities of water.
Water tankers are forced to take long detours to avoid Israeli military checkpoints and roads which are out of bounds to Palestinians, resulting in steep increases in the price of water.
In rural areas, Palestinian villagers are continuously struggling to find enough water for their basic needs, as the Israeli army often destroys their rainwater harvesting cisterns and confiscates their water tankers.
In comparison, irrigation sprinklers water the fields in the midday sun in nearby Israeli settlements, where much water is wasted as it evaporates before even reaching the ground.
In some Palestinian villages, because their access to water has been so severely restricted, farmers are unable to cultivate the land, or even to grow small amounts of food for their personal consumption or for animal fodder, and have thus been forced to reduce the size of their herds.
“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” said Rovera.
“Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water, and take responsibility for addressing the problems it created by allowing Palestinians a fair share of the shared water resources.”
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.
Contact: Suzanne Trimel, Amnesty International Media Relations Director, 212-633-4150, strimel@aiusa.org
Please visit www.amnestyusa.org for more information.
U.S. rushes production of 30,000 lbs bombs to use on Iran
Bunker buster carries goal of deterring Iran
By SCOTT CANON, The Kansas City Star, Oct. 22, 2009
Even as Washington emphasizes walking softly to pry Iran away from its nuclear ambitions, the Pentagon is speeding the manufacture of its own big stick.
This month, the Defense Department awarded $51.9 million to McDonnell Douglas to more quickly adapt a 30,000-pound bunker buster to the B-2 stealth bomber.
The GBU-57 bomb and the fleet of B-2s — stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base with occasional deployments to Guam and an outpost in the Indian Ocean — are widely seen as the likeliest U.S. military option for setting back Tehran’s hopes for building nuclear weapons.
“There is a certain amount of wise military planning in all this,” said Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, “and a certain amount of saber-rattling.”
The weapon is behind schedule. In 2007, officials at the bomber base east of Kansas City estimated the bomb would be B-2-ready in 2008.
Budgetary hiccups pushed the delivery date to mid-2011.
Now the testing of the bomb and the delicate job of outfitting it for any of the $2.2 billion planes is, as one Pentagon spokesman said, “back on track.” It should now be ready, said Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell, “in the coming months.”
About 20 of the bombs are being made.
“This has been a capability that we have long believed was missing from our — our quiver, our arsenal, and we wanted to make sure we filled in that gap,” Morrell said at a press briefing this month. “I don’t think anybody should read anything into it beyond what it is. And I don’t think anybody can divine potential targets or anything of that nature.”
The Iranians have many uranium-enriching centrifuges at an underground location at Natanz. But on a visit to the United Nations last month, President Barack Obama announced the Iranians were building another secret nuclear facility near the holy city of Qum, this one deep in a mountain. Some speculate that the mountain facility is in response to a possible bunker buster.
The disclosure of the new facility may have put the Tehran leadership on defensive. A tentative deal cut this week calls for Iran to ship about three-fourths of its known nuclear fuel stockpile to Russia. Once there, it would be converted into metal fuel rods practical for a nuclear power plant, but not for an atomic warhead.
But the pact is shaky, and like less-successful efforts to stymie North Korea’s nuclear program, short-term advances often see reverses.
That’s where the biggest-yet bunker buster comes in. By the reckoning of military analysts, the bomb is conventional — by which they mean it does not carry a nuclear warhead. But it is unconventionally large.
The GBU-57 has the weight of about two elephants, stretches 20 feet and carries more than 5,300 pounds of explosive. Two will fit in the belly of a B-2.
Previously, the biggest non-nuke in the U.S. arsenal was the MOAB, massive ordnance air blast, or “Mother of All Bombs.” It explodes above its target.
Four tons heavier, the GBU-57 is called a MOP, massive ordnance penetrator.
Dropping such a behemoth is complicated.
“When you let go, all of a sudden the plane is 10 percent lighter than it was a second ago,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “Planes have a tendency to pitch up when that happens.”
Some published reports suggest the new bomb can burrow through 200 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating, but many analysts are skeptical. The physics of bunker busting are tricky, and even nuclear bombs can’t punch into the world’s most hardened targets.
Still, the bomb might be enough, if its shock can disturb the spinning centrifuges and make the sensitive devices wobble into self-destruction.
“Once you shake it up, it becomes like the inside of an engine that has thrown a rod. It tears itself apart,” said Owen Cote, a security analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But that’s not your only issue.”
First, he said, Obama would have to consider if U.S. intelligence is good enough to find the right targets and whether a strike would do enough damage to the Iranian program.
Then the White House would have to calculate the backlash. Iran would have the options of punishing U.S. troops in countries on either side of it, send missiles toward Tel Aviv, Israel, or sink tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
“If you can delay their nuclear program, that’s good. Time is your friend,” Cote said. “But you have to think about what (the Iranians) will do the day after you bomb them.”
*****************
Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran?
Is the U.S. Stepping Up Preparations for a Possible Attack on Iran's Nuclear Facilities?
By JONATHAN KARL, ABC News, Oct. 6, 2009
Is the U.S. stepping up preparations for a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities?
The Pentagon is always making plans, but based on a little-noticed funding request recently sent to Congress, the answer to that question appears to be yes.
First, some background: Back in October 2007, ABC News reported that the Pentagon had asked Congress for $88 million in the emergency Iraq/Afghanistan war funding request to develop a gargantuan bunker-busting bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). It's a 30,000-pound bomb designed to hit targets buried 200 feet below ground. Back then, the Pentagon cited an "urgent operational need" for the new weapon.
Now the Pentagon is shifting spending from other programs to fast forward the development and procurement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon comptroller sent a request to shift the funds to the House and Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees over the summer.
Click here to see a copy of the Pentagon's request, provided to ABC News.
The comptroller said the Pentagon planned to spend $19.1 million to procure four of the bombs, $28.3 million to accelerate the bomb's "development and testing", and $21 million to accelerate the integration of the bomb onto B-2 stealth bombers.
'Urgent Operational Need'
The notification was tucked inside a 93-page "reprogramming" request that included a couple hundred other more mundane items.
Why now? The notification says simply, "The Department has an Urgent Operational Need (UON) for the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high threat environments. The MOP is the weapon of choice to meet the requirements of the UON." It further states that the request is endorsed by Pacific Command (which has responsibility over North Korea) and Central Command (which has responsibility over Iran).
Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran?
The request was quietly approved. On Friday, McDonnell Douglas was awarded a $51.9 million contract to provide "Massive Penetrator Ordnance Integration" on B-2 aircraft.
This is not the kind of weapon that would be particularly useful in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it is ideally suited to hit deeply buried nuclear facilities such as Natanz or Qom in Iran.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
'Israel may attack Iran after December'
By JPOST.COM STAFF, Jerusalem Post, Oct. 15, 2009
Israel is making preparations to carry out military attacks in Iran after December, a French magazine reported overnight Wednesday.
According to a report in Le Canard Enchainé quoted by Israel Radio, Jerusalem has already ordered high-quality combat rations from a French food manufacturer for soldiers serving in elite units and has also asked reservists of these units staying abroad to return to Israel.
The magazine further reported that in a recent visit to France, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi told his French counterpart Jean-Louis Georgelin that Israel is not planning to bomb Iran, but may send elite troops to conduct activities on the ground there.
These, according to the magazine, could involve sabotage of nuclear facilities as well as assassinations of top Iranian nuclear scientists.
Israel has recently toned down rhetoric against Iran so as not to hinder US diplomatic efforts at bringing Teheran to become transparent regarding its nuclear program, but neither Jerusalem nor Washington have so far made any unequivocal statements to the effect that the military option against Iran was no longer being considered.
Israel has maintained that it has the military capability to tackle Iran on its own if sanctions against the Islamic Republic prove ineffective.
Israel accuses Iran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Teheran maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful.
The Jerusalem Post could not confirm Le Canard Enchainé's report.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Israel and U.S. prepare for largest-ever joint air force drill
By Reuters, Haaretz, Oct. 12, 2009
Israel and the United States will hold their biggest joint air-defence exercise next week, the Israeli military said, testing missile interceptors that would serve as a strategic bulwark in any showdown with Iran.
The drill, dubbed Juniper Cobra, has taken place every two years since 2001 but now underscores efforts by the Americans to reassure Israel as they and other world powers pursue negotiations to curb Iran's nuclear program.
An Israeli defense official said the maneuvers would begin on October 20, having been postponed from their original October 12 start-date.
But a military spokeswoman, Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich, said holding the exercise next week did not constitute a postponement.
"The exercise will happen next week in accordance with the original plan," she said.
U.S. forces including 17 naval ships and ground personnel operating the Aegis, THAAD and Patriot missile shields will be meshed with Israel's Arrow II interceptor for the drill, the defense official said.
"It will be the biggest Juniper Cobra ever," the official said, adding the exercise would be overseen by Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, chief of the U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet, as well as by the commander of Israel's air defense arm.
The U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv had no immediate word on scheduling. In a statement issued last week, it said Juniper Cobra "is not related to or in response to any world events".
Iran denies seeking a nuclear bomb, but the lack of transparency around its designs and Tehran's rhetoric against Israel have stirred fears of war.
Israel, which is assumed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal, has hinted at the possibility of attacking Iran if it deems diplomacy a dead end.
But some analysts believe Israel's military limitations, and U.S. resistance to the idea of pre-emptive strikes, may force it into a more defensive posture with the help of its top ally.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Al-Aqsa flares up tensions between Israel, Jordan
Press TV, Oct. 12, 2009
Jordan has threatened to expel Israel's ambassador over the regime's aggression in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in the occupied East Jerusalem Al-Quds.
According to a report by the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, Jordan threatened the expulsion in response to Israeli violation of the sanctity of Al-Aqsa mosque over the last two weeks.
Israel deployed thousands of troops in the area after it closed down the Al-Aqsa mosque compound to Palestinians and allowed Jewish worshippers to hold a religious ceremony in the site.
The closure of the holy compound caused fierce clashes in the city.
Under a peace treaty signed in 1994, Israel recognized Jordan's right to look after all Islamic and Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem al-Quds, which is considered by the United Nations as an occupied territory.
Last week, a senior Jordanian official called on Israeli police to keep Jewish religious extremists away from the compound d— known to Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount — and keep the Mugrabi Gate closed, Haaretz reported.
"That will calm the atmosphere while respecting the Jordanian role in Al-Aqsa mosque," said the official.
Before the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, visits to the holy site had to be coordinated with the Waqf religious trust, which is under Jordanian control.
Between 2000 and 2003, non-Muslims were completely barred from the area until the Israel police decided unilaterally to reverse the ban.
Israel occupied East Jerusalem Al-Quds during a 1967 aggression and later annexed it.
SB/MD
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