As I read through my emails yesterday morning, I came across one that had been sent by the Popular Committee of Bi’lin (West Bank). It’s subject line read: “Bi’lin Invaded by Israeli Soldiers.” The email, sent by Iyad Burnat, the head of the Popular Committee, describes a 2:30 am raid by close to 70 soldiers. Declaring Bi’lin a “closed military zone,” the soldiers broke into a number of homes. In the process, they seized and took away – for no stated reason — two sixteen-year-old boys, Mohsen Kateb and Hamoda Yaseen.

Burnat’s home was also broken into and his nine-year-old-son, Abdal, threatened with seizure. At that point, a number of Popular Committee members as well as those of the International Solidarity Movement stood repeatedly in the path of the soldiers. Though they were brusquely pushed aside, they did manage to prevent Abdal from being arrested. They also managed to prevent the arrest of Haitham al-Katib, an activist, who was video-taping the raid. Burant reports that similar types of raids haven taken place almost every night for the past two weeks and that, all told, seven Bi’lin community members have been arrested.

Throughout the morning, I have read and re-read this email. Perhaps it’s because I was just in Bi’lin two weeks ago and met Burant along with many other Popular Committee Members. Perhaps the memory of being bombarded by tear gas cannisters and rubber bullets during the Committee’s Friday afternoon protest march to the separation fence (the building of which has claimed 60% of the community’s farmland) has yet to dissipate. Or, perhaps it’s simply because human beings are suffering terribly and there seems to be no end to that suffering in the near future.

Burnat’s email closes with a note of gratitude, “Thank you for your continued support.” Perhaps this is the line, most of all, that keeps me returning to my computer. How can I continue to support those whom I have known for two years in this community? What does solidarity with the Popular Committee’s nonviolent movement look like from here in the US, thousands of miles away from Bi’lin? If I am not there to put my body in the way, as did the folks of the Popular Committee and the International Solidarity Movement, what else can I be doing?

Read the rest of this article »

Activists with Rising Tide draped this 25-foot banner on the downtown DC offices of the Environmental Protection Agency.

• About 24,000 Toronto municipal workers have entered their second week on strike over contract disputes.

• Niger’s opposition party is calling for a nationwide lockdown on Wednesday to protest President Mamadou Tandja’s plans to change the constitution that would allow him to run for a third five-year term.

• A three and half week hunger strike that involved over 100 Los Angeles teachers and district personnel has come to an end. Despite the attention it brought, participants are planning to shift strategy in their fight against budget cuts and layoffs.

• Around 12 parents in Glasgow, Scotland have been occupying a primary school for three days to protest the planned demolition of the building as part of wider spending cuts.

• As many as 1,000 police cadets in southwest Bangladesh went on a hunger strike after an officer allegedly hit one of the cadets.

• Union members upset with Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter over recent vetoes turned their backs to him in protest at an event commemorating the site of the 1914 Ludlow massacre of striking coal miners.

• San Francisco LGBT labor group Pride at Work held a vigil on the steps of City Hall protesting the mayor’s deep budget cuts to HIV programs.

In what is the first major political crisis to hit Central America in years, Honduras has seen its democratically elected president Manuel Zeleya overthrown in a coup d’etat by the military. The event comes just as the people of Honduras were set to vote on a change to the constitution that would allow presidents to seek re-election beyond a single four year term.

Not surprisingly–when it comes to such headlines–accusatory eyes are beginning to look toward the US. While President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have expressed support for Zeleya’s return to power, it is impossible, as Jeremy Scahill noted, “to imagine that the US was not aware that the coup was in the works.”

The coup plotters/supporters in the Honduran Congress are supporters of the “free trade agreements” Washington has imposed on the region. The coup leaders view their actions, in part, as a rejection of Hugo Chavez’s influence in Honduras and with Zelaya and an embrace of the United States and Washington’s “vision” for the region. Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls.

There are other factors to consider as well, such as the large US military presence in Honduras and the training of Honduran military leaders at the US Army School of the Americas. There are sure to be more ties uncovered in the following days.

In the meantime, popular resistance is beginning to mount. Despite a curfew imposed by the interim president, pro-Zeleya demonstrators held a vigil by the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa before police fired tear gas to disperse the crowds. Media outlets have either shut down or aren’t reporting news and the internet is down in the capitol city.

Zeleya’s presidency minister Enrique Flores Lanza announced that the cabinet is launching a campaign of “peaceful civil resistance” to bring Zelaya back to office.

“We are making a call and talking with patriotic leaders in Honduras, because we will begin a peaceful civil resistance in whole country,” said the minister.

“People of the country are demonstrating to oppose the attack on democracy,” he said.

Meanwhile, here in New York, I’ve received word of an “Emergency rally in support of Honduras” set to take place in front of the Honduran Mission to the United Nations between 3pm and 6pm today.

I expect more news on protests to filter in later.

• The Free Gaza Movement, attempting to send two boats with banned supplies, such as concrete and medical supplies, to the people of Gaza are getting ready to set sail despite “threats and intimidation” from the Israeli government.

• The 650 oil refinery workers in Lindsey England, who lost their jobs after staging a week of unofficial walk-outs because of 51 redundancies, are expected to be reinstated after employers backed down to union leaders, who had the support of strikers across the country.

• Arizona teachers and other public school supporters are at the state Capitol to protest a Republican budget proposal that would cut spending for education and other government programs.

• About a dozen people waved “Save the Fish” signs in front of the Hawaiian state Capitol Saturday to protest the closing of a fish hatchery, which they say is necessary to restock the depleted waters.

• Israeli security forces detained 22 pro-Palestinian Israeli activists as they dispersed a protest against settlements in the occupied West Bank.

• An activist in Florida ended a three-day hunger strike after Bank of America agreed to meet so his organization can monitor minority-lending practices.

• A crowd of more than 100 protesters chanted “No more!” from the steps of a Texas courthouse Sunday evening as they demanded an investigation into a police raid earlier in the day at a gay night club.

In the New York Times this week, there’s a haunting story by Katharine Q. Seelye on a church service in Kentucky in which the pastor invited parishioners to bring their guns. Here’s the man of God himself with his submachine gun:

In addition to the church service, Seelye discusses the rising rates of gun-buying in this country, as well as NRA-stoked fears that Obama—who has mainly ignored gun issues so far—will take away their weaponry.

Even better than the article, though, are two posts on the Times’s Lede blog, which have more details from the church service and other insights from Seelye’s reporting. There’s even a discussion forming in the comments about whether a church service about guns is “heresy” and the meaning of Jesus’s mysterious remarks about swords. In America, gun control isn’t just a public policy question; it’s a theological one too. And even in Kentucky, one of the country’s most gun-friendly states, not everyone is happy to see religion conflated with gun-toting.

Terry Taylor and Diana Fulner

They’re not mentioned in the original article, but at the bottom the first of Seelye’s Lede blog posts, she discusses other Kentuckyans who are bent on doing things differently.

Clergy from some other churches and peace activists are sponsoring an alternative event, called “Bring your peaceful heart, leave your gun at home,” and today I visited with the organizers.

[…]

The executive director of the Interfaith Paths to Peace, Terry Taylor, one of the organizers, told me that he and 18 co-sponsors planned this event because they were “deeply troubled by the idea of wearing weapons into sacred space.”

He said they did not consider themselves “protesters,” per se, and did not want to be part of a demonstration at New Bethel.

They appear quite insistent on avoiding the posture of protest, and have a graceful way of explaining why:

“A protest is not the way we do things,” Mr. Taylor said. “We’re not against things, we’re for things. Going and carrying signs at that event would build unhappiness and could potentially be confrontational. They have the right to do what they want. We’re going to give people an alternative that we think is better.”

Those of us so eager to protest violence could probably stand to keep this approach in mind more too. After all, there is violence even in pulling somebody’s gun from their holster. Much better is to offer them something else that they’ll want to carry around even more, that will make them feel even safer.

In a provocatively-titled essay at Killing the Buddha today—”Gays Are the New Niggers“—Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou calls on the memory of Bayard Rustin. More than anyone, perhaps, Rustin is responsible for bringing Gandhian nonviolence to the civil rights movement in the American South. He was an officer in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a war resister, a close advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and a key organizer of the 1963 march on Washington, D.C. He was also a gay man, a fact that landed him in jail, drove a wedge between him and other movement leaders, and made him the target of diatribes by Strom Thurmond on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

For Rustin, gay rights was inextricably part of the larger struggle for civil rights. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, which helped to launch the modern gay rights movement. In an essay of Rustin’s which Sekou quotes, “From Montgomery to Stonewall,” he insists on the continuity between the two causes:

That was the beginning of an extraordinary revolution, similar to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in that it was not expected that anything extraordinary would occur. As in the case of the women who left the Russian factory, and in the case of Rosa Parks who sat down in the white part of the bus, something began to happen, people began to protest. They began to fight for the right to live in dignity, the right essentially to be one’s self in every respect, and the right to be protected under law. In other words, people began to fight for their human rights. Gay people must continue this protest.

Rustin’s legacy, which was often hidden in order to protect the civil rights movement from homophobic distractions, has been profoundly underappreciated. We can only hope that today, finally, we are arriving at a place where his tremendous contribution can be appreciated for what it was and his call can be heard. Sekou concludes:

All niggers—historical and contemporary—must join forces to achieve freedom for all. Rustin places a moral challenge on those in the struggle: “Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don’t fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return on me.”

We Buddhists must find the courage to leave our temples and enter the temples of the human experience,
the temples that are filled with suffering.
If we listen to the Buddha, Christ, Gandhi, we can do nothing less.
The refugee camps, the prisons. the ghettos, and the battlefields then become our temples.
We have so much work to do.

Maha Ghosananda, “The Human Family”

The recent revelation of top Democratic support for President Richard Nixon’s decision to send U.S. and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia, provide arms to the Cambodian government and continue its “secret bombing” raids had me re-reading Santidhammo Bhikkhu’s “Maha Ghosananda: The Buddha of the Battlefield” last night. I suppose I was looking for someone who found a nonviolent way through the madness of war and of its horrific violence.

The June 24th edition of the Washington Post reports that when Nixon telephoned Senator John Stennis (D-Mississippi), then chair of the Armed Services Committee, on April 24th, 1970 to let him know of his plans for Cambodia, Stennis responded: “I will be with you … I commend you for what you are doing.” Part of what Stennis “commended,” had already been well underway, as is noted in the the March 18th, 2009 edition of The Cambodian Daily: “Between March 18, 1969 and August 15, 1973, U.S. warplanes carpet-bombed, sometimes indiscriminately, ‘neutral’ Cambodia, killing civilians, pulverizing the countryside and pulling the nation deeper into conflict in neighboring Vietnam. Causality estimates range from as few as 5,000 to more than half a million.”

The Daily points out that the March 18th bombings were not the first to have pummeled the land and its people; they had been going on since 1965. The 1969 “Operation Menu,” with its “Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Supper, Dinner and Dessert” campaigns, was simply an escalation of what had already begun in 1965. All told, the Daily reports, “the long-range B-52 bombers flew more than 230,000 sorties over Cambodia and dropped more than 2.75 million tons of ordnance on more than 113,000 Cambodian sites … and more than the total tonnage of bombs dropped by Allied Forces during World War II, counting the two atomic bombs used on Japan.”

Mann Phal, who was a young girl during the time of Operation Menu, puts human flesh on the payload statistics of the Cambodian Daily’s account: “My father said, ‘Child, run into the bunker, the plane is coming. Come to the bunker.’ Before she could reach it, the bunker took a direct hit. The explosion tore her family to pieces and hurled a chunk of her father’s leg on to a treetop. The bodies of her mother and siblings were eviscerated. That bomb also sent searing hot shrapnel into Phal’s head, legs and arms … Phal survived [her brother carried his unconscious sister to safety] but her arm was left dangling by bits of flesh and bone, and was later amputated. [Her] grandmother returned to the blast site … to collect the body parts [Phal's parents and four siblings were killed] strewn about and buried them together in a single grave. ”

The Daily ends its article with a final quote from Phal: “If you bring [the American pilot who dropped the bombs] here today, I would beat him. And I would cut off his arm to put it on my own body.” Read the rest of this article »

A New Orleans brass band plays hymns at a memorial march for slain pedestrians in Hell's Kitchen, NYC. Neighborhood activists say six recent deaths have gone overlooked by the media and city government.

• United Auto Workers in Strasburg, Virginia gathered outside of the International Automotive Components plant on Wednesday to protest the outsourcing of jobs.

• Support continues to mount for the 650 Lindsey, England oil refinery workers who recently lost their jobs. Some 4,000 workers across the country have gone on strike and many plan to stage a demo at the corporate headquarters of energy supplier Total in Paris next week.

• Minority business owners in Jacksonville, Florida are urging other minorities to boycott Bank of America for discriminatory lending practices.

• Air India employees are set to stage a sit-in at the airline’s offices on Friday to protest the management’s decision to withhold their salaries for two weeks.

• Tenant activists in NYC plan to tape their own mouths shut to protest the Rent Guidelines Board vote to raise rent for the city’s 1 million regulated apartments.

• South Chicago residents have been staging a sit-in since Monday in order to slow or prevent parking meters from being installed.

Border activists, along with humanitarian and social justice organizations, are waiting for several government agencies to respond to their request for a meeting, where they hope to address the ongoing prosecution and harassment of aid workers along migrant trails. In last week’s press conference, No More Deaths announced:

[...] we request a meeting between Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (BANWR) officials, the Department of the Interior and humanitarian, human rights, environmental and faith organizations to take place no later than two weeks from today’s date, in order to discuss ways that we can cooperate to prevent additional death and suffering on the US-Mexico border and the federal lands it transects.

Aside from the legal harassment and consequences that detract energy and resources from the life-saving work of these humanitarian organizations, No More Deaths has consistently reported finding slashed gallon jugs of water, most likely done by federal agents along the grueling migrant trails. As the Arizona border community strives to find humane and environmental solutions to these conflicts, Congress is poised to make life along the border even more difficult.

The House of Representatives began hearing arguments on the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill (HR 2892) yesterday. There are three proposed amendments to this bill that would require the construction of an even more inhumane border wall.

With the current death toll nearing 100, the work of groups like No More Deaths to engage one’s adversary in conversation is a trademark of Gandhian nonviolence. Hopefully BANWAR officials will recognize it is also in their best interest to come to the table so that the inexcusable human suffering in the desert can come to an end.

A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was allegedly chained to the ceiling of his cell.

I’m gratified to see, this morning, a front-page report at the BBC on the prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Hundreds of people have been held at Guantanamo; thousands have been held at Bagram.

When I joined Witness Against Torture earlier this year to protest torture and unjust detention, people passing by were often confused. Didn’t Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo? And end torture? When asked, virtually none of them had ever heard of Bagram, a place that represents a troubling wrinkle in the new administration’s attempt to look like a meaningful departure from the excesses—even crimes—of the last.

This passage is particularly telling:

Since coming to office US President Barack Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month.

But unlike its detainees at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.

The inmates at Bagram are being kept in “a legal black-hole, without access to lawyers or courts”, according to Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a legal support group representing four detainees.

She is pursuing legal action that, if successful. would grant detainees at Bagram the same rights as those still being held at Guantanamo Bay.

But the Obama administration is trying to block the move.

The dilemma here should be as clear for activists as for the administration. Guantanamo is in the United States’ backyard, so people’s attention will fixate on it. Bagram is out of sight, out of mind. For the sake of appearances, it might just be enough to clean up Guantanamo and say progress has been made. Not knowing better, well-meaning Americans will be satisfied. But for the sake of real justice, that is nowhere near enough. The violence being done at Bagram is affecting everyone there as we speak. And it won’t be long before the rest of us feel the ripples of its consequences.

Focusing on Guantanamo, we have to realize, is only the beginning. No torture, no inhumane treatment of prisoners, not at Guantanamo, not at Bagram, not anywhere.

Earlier this month, Palestinians organized and staged Hip-Hop Kom, a rap competition broadcast in the West Bank and Gaza showcasing the talent of local rappers. As Jordan Flaherty, writing for The Electronic Intifada, notes, “Through the use of video conferencing and projection, each city could see and hear the performances happening in the other. Five groups from Gaza participated, coming in first, third, and fourth place.” Although Gazans took the prize, the real victory goes to all the Palestinians who orchestrated and participated in the event which embodied the principles of pragmatic nonviolence. It was a subversive action, daring to unite and voice the angst of oppression over melodious beats and rhythms. It was a bold demonstration of the power of Palestinian youth and their ability to peacefully and creatively mobilize themselves in the face of violence.

I see Palestinians turning toward an art form that was birthed by oppressed black people in the US and I can’t help but notice the parallels between the groups. Hip-hop gives expression to the plight of marginalization and it vocally validates the experience of the oppressed. In the US, we are witnessing the infiltration of hip hop by forces of materialism and greed. In Palestine, the essence of hip-hop still remains close to the root of active struggle and resistance against on oppressive order. Palestinian hip-hop reminds us that the poverty of the South Bronx shares a common cause with the poverty of Jenin. It calls us back to the realization that we are all a people in struggle against the war machine. While we let hip-hop die on its native soil, a drumbeat from Palestine calls us toward a resurrection fueled by the knowledge that our country deprives and exploits its poor at home in order to make war on others abroad.

Palestinians are painfully aware that life in Palestine depends on perception and awareness in the US. Getting back to the roots of hip-hop will situate us at the interface of the international and the domestic and will put us in solidarity with local and global networks of people struggling for change and freedom from tyranny. Hip hoppers in the US must therefore take hip-hop as seriously as the Palestinians do and utilize it as a tool to organize and elevate the consciousness of the nation. We must bring the human face of Palestine to our fellow Americans but in order to do so we have to get closer to them ourselves. Can we show them that we care? Or are we too committed to rapping about money and illusory prosperity? Are we exporting our solidarity or a vain, materialistic outlook on life? Are we representatives of the status quo of imperialism and colonialism or do we chant the fires of resistance? Only we can decide.

NASA climatologist James Hansen (center) gets arrested at West Virginia anti-coal protest yesterday.

Hundreds of anti-coal/anti-mountaintop removal activists gathered for a historic protest in Coal River Valley, West Virginia yesterday. The top headlines are that NASA climatologist James Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah and 94-year-old former WV congressman Ken Hechler were among 30 arrested for sitting down on a highway outside of Massey Energy, the leading mountaintop removal coal mining company. A large number of coal supporters also showed up and were described as being aggressive toward the other rally participants. Coal River Mountain Watch co-director Judy Goldman was reportedly hit in the face by a Massey supporter, who was apprehended by police just before attempting to assault a coal miner’s widow/community activist.

Here are a couple jumping off points from this action:

-Charleston Gazette staff writer Ken Ward Jr. blogged about the action, raising the point that both sides of the coal debate could claim a victory yesterday. This leads to a number of important questions, namely “So what next?” but also, “What about the miners? Who can argue that they don’t have a right to stand up for their jobs and their families?” The Gazette blog offers some good analysis.

-Robert Kennedy Jr. helped rally protesters for the yesterday’s action while at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee over the weekend, telling the crowd, “Let’s get arrested!” However, I haven’t seen any reference to him being at the protest.

-James Hansen has agreed to debate Massey Energy President Don Blankenship later this week.

-Hansen also wrote a plea to President Obama to put an end to mountaintop coal mining.

-Video of 94-year-old former WV Congressman Ken Hechler talking about why he’s become a “hell raiser.”

• Staffers and Representatives were treated to a flash mob on Tuesday at Longworth Cafeteria on Capitol Hill. Over 30 young activists froze mid-motion for two minutes before raising their voices in unison and yelling “Solve climate change now!”

• More than a dozen New York City beekeapers gathered Tuesday on the steps of City Hall to support a bill that would legalize beekeeping in the nation’s largest metropolis.

• Several hundred hotel workers and supporters picketed in front of the Hilton in Crystal City, Virginia to protest an imposed contract that cut salaries and benefits.

• More UK power plant workers go on strike to show solidarity with the 647 Lindsey Oil Refinery workers who were dismissed last week for staging their own unauthorized strike.

• A group of female academics in Italy have called on the wives of world leaders to boycott an upcoming meeting of the G8 in Trieste over Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s “offensive” attitude toward women.

• Inhabitants from several southern Peruvian provinces blocked important highways on Monday to protest against the land use and the industrial pollution to the environment.

• 6,000 people gathered at the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield, effectively shutting it down, to protest looming social service cuts.

As the whole world watched the tragic death of an Iranian female protester named Neda this weekend, news coverage shifted from the uplifting and defiant non-violent struggle of the Iranian people to the brutal crackdown of the Iranian regime. This has naturally led many to question the effectiveness of nonviolence.

A Los Angeles Times story called attention to this phenomenon and cited a comment found under a protest video posted on YouTube:

“Someone pointed out Gandhi and MLK as an example of peaceful protesting. Here’s my take on that: MLK was not facing a dictatorship, so it doesn’t apply. Gandhi had a unique situation: peaceful protest worked here because he only had to convince the people of India that they should not be governed by foreign powers (England). In Iran’s case, there are no foreign powers to rise up against, only a dictatorship that also happens to have millions of local supporters. Violence is necessary here.”

This sort of argument manifests itself quite frequently among those with only a cursory knowledge of nonviolence.  It seeks to imply that nonviolence doesn’t work against dictatorships (even though it has, e.g. Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines and Milosevic in Serbia). It also implies that Gandhi and King succeeded because they were fighting civilized opponents who were unlikely to mow down a bunch of peaceful protesters. But we can’t forget the lynchings that occurred in the South while local authorities looked the other way or the fact that King’s own house was bombed by segregationists. Are they not comparable to Ahmadinejad’s “millions of local supporters”?

Many lives were lost in the Indian independence movement as well. One glaring incident, known as the Amritsar Massacre, saw 90 British soldiers kill nearly 400 unarmed men, women and children and injure over a thousand without warning in less than 15 minutes at what was nothing more than a religious holiday and harvest festival.

So, to say that either of these men and their movements had it easy overlooks the great deal of violent opposition they faced and the immense courage and dedication it took to remain nonviolent. For this reason we must be wary of those calling for an intervention in Iran or an arming of the protesters. But not for this reason alone.

We have also forgotten another valuable history lesson, which is that the Iranians have used nonviolence before to overthrow a brutal and repressive regime. After 25 years of rule by the US-installed Shah, Iranians took to the street in 1979, waging boycotts, strikes and non-co-operation. In the book “Unarmed Insurrections,” author Kurt Schock gives full credit to the nonviolent movement, stating, “The lifeblood of the shah’s regime was drained by mass civil disobedience.”

While it is sad that this Islamic Revolution paved the way for the current regime, which violates all sorts of human rights, we must convince ourselves that the last thing thing the Iranians need now is our help. Chris Hedges expounded on this point in a recent article titled, “Iran had a democracy before we took it away.”

Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught… We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate.

There’s no reason we can’t lend our moral support to the protesters in the street. But to call for violent resistance, perhaps backed by foreign militiaries, would only serve to set the Iranians back even further than we’ve already done.

On February 4th, 1968, just about a month before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “Drum Major Instinct” sermon from the pulpit of Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The “drum major instinct,” according to King, is the desire for “recognition, importance, and attention.”

Elise Aghazarian, a professor of sociology at Bethlehem University and Palestinian activist

It’s a shorthand way of speaking about the relentless, though perhaps unconscious, desire to “be number one.” While those in the social justice, peacemaking and civil rights movements might assume that King was only addressing the wealthy and the powerful, it would be a mistaken assumption. King, relying upon the psychological studies of Alfred Adler, contends that the desire to “lead the parade,” is a pervasive human tendency.

For King, the “great issue in life is to harness the drum major instinct.” Failure to do so lends itself to a range of debilitating practices, particularly for the nonviolent activist. The unharnessed drum major instinct, for example, fosters a snobbish exclusivity not a welcoming inclusiveness; destructive competition not affirming cooperation; gossip and not meaningful conversation, etc. When properly harnessed, however, the drum major instinct fuels true human greatness: “to be first in love, to be first in moral excellence and to be first in generosity.” Further, there is no “Ph.D.” required for this kind of creative genius; it is a field of study and application open to all. Meditating upon his death, though not knowing how soon that would come to pass, King asked that all of his achievements be forgotten; he simply wanted to be remembered as one who led a life “committed to peace, justice and righteousness.”

During a recent visit to Beit Sahour, a Palestinian town just east of Bethlehem, I met Elise Aghazarian, a young woman professor of sociology at Bethlehem University. In short order, it was quite evident that I was in the presence of someone who, though relatively unknown, embodied the greatness described by King in his sermon. Aghazarian, who is of Armenian and Palestinian descent, spoke to our CODEPINK delegates at a forum sponsored by the Alternative Information Center (AIC). The AIC is a Palestinian-Israeli grassroots organization engaged in the dissemination of information, critical analysis and political advocacy. After the forum, she joined us for lunch.

Aghazarian impressed me with her comportment, intelligence, warmth and passionate interest in her studies. Upon learning of the crushing circumstances forced upon her by the Israeli occupation, I was moved by her resilience and obvious love of life.

This resilience and love of life flowed through the brief talk that she gave at the AIC forum. I have, as much as is possible, reconstructed her talk for those not fortunate enough to have been there upon its hearing and in her presence. Read the rest of this article »