Over at Danger Room, Noah Shachtman has a great post on how activists both inside and outside of Iran have taken what is now being dubbed the “Green Revolution” online, and the various ways that these cyberattacks could potentially backfire.

Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime’s propaganda sites with junk traffic. “NOTE to HACKERS – attack www.farhang.gov.ir – pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us,” Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn’t clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. “There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep, which seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating bogus requests for serving images,” notes Open Society Institute fellow Evgeny Morozov.

In both Iran and abroad, the cyberstrikes are being praised as a way to hit back against a regime that so blatantly engaged in voter fraud. But some observers warn that the network strikes could backfire – hurting the very protesters they’re meant to assist. Michael Roston is concerned that “it helps to excuse the Iranian regime’s own cyberwarfare.” Text-messaging networks and key opposition websites mysteriously went dark just before the election. Morozov worries that it “gives [the] hard-line government another reason to suspect ‘foreign intervention‘ – albeit via computer networks – into Iranian politics.”

Iran has one of the world’s most vibrant social media communities. That’s helping those of us outside Iran follow along as this revolution is being YouTubed, blogged, and Tweeted. But Iran’s network infrastructure there is relatively centralized. Which makes Internet access there inherently unstable. Programmer Robert Synott worries that if outside protesters pour too much DDOS traffic into Iran, carriers there “will simply pull the plug to protect the rest of their network.”

For the moment, however, those connections are still live. And activists are using them to mobilize mass protests in Tehran.

And if you’re simply interested in following the protests real-time on Twitter, rather than actually participating, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin writes:

Link to Twitter search for hashtag “IranElection.” Some Twitterers I’m following on this issue: @persiankiwi, @ johnperrybarlow , IranRiggedElect, @Pouyan.

As hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tehran yesterday in defiance of a government ban on demonstrations, I stumbled across this bizarre public service announcement that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence produced and broadcast last year to warn of an American conspiracy to nonviolently overthrow the government. In the video, as the New York Times explains:

…animated versions of John McCain and George Soros are shown meeting inside the White House to plot against Iran. The evil genius they confer with is an animated version of Gene Sharp, the political scientist whose theoretical work on nonviolent protest inspired the color revolutions of Eastern Europe.

While I have admittedly not delved deeply into the subject, I have yet to see any evidence that Mir Hussein Mousavi, the opposition candidate for president in Iran, is an American stooge. (There was, however, an interesting article in the Washington Post that questions the argument that the elections were in fact stolen.)

If I was to guess, the video was made and released for several reasons. First, there is no doubt genuine fear over recent U.S. efforts to influence Iran’s domestic affairs – which have been well documented. But, at the same time, it served to discredit homegrown activists who have been working to change the political landscape in Iran.

In his defense of Gene Sharp and others who promote nonviolent strategies and tactics around the world, Stephen Zunes wrote last summer:

Whenever governments are challenged by their own people, they tend to claim that those struggling for freedom and justice are traitors to the nation and agents of foreign enemies. In previous decades, opposition activists challenging U.S.-backed dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere were routinely labeled as “communist agents” and “Soviet sympathizers.” … Similarly, opposition activists in Iran, Belarus, Burma, and Zimbabwe have been labeled as “supporters of Western imperialism” and “American agents.”

[...]

In reality, the limited amount of financial support provided to opposition groups by the United States and other Western governments in recent years cannot cause a nonviolent liberal democratic revolution to take place any more than the limited Soviet financial and material support for leftist movements in previous decades could cause an armed socialist revolution to take place. As Marxists and others familiar with popular movements have long recognized, revolutions are the result of certain objective conditions. Indeed, no amount of money could force hundreds of thousands of people to leave their jobs, homes, schools, and families to face down heavily armed police and tanks and put their bodies on the line unless they had a sincere motivation to do so.

• Thousands of protesters clash with police in Iran over the weekend after President Ahmadinejad declares victory in an election that supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi say was rigged

• Protests continue in Peru after the Congress temporarily suspends the two controversial land-use laws that sparked the protests and civil disobedience over two months ago

• Railway workers in Finland begin a one-day walk-out today to protest a recent announcement that the state-owned Finnish Railways is planning on firing 1,500 workers

• More than 10,000 South Koreans demanded President Lee Myung-Bak resign at an anti-government rally on the 22nd anniversary of a pro-democracy uprising last week

• Bus drivers in China end strike over low wages and long hours as the municipal government agrees to negotiate a pay increase

• Employees of the South Africa Broadcasting Company (SABC) sat in at the chief executive’s office to demand a pay increase and the sacking of the SABC board

• Six thousand dock workers in the Ivory Coast vow to continue their strike until pay and working conditions are improved, although they have now begun to receive arrears payments

• Sunnis launched a nationwide strike in Pakistan on Saturday to protest the killing of the respected religious scholar Sarfraz Naeemi and five others in a suicide attack

Badshah Khan and Gandhi

What does it take to imagine that nonviolent approaches to conflict might be possible? Millennia-old religious traditions? A prophet? Common sense? Certainly the last place one would expect to find it: a race of hardened warriors in a hardened land, where a gun is part of the common attire and tribal feuds last for generations.

Yesterday evening, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened T.C. McLuhan’s 2008 film—decades in the making—The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace. It tells a story desperately in need of being told: the life of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the towering Pashtun leader who worked with Mohandas Gandhi in the nonviolent struggle to rid colonial India of British rule. After that, he worked to dissolve the incendiary lines of cultural and religious identity that marked Pakistan from the beginning. In all, he spent a third of his 98-year life in prison.

The Khudai Khidmatgar

Those interviewed in the film refer again and again to a “miracle”: that Khan, a product of the chaotic tribal region in present Pakistan and Afghanistan, could have become a “Badshah”—an “emperor”—of peace. And that he mobilized a hundred-thousand-strong nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgar, whose soldiers wore locally-spun red cloth, symbolizing their commitment to shed blood for the cause of peace and freedom. Amidst a supposed culture of killing, Khan came to realize that violence can only lead to defeat and the only victory worth having is a nonviolent one.

At the time, many assumed that Khan learned his methods from Gandhi. Or perhaps through his British schoolteacher, Reverend Wigram. No, Khan insisted, he had come to them on his own, through his Muslim faith and through the traditions of his people.

The most powerful parts of the film are those with the 82 Khudai Khidmatgar soldiers—5 of whom were women—that McLuhan managed to gather by traveling among remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan. All in their nineties at least, they spoke proudly of their service and of their devotion to the ideals that Khan taught. Khan was the son of a wealthy landowner, and he had a British education. But, by and large, not these men and women. Yet somehow, they fail to act out the barbarous stereotype that everyone—inside and out—seems to have about their society. Their witness reminds us, in fact, that traces of nonviolence are deeply ingrained in every human society, no matter how warlike. We forget this too easily when violence is all that titilates us enough to make headlines.

The Frontier Gandhi could hardly be more timely, yet it also runs the risk of being lost in the same senseless politics that kept its subject so marginalized and persecuted throughout his life. India-Pakistan tensions were palpable in the voices of those in the present trying to claim or disown Khan. Pakistan has erased his memory from the schoolbooks, and former President Pervez Musharraf even appears in the film, calling the Badshah a detractor from the Pakistani cause. For Indians, however, he represents a vindication for the Gandhian legacy which they claim. During the incredibly violent period of partition between India and Pakistan, which Khan and Gandhi opposed, the Khudai Khidmatgar stood guard over Hindu homes and property in Pakistan to protect them from Muslim mobs. While the film shows people on Pakistani streets for whom Khan’s name doesn’t ring a bell, a gaggle of Indian schoolgirls gives a glowing account of his accomplishments.

Worrying also is the appeal that this film might have for Western forces engaged in a war precisely where Khan lived and worked. Might promoting his story give rise to a more “passive” resistance? When Taliban fighters give up their guns to become meek peacemakers, one might imagine, it’ll be a whole lot easier to install a pro-Western nation state over the “lawless” tribal regions, ridding the universe of terrorism once and for all. Hamid Karzai, incidentally, praises Khan in the film. One can only hope that the convictions of Gandhi and Khan are true, that there is no weapon more powerful than nonviolent struggle, and that those who wield it, even against the American war machine, would truly and meaningfully win.

At his death in 1988, Badshah Khan showed one last time his mastery as an artist of human spirit. Though he died in a hospital in Pakistan, he insisted on being buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, across the Khyber Pass. His family objected, but he insisted. And so it was. Thousands poured over the border, with no papers or passports. The Afghan civil war went on hold for a few days. Business as usual—warfare as usual—stopped for a while so that people could celebrate the vision of a great man.

But there was a bomb. 15 people died, out of the hundreds of thousands who came in peace, in defiance of normalcy. There was a bomb, so the funeral was on the news.

As I mentioned the other day in my post about Obama’s Cairo speech, there’s a misguided notion that the Palestinians know nothing of nonviolence.  The Jewish Daily Forward, in an editorial it ran on Wednesday, is the latest to make this mistake:

For years, many have wondered why Palestinians have not adopted the tactics of nonviolence from the American civil rights movement, and here Obama gave public voice to that point, without qualification.

Meanwhile, according to the Palestinian News Network:

An Israeli military court is trying a leader of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance for organizing just that; nonviolent resistance to occupation.

Azmi Al Shoukhi is the General Secretary of the Palestinian Popular Committees and he, along with four fellow nonviolent organizers are being tried in Israeli military court. The arrests took place during the weekly nonviolent demonstrations in southern Bethlehem, cushioned between the killings of two Palestinian demonstrators in western Ramallah’s Bil’in and Na’lin.

[...]

He was arrested for participating in a nonviolent demonstration against the Israeli Wall and settlements in the West Bank.

This information was not, to the best of my knowledge, picked up by any western English-language media.

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the largest protest in NYC history. Upwards of one million people gathered on the Great Lawn in Central Park to rally against nuclear weapons while the UN held a Special Session on Disarmament. Two days later 1,600 demonstrators were involved in acts of civil disobedience at the consulates of five countries.

The Nation ran an editorial two weeks later heaping significant praise on the days’ events:

It was a good refresher course in the power of civil disobedience–deliberate, nonviolent violations of valid laws through which protesters invite punishment or injury to themselves in order to call attention to matters of overriding moral urgency. As carried out by the antinuclear protesters last week, the action was lawbreaking in the spirit of fidelity to law.

The following video does a good job of recapping the protest and the events that led up to it.

Nine Greenpeace activists in the Czech Republic scaled a smokestack at a coal-fueled power plant on Wednesday and unfurled a banner that read "Stop CO2." Four of the protesters spent the night on the power plantbefore descending.

• Upwards of 300 Palestinians and their international supporters, rallied near the Erez crossing in northern Gaza on Wednesday to call for the crossing to be opened, thus putting an end to the three year siege.

• Close to 6,000 people marched in Manila on Wednesday to protest any attempt to amend the constitution and scrap next year’s presidential election.

• South African Broadcasting Corporation employees staged a sit-in outside the CEO’s office to protest the corporation’s failure to implement a pay increase.

• 200  construction workers at an oil refinery in Lindsey, England staged a walk-out to protest job cuts.

• Bus drivers in China’s Bazhong City went on strike over low wages, but returned to their posts when the municipal government agreed to negotiate a pay increase.

• Several homeowners and members of a non profit organization protested outside Chase Bank in Howland, Ohio yesterday to demand that the financial institution help customers obtain affordable home loan resolutions.

• More than 600 prison guards in New South Wales Australia are going on strike to protest the planned privatization of one of the area’s prisons.

Last Thursday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to the town of Pikalyovo, where two days prior several hundred people blocked a federal highway for six hours to protest job cuts and unpaid wages. The purpose of his visit, however, was not to scold those who took to the streets, but to get the town’s sole factory – which had recently stopped production – running again.

In what sounds like a publicity stunt, Putin chastised Oleg Deripaska, a metals tycoon who used to be Russia’s wealthiest man, and the two other businessmen who jointly own the factory at a meeting that was broadcast on national television.

“You have made thousands of people hostage to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism — or maybe simply your trivial greed. Thousands of people. It’s totally unacceptable,” Putin angrily said during the meeting.

After threatening to nationalize the plant, which was privatized only five years ago, the owners were then forced to sign a contract that would reopen the facility. At the same time, $1.5 million in back wages was returned to the workers, many of whom are now living in desperate poverty.

Nonviolent action may spread in Russia, according to the New York Times, which is feeling the effects of the economic crisis:

As they celebrated, citizens here said they could never have attracted Mr. Putin’s attention if it were not for the protests.

[...]

Mikhail Viktorovich Shmakov, chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions, said Thursday that the protest mood was rising in “many one-factory towns,” among them the cities of Tsvetlogorsk and Baikalsk, where 42 employees of a paper mill have begun a hunger strike over unpaid wages.

Svetlana Antropova, the energetic head of Pikalevo’s trade union, was more blunt in her assessment. “Other trade unions should behave like us,” she said.

You had to see it to believe it: Hunter “Patch” Adams, MD, fully decked out in his clown outfit, and a retired Israeli military general standing together in an enormous pair of red silk underwear. Patch calls it his “underwear security,” a play upon “undercover security.” It’s an ingenious device which encourages egotistical disarmament. You can’t climb into Patch’s underwear if you are overly-defended.

“Being part of the fun” wasn’t a thought that occurred to me when I signed up for the CodePink humanitarian delegation to the Gaza Strip. Since our particular delegation was to enter Gaza by way of Israel, I suspected our chances of getting in were slim. Indeed we were denied permission and entry on three separate occasions. I had recently seen the pictures of Gaza taken by two previous CodePink delegations who had entered through Egypt. These pictures showed the massive destruction of homes, schools, ambulances, hospitals and factories. They also showed horrific human injury and death, not to mention the rotting carcasses of livestock and animals. So, what came to mind when I thought of Gaza was “death, destruction, starvation, crisis, etc.”

It was Nasser Ibrahim, the Director of the Palestinian-Israeli Alternative Information Center in Beit Sahour (West Bank) who provided a way for me to see the necessity of the work of clowning, with its love of joy and of fun, in the context of a disaster. According to Ibrahim, political resistance is an “effort to hold on to your humanity. It is the work of being human.”

Ibrahim’s insight certainly came to life during our three attempted crossings into Gaza. During our first attempt, we were joined by “Kassamba,” an Israeli anarchist band whose name roughly translates into “sound rockets,” and a troupe of clowns. Kassamba, Patch and the Israeli clowns had all of us dancing, laughing and smiling in an area that was filled with miles of fences, guard towers, military vehicles and M-16′s. When our passports were returned to us and our entry denied, Patch took the passports and started a game of poker with them just underneath the checkpoint booth, a move that had the Israeli guards looking on in amazement and amusement. When Patch reached out his hand to one of the guards, the guard reached back and clasped Patch’s hand with a strong grip. In this case, the hand that clasped the other had to first release his hand from a gun. “Score, humanity!” at least for this moment.

Our second and third efforts to cross were enriched by balloons, kites and flowers as well as by a three-hundred person strong demonstration by Gazans just across the crossing from us. Our kites and balloons embodied our soaring spirits and the desire to connect with the people of Gaza. Our flowers were placed in the fence of the Erez crossing along with handwritten notes. Prior to placing our notes in the fence, we were able to speak with a few of the Gazans who had made it through the crossing and who were on their way to the hospital. Be they elderly women or small children held by their mothers, the pallor of sickness was quite evident, particularly in the sweltering heat of the day. Most were suffering from heart ailments and were in need of serious medical attention. In order to get out of Gaza, where medical supplies are in short shrift and hospitals are barely functioning, they had to wade through an onerous bureaucratic permit process only to wait—if they were among the fortunate few—for hours before being allowed out. The festive atmosphere we had created in this desolate and inhuman space brought forth smiles and hugs from our Gazan friends. “Score, humanity! Once again.”

Though the gates to Gaza were not opened for us, the gates around my heart were opened. Far from being dispirited, I know that the roots of my peacemaking practice are stronger and more deeply rooted than ever before. Once again the words of Nasser Ibrahim came to mind: “Never give up!” I will not give up; I have only just begun.

• Thousands of Guatemalan campesinos blocked roads at seven or more sites on June 4 in a nationwide protest organized by the Committee for Campesino Development (Codeca) to demand that the government carry out agrarian reform

• Unionised workers at Ssangyong Motor Corp. in South Korea have vowed to continue their sit-in strike, rejecting a proposal from the management that it could reconsider layoffs if they disperse.

• Around 150 Polish parents and students occupy a Polish high school in Athens that Poland’s Education Ministry has decided to close

• Thousands of subway workers in London continue 48-hour strike over pay that has brought the Tube network to a halt

• Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans marched in front of the Capitol building in San Juan on June 5 to protest plans by Gov. Luis Fortuño to lay off about 30,000 government workers and to privatize some public services.

• Detainees at a federal immigration detention center in South Texas participate in a hunger strike

• A group of 300 almost exclusively black students at Berkeley High School in California protested two racist photos that were posted on Facebook