• A 150-strong group of Belgian firefighters sprayed foam from 20 trucks over a main road in central Brussels, blocking traffic in an effort to press for speedier promotions. Government buildings, including the Minister President’s office, were targeted.

• Police and a specialist evictions team began a major operation to end a six-month occupation of an opencast mine site in Scotland this morning by arresting 10 Climate Camp protesters chained to tree houses and make-shift forts. There are about 40 climate campaigners now occupying tunnels, tree houses, and homemade barricaded huts.

• About 2,000 photographers gathered in London over the weekend to protest stop and search methods by British police. The photographers say they’ve been unduly targeted by Section 44 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which was designed to give police greater powers to fight terrorism.

• More than 500 Australian websites are planning to take part in a day of action dubbed ‘The Great Australian Internet Blackout’ to protest the Federal Government’s proposed internet filter.

• Over 5,000 people converged on downtown Toronto Saturday afternoon to protest the prime minister’s decision to shut down the federal Parliament until after the Olympic Games.

• Hundreds of protesters in southern China donned masks to protest a planned incinerator plant, the latest grassroots initiative to target polluting projects in the region.

• Greek farmers have been blocking roads in Greece for more than a week to protest the government’s current agricultural policy, which threatens to put 50 thousand people employed in agriculture and livestock out of work.

After more than half a century of intransigent injustice, the Palestine/Israel “conflict”—or “disaster,” or whatever you want to call it—only seems to get worse. In the last few years, Israel has pummeled both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip with devastating impunity and, especially in the Strip, forcibly prevented its victims from making any kind of meaningful recovery. Meanwhile, pro-Palestinian activism in Israeli civil society is reportedly on the decline. But, in one of a series of events since returning from the partly-thwarted Gaza Freedom March, a group of activists spoke of their experiences on Thursday at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, telling a packed room of more than 200 people, “We are here to celebrate an achievement.”

The Egyptian government didn’t let most of the over 1,300 protesters from around the world into Gaza for the planned march, but those at Judson said that they witnessed a new stage in the emergence of a global movement, facilitated by the Internet, that may well be poised to end the international support that makes Israel’s policies possible. The linchpin of the movement, the Cairo Declaration of the Gaza Freedom March, was drafted by would-be marchers while they waited in Egypt. It includes commitments to:

Palestinian Self-Determination

Ending the Occupation

Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine

The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees

The Declaration also calls for comprehensive boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and the interests that enable its occupation. Read the rest of this article »

First off, thanks to everyone who has made this site a frequent read. We are now eight months old and the number of regular visitors keeps increasing, which makes us all the more committed to providing new content every day. We’ve published nearly 400 posts and we keep meeting more and more people who want to contribute content.

All this work and support has really helped us hone our vision. So, recently, we decided it was time to update our About page with a clearer description of the site, as well as add several new pages to better connect with readers and expand our network.

We now have Writer’s Guidelines for those interesting in becoming contributors, a Classroom Guide for teachers and professors, and an Internship Announcement for students, recent grads, or young journalists interested in working with us. So please look them over and let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. talk before a press conference in New York City in 1962.

Writing online for Sports Illustrated this week on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, columnist Dave Zirin reminds readers that Dr. King, while perhaps not the greatest athlete himself, nonetheless embraced sports as an effective and serious platform from which to promote civil rights.  “Dr. King,” Zirin writes, “was involved in three of history’s most critical collisions of sports and politics”—Jackie Robinson’s integration of modern baseball in 1947; Muhammad Ali’s struggle against the Vietnam War and the draft board in the late 1960s; and the protests promulgated by Harry Edwards and his Olympic Project for Human Rights at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics.

Dr. King, argues Zirin, embraced a broad view of sports, correctly seeing them as a powerful medium by which to convey his message.  Dr. King didn’t see “athletes” as a distinct subset of the population, that is, as mere performers who daily displayed wondrous feats of physical prowess for everyone to enjoy.  Rather, athletes were human beings who happened to be involved in sports.  In other words, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali drew their principal identities from their humanity, not from their idiosyncratic physical talent.  It is a concept that we frequently seem to forget.

Too often today, an athlete’s visibility determines how he will be treated and accepted in society.  It was widely speculated, for example, that ex-New York Giant Plaxico Burress received a harsh, two-year prison sentence for attempted weapons possession in the second degree, because New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to make an example of the Super Bowl XLII hero.  Gilbert Arenas, erstwhile All-Star guard for the N.B.A.’s Washington Wizards, is currently embroiled in his own gun-possession brouhaha and some expect the D.C. courts to use his sentence (to be handed down on March 26) as an opportunity to send society a message similar to the one channeled through Burress.  Granted, these men did in fact willfully break the law and place themselves in legal jeopardy, and illegally possessing firearms isn’t strictly a basic Second Amendment rights issue.  Still, the notion that one’s stardom—and subsequent visibility—as a star athlete makes one’s legal situation more juridically noteworthy—and therefore riper for a harsh punishment—is ludicrous and patently unfair.

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that a person was a man before he was a sportsman, and Zirin quotes Dr. King’s invocation of Ali to make this point: “Like Muhammad Ali puts it,” he said in 1967, “we are all–Black and Brown and poor–victims of the same system of oppression.”  That same venal system of oppression must today be transformed into the “same system of fairness and tolerance” in which one’ status as an athlete doesn’t trump his status as a person.  If we are to eliminate prejudice based on (as is commonly cited) “race, color, creed, religion, national origin, citizenship, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, or military status,” then we also need to eliminate “fame”-based discrimination as well.

Civil rights—and unbiased jurisprudence—need to apply to everyone equally, not more harshly to others because we think their status as athlete lends more gravitas to their respective case.  Last time I checked, Lady Justice wore a robe and carried a scale, not a zebra-suit and a whistle.

• Activists with Witness Against Torture gathered yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Capitol to protest the voided deadline President Obama set for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo. Some held banners on the Capitol steps reading “Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” while others performed a “memorial service” for the three detainees whose deaths were covered up by the military. 42 were arrested.

• About 500 villagers from the Afghan province of Ghanzi chanted slogans against the United States and the Afghan government as they carried the wooden coffins of four recently slain civilians by NATO forces to the provincial capital.

• Three environmentalists in West Virginia set up tree-top platforms 60-feet in the air Thursday morning to protest a mountaintop removal blast site run by Masset Energy.

• About 100 inmates at the Varick Federal Detention Center in Lower Manhattan refused to go to the mess hall on Tuesday morning and gave guards a flier declaring they were on a hunger strike to protest detention policies and practices.

• 1,200 employees at the Indian unit of mobile handset maker Nokia Corp. in Mumbai went on strike yesterday to protest the suspension of some of their colleagues.

• Thousands of French public sector workers went on strike yesterday and took part in demonstrations across the country to protest plans for job and spending cuts.

• Hundreds of ship builders went on strike yesterday to protest 370 layoffs and the outsourcing of some operations at STX Finland’s shipyard in southwestern Finland.

• Several hundred UC Berkeley staff, students, and faculty held a noon rally on Wednesday to protest UC administration plans to privatize bus service at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 14 were arrested after they linked hands and surrounded a shuttle bus.

An Australian peace activist named Sheik Haron (pictured to the right) was recently charged with writing hateful letters to families of fallen soldiers. Jarrod McKenna reflects on this incident as a reminder to activists to “love the enemy”:

The world is ready for an activism which loves its enemies. As A.J. Muste put it, “There is no way to peace — peace is the way.” The early Christians were called “people of the Way” because they lived the way of Jesus. If the sharing of our faith is to have any integrity, Christians who say “Jesus is the Way” must embody “the Way of Jesus.” The same is true of peace activists (Christian or otherwise). As Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would often say, “Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

As a human being living in a time of tremendous challenge to the earth’s resources, I am quick to apply this message to the issue of sustainability. According to nonviolent principles, just as we love the soldiers and their families, we must also love those who pollute and degrade the earth. When we stand up for the earth, we might remember that most of us have polluted, and still pollute, in some ways, such as fossil fuel transport, using plastics, and heating our homes.

At this time, quickly and urgently, we are needed to build systems in which we can coexist with each other and with the earth. Sustainability is a form of peace–peace for our biosphere. Along the way to that lofty goal, when we refuse the pollution, still we may love the polluter. That love may be motivated by the vision of the reconciliation when we all will live together in peace on a healthy earth.

Residents of At-Tuwani Village block the path of an Israeli military jeep.

Every time I return home after a vigil, I am asked, “How was it?” How does one answer? We were present? Ignored? Warmly greeted? Does it matter? The war goes on. Guantánamo remains open. Lies continue. We show up. We pray. We walk. So to attempt to describe my voyage with a Christian Peacemaking Team (CPT) delegation to Palestine/Israel in late November is more difficult to answer than the journey itself.

I am blessed to have been led to this step by Catholic Workers and very dear friends. My desire to join a delegation elsewhere was rerouted by the suggestion that I should go to Palestine. As I have related many times, when Anne Montgomery—an 80-year-old nun who travels the world taking part in nonviolent direct actions—says go to Palestine, you go. I went.

For 11 days, our delegation of seven—three women and four men, including a Briton, two Germans, a Canadian, and three Americans—jumped in and out of cabs, buses, hiked hills, climbed mountains, slept in hostels, caves, tents, met with lawyers, activists, shepherds, soldiers, teachers, settlers, and NGO human rights groups. We talked, vigiled, prayed. We learned. We tried to learn. For me, the more I heard, the more confused I became. I felt in the middle of a sudden death battle in which neither side would give in. But I also felt completely at home, welcomed.

In Hebron, I went through a checkpoint. I showed my passport, as instructed and walked on. Then I heard the Israeli soldier manning the post call. I was sure he was yelling at me, but I continued. He called again, in Hebrew. I turned and he asked, “What state?” I answered and he waved me on. But it made me aware that if one does not speak the language of the occupier, one can most certainly be put in harm’s way.

Read the rest of this article »

A New Yorker interview with Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, revealed that anti-whaling protesters have acquired the same type of non-lethal weapons used against them by Japanese whalers:

WATSON: …The Shonan Maru No. 2 actually attacked the Steve Irwin on three different occasions, using LRADs (Long Range Acoustical Devices) and water cannons.

KHATCHADOURIAN: LRADs are non-lethal weapons that have been used to disperse protesters, by soldiers in Iraq, and by ships trying to ward off pirates. They project high-decibel audio waves at their targets. Will you be getting one, too?

WATSON: We have one. We just have not used it—yet.

KHATCHADOURIAN: What gadgetry are you using?

WATSON: We have photonic disrupters to disorient the harpooners. They are lasers designed not to cause damage, but to blind temporarily, like flashbulbs. We have a few other tricks we have not used yet, and we continue to hit them with our non-toxic, biodegradable, organic stink bombs.

Last week, I asked if the Sea Shepherd’s aggressive anti-whaling tactics, which are known to include property damage, could still be considered nonviolent. But this new information about their non-lethal arms cache makes their position on violence rather clear and raises many new questions as well.

Read the rest of this article »

In Phoenix, more than 20,000 people marched on Saturday to protest the indiscriminate attacks and race-based raids conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against residents of Maricopa County. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

• On Sunday, more than 25,000 people took to streets in protest against the government’s labor policies when the Confederation of Turkish Labor Unions, or Türk-İş, staged a wide-ranging demonstration called “Democracy and Rights for Livelihood, Peace and Freedom.”

• A group of Greenpeace activists interrupted a speech by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in Vancouver on Friday when several protesters stood up and began chanting loudly against his stance on Canada’s oilsands.

• More than 7,000 workers at steel giant ArcelorMittal’s plant in Algeria will intensify a strike aimed at forcing the management to revamp the ageing El Hadjar complex. Workers went on strike on Tuesday to protest the planned closure of the coking plant, which employs 320 people.

• Worker blockades of the Belgian breweries of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which began after the world’s largest beer maker announced it planned to cut 263 jobs out of its 2,700 Belgian workforce, were set to continue into a second week after the collapse of mediated talks last Thursday.

• Monday marked the third day of a hunger strike by students demanding housing for homeless tsunami survivors in West Aceh district in Indonesia.

• Jordanian prisoners in Iraq, most of whom are university students, drivers and traders, have embarked on an open hunger strike to press for their release.

• Hundreds of Proshika employees in Bangladesh staged a sit-in in front of their head office for the fifth consecutive day on Saturday and also held a protest march against police barring them from entering the building in the city’s Mirpur.

• In India, leaders of all-party Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Telangana Saturday began a hunger strike to demand that the central government immediately initiate the process for formation of the state.

As the crisis in Haiti unfolds, news reports first anticipated and then confirmed the anxiety of many on the ground: that a hamstrung or decimated police force would lead to violence and looting. There are numerous reports of looters wielding knifes, machetes and guns and mobs killing suspected looters as the rag tag police force tries to reestablish order.

These might be uncomfortable facts for those of us who believe in nonviolence. Pessimists and so-called realists find a ready-made narrative for such events in Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of war. For them, what is happening in Haiti is the enduring natural fact that without fear of government people will take the opportunity to exploit and destroy one another. Only the threat of violence by a functioning police force keeps the worst impulses of human beings in check.

And even if you’re not a Hobbesian, there’s room for despair and cynicism. David Brooks took the opportunity to isolate the backwardness of Haitian culture (the first to end slavery in the Western Hemisphere), as the reason their infrastructure was so vulnerable to earthquakes. Pat Robertson decided it was a good time to chastise Haitians for throwing off the French. Even American assistance, given our history of pernicious meddling in the country and our conspicuous prioritizing of American lives above the lives of Haitians might seem self-serving.

Yet the vast majority of people in Haiti responded to the earthquake with the apparently just as natural of an impulse to help one another. People immediately began to risk their own lives to rescue people trapped under rubble. Previously intractable religious differences instantly melted away. In a remarkable spontaneous protest, Haitians in Port-au-Prince piled up bodies as roadblocks in a macabre protest of the delay in aid. Under the headline “Looting Flares Where Authority Breaks Down” the New York Times reported that “given the conditions, it was all the more remarkable that a spirit of cooperation and fortitude prevailed nearly everywhere else, as people joined together to carry corpses, erect shelters and share what food they could find.”

Just as remarkably, a small portion of the United States military – the same institution that so brutally occupied Haiti for two decades in the early part of the last century – has been temporarily repurposed to deliver aid that will undoubtedly save many thousands of lives. Ordinary Americans and people all over the world immediately responded with millions in donations.

In response to the argument that human history is rife with violence, Gandhi remarked that the force of nonviolence is so common that every instance of it cannot be remarked upon. Yet “thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force.” No doubt this force is the dominant one in Haiti at the moment as it sustains the vast majority of those who have survived – and will save many more lives in the coming days.

To donate to Partners In Health, which has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years, click here.