• Anti-BP protesters from Greenpeace disrupted a speech by the company’s chief of staff at a major oil conference in London yesterday, urging the company to change its ways following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

• Members of an indefinite vigil held in front of the Massachusetts State House have reached their 17th day of protest against the anti-immigrant amendments added to the budget bill.

• More than 100 gay rights protesters marched in Toronto on Saturday to demand greater rights for all minority populations marginalized because of their gender, sexuality or socioeconomic status.

• Students and staff at 100 colleges and universities in Great Britain are protesting funding cuts that could keep 200,000 people out of universities next year.

• Students at the University of Puerto Rico voted to end their two-month strike against massive budget cuts on Monday after agreeing to a package with the administration that includes an extension of tuition waivers, the cancellation of a fee that would have drastically raised education costs, a commitment not to arbitrarily punish strike participants, and rejection of school privatization plans.

• Israeli soldiers injured several protesters on Sunday in an attack on a nonviolent demonstration against illegal settlements and the construction of the Israeli separation wall in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem.

• 12,000 Minnesota nurses voted to hold an open-ended strike on Monday following retaliation from employers after a one-day strike on June 10.

It seems those noisy buzzing plastic trumpets (known as vuvuzelas) that are being blown incessantly at the World Cup have attracted the attention of French union workers looking for a way to make this week’s planned protests against government austerity measures more boisterous. According to Reuters, the chief executive of France’s exclusive importer of vuvuzelas has been flooded with thousands of orders in recent days, “many from unionists requesting speedy delivery.”

On the one hand this could be a great idea, incorporating what’s clearly become a new way for a group of people to completely dominate an event. On the other hand, there is evidence that this plastic noise trinket can cause hearing damage, which is not a good way for any activist to try and make a point. As always, we’ll let the French be our test market when it comes to protesting, since they love it so much.

Though the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder died in 1997, new writings of his continue to appear in print. Just released (hat tip to Danny Postel) is a new collection of his work on the connections between pacifism and epistemology—the study of knowledge, of how we know, believe, and understand.

The two subjects might appear to have only a tendentious tie. What does nonviolence have to do with knowledge? For the beginning of an answer, one need go no farther than Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, truth-force. Truth, he taught, is the method and medium of nonviolent force. But then further questions arise. What do we mean by truth, and where does it come from? How do we recognize it?

For the rest of an answer, this book seems like an excellent place to start:

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

Learn more and order the book at Wipf and Stock Publishers. Also check out another Yoder publication from Baylor University Press this year, Nonviolence: A Brief History.

Inspired by Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s call to be prepared to bear significant costs for peacemaking, my small group of antiwar activists in Melbourne, Australia decided to “up the ante” and try some actions that might be potentially more costly than anything we had done before resisting the war in Afghanistan. This was back in October 2009.

We spent months researching Afghanistan—the geography and politics, as well as the war. We also spent some time placing these events in the context of our Christian faith, asking some hard questions about our activism: were we too focused on symbolism and not enough on effectiveness? Were we too focused on effectiveness and not enough on means?

This culminated in our action at Swan Island, a highly secretive military base in southern Victoria, Australia, near the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. The island also houses a yacht club and public golf course, all accessible via a bridge which is guarded during the day and locked at night. The base itself provides training for Australia’s elite SAS troops, who are playing most of our combat role in Afghanistan, as well as ASIS, or Australian Secret Intelligence Service (our equivalent of the CIA in the US). We figured if we could disrupt the activities of this base, we could probably disrupt some of the preparation for and implementation of the war.

So in the early hours of March 31 (the week before Easter) Jacob Bolton, Jessica Morrison, Simon Reeves and myself went to Queenscliff and swam the short distance to Swan Island.

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• Hundreds of demonstrators, condemning Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, picketed at the Port of Oakland on Sunday and may have prevented an Israeli cargo ship from unloading for the day.

• Some 5,000 people protested in the capital of Kosovo on Friday against a government decision last month to ban Muslim head scarves in public schools.

• More than 80 activists of the opposition Popular Front Party in Baku, Azerbaikan were detained in a rally on Saturday for protesting government restrictions on freedom of assembly in preparation for upcoming elections.

• About 100 rallied in Media, Pennsylvania on Thursday to demand that policy makers increase business taxes to help close the state budget gap, rather than cutting education and social services.

• Dozens of Palestinian residents from the village of Al-Ma’asara protested the confiscation of their land caused by the construction of the Israeli separation wall on Friday.

• Dozens protested outside City Hall in New York City Thursday in a rally to save New York’s public libraries from budget cuts. The mayor’s proposed budget calls for almost $75 million in cuts to city libraries.

• More than 75 bicyclists paraded through Madison, WI on Saturday, most starting out naked but ending up clothed, in order to bring attention to the causes of energy independence and body acceptance.

• Egyptian security forces beat and arrested dozens of protesters on Sunday when they attempted to march through downtown Cairo in the latest demonstration against police brutality following the death of a young man earlier this month.

As a New Zealander, I was both delighted and concerned to discover that my country is considered the most peaceful in the world by the 2010 Global Peace Index (GPI), a publication developed by an international panel of peace experts in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit and published by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

On one hand, I think the world needs initiatives like this. The study’s founder, Steve Killelea calls the GPI “a wake-up call for leaders around the globe”, and I hope he is right. But, given the factors it examines—such as levels of violence and crime within a country, plus military expenditure and wars—the GPI unfortunately glosses over some interesting realities.

First, if you do believe peace can be achieved at the end of a gun, it unfairly vilifies countries like the United States who, though they account for 54 percent of global military spending, tend to use this spending to ensure the “peace” of their allies and neighbors. So countries sheltering under the military wings of a world power can happily slide up the index by letting the US (and the other top spenders like Russia, the UK, France and China) slide down.

Being a strong believer in nonviolent solutions to conflict resolution, I commend the GPI for bringing people’s attention to the scale of military spending by these countries. Most of the time I think what the US would call “ensuring peace, freedom and stability,” is just another name for exploitation and empire-building. Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of this so-called “peace” are never challenged about their complicity in global conflict.

A New Zealand soldier with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Province on July 8, 2008.

And complicit we are.

The New Zealand government sent troops to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks. They have been there ever since. According to Jonathan Steele of The Guardian between 20,000 and 49,600 people may have died of the consequences of the invasion. It is estimated that in Afghanistan there are 1.5 million suffering from immediate starvation, as well as 7.5 million suffering as a result of the country’s dire situation.

No matter. The NZ government uses rhetoric about “security” and “fighting terrorism” as a justification for the continued involvement of the NZDF (Defense Force). The language used by the government creates the image of altruistic action by the military. Soldiers are “peacekeepers” sent to do “reconstruction”—which obscures the reality that the Afghani government was installed by the US for economic reasons. It was only after the media revealed that the NZSAS (Special Air Service) was there that the government admitted to their involvement. They loudly trumpet the “reconstruction team” as “humanitarian aid” when in fact they are there to prop up the US military occupation.

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Twenty-four Witness Against Torture activists were acquitted of an Unlawful Assembly charge in D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday, June 16th.   Back in January, while twenty-eight jumpsuit-clad activists occupied the steps of the Capitol building, fourteen others broke off from a tour inside the Rotunda and performed a memorial service for three Guantánamo deaths.

Judge Canan’s courtroom was crammed with pro-se co-defendants, supporters, and legal advisors. Bill Quigley, attorney advisor and Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, poignantly orated the motion to argue the activists’ defense of international law and necessity.  Drawing on stories of mistreatment and continued detention of over one hundred men in Guantánamo, Quigley argued that no further legal recourse is available to address the injustice of U.S. policies of torture.

While Judge Canan denied the defense request, he acquitted the twenty-four outright by way of a technicality – the government wasn’t able to argue their breaching of the peace.

The anti-torture activists cheered.

However, a year and a half after Obama’s issued promise to close the detention facility, 181 men still languish there, every day fading further away from their families and lives on the outside.  Many are facing their eighth year of illegal detention.  Many more, an estimated seven hundred men, are being held by the U.S. at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.  And now, after the action, the subsequent arrest, thirty-plus hours in a D.C. Central holding cell, and almost five months of trial preparation, I can’t help but wonder what other means we have to hold the Obama Administration accountable for this immoral disaster.

Certainly we can’t stop thinking of creative, controversial strategies to confront the decision-makers.  We can’t give up on efforts to continue to educate.  Human rights groups and solidarity networks throughout the world maintain their organizing to bring awareness to these crimes.  But beyond that, I’m at a loss as to the means necessary to ensure our Muslim brothers and sisters, despite their actions, will not be rendered, tortured, and held indefinitely in my name.

Still, we must revel in our small victories. “With his decision”, said Quigley following the acquittal, “the judge validated the effort of the demonstrators to condemn the ongoing crime of indefinite detention at Guantánamo.”  Surely, this struggle continues.

• Hundreds of Los Angeles students at Lawndale High School walked out of class Wednesday to protest a controversial decision to transfer the school’s top teachers to a neighboring school.

• Around 3,000 South Africans marched in Durban Wednesday to denounce FIFA and their government for spending 33 billion rands (4.3 billion USD) in preparation for the World Cup while millions live in poverty. Also, dozens of security workers walked off the job hours before the Brazil-North Korea soccer match Tuesday to over a pay dispute.

• West Virgina residents opposed to mountaintop removal mining rallied at the capitol in Charleston on Tuesday. The group, which calls itself  ‘Appalachia Rising’ is attempting to rally Appalachian residents opposed to mountaintop removal to join in a mass demonstration set for Sept. 27 in Washington.

• Protesters gathered outside the office of U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) on Wednesday to demand that Perriello vote against allocating an additional $33.5 billion to fund the war in Afghanistan.

• About a dozen activists rallied on Wednesday in Samara, in central Russia to protest a new law which they say will lead to the commercialization of education in their country.

• In Nepal, indigenous groups, with the backing of  several opposition parties have promised to launch a strong protest movement against the construction a controversial 269 metre dam if surveying and evacuations of villagers go forward. The Sapta Kosi Multipurpose Project dam will submerge at least 50 Nepalese villages.

• Fourteen people were arrested in Denver on Tuesday during an immigration rights protest for kneeling and blocking traffic in front of the Federal Court House.

The New York Times reports:

Under intense international pressure after its commandos killed nine activists aboard an aid flotilla trying to breach its blockade of Gaza last month, Israel on Thursday announced what it called “adjustments” in its policy, promising to ease the entry of civilian goods by land while maintaining its naval blockade.

The announcement, which offered few details, said that the security cabinet had decided to “liberalize the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza” and to expand the inflow of construction materials for civilian projects that are under international supervision.

Israel has still barely budged on the Gaza blockade since the Freedom Flotilla incident, but they are at least beginning to recognize that their legitimacy among the international community in the future depends not on accusing activists of terrorism but on changing their profoundly repressive policies toward Palestinians. To the extent that the actions of the activists have cast light not on themselves and on the Mavi Marmara disaster but on the conditions that are undermining the prospects of peace, they are successful. The more they eschew violent resistance in the future, the more powerful their message will be.

Librarians and bibliophiles alike held a 24-hour read-in marathon on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza this past weekend. The action brought 200 volunteer readers together to help raise awareness to the proposed $37 million budget cut to New York’s public libraries, which would result in the closing of at least 10 branches, a reduction in hours of operation (libraries would be open only 4 days a week as opposed to the average of 6 or 7), as well as lay offs of over 700 librarians.

The read-in featured everything from Emma Goldman to James Baldwin, Gossip Girl and Albert Camus, serving as a great testimony of the wide range of library patrons these cuts will affect. As the New York Times reported:

“In the Great Depression, the New York public libraries were kept open seven days a week,” said Aliqae Geraci, a librarian in Queens and a coordinator of the event. “It is a huge support system for the unemployed and the transient”

[…]

The organizers are hoping the City Council will restore financing to avoid the cuts, which they say will particularly hurt the city’s less fortunate, who depend on libraries for Internet access and employment help.

Another large group these measures will affect is children and parents. Libraries offer numerous free programs for literacy, homework help, and after-school activities. Along with school budget cuts which will result in the closure of several schools and teacher layoffs, kids will surely suffer terrible consequences from these actions.

Thanks to websites like Don’t Close the Book on Libraries and Save NYC Libraries, as well as entertaining actions like the Ghostbusters reenactment that Improv Everywhere staged, NYPL has raised over $120,000 in addition to receiving over 100,000 letters of support. But there’s still more work to be done! If you want to help, today (June 17, 2010) is Call In Action Day. If you’re in the New York City area, call 311 (outside New York call (212) 639-9675) and tell them why you think we should continue to fund our libraries.