When Nadav Weinberg, a soldier who had served with the Israeli Defense Forces, spoke at Arizona State University last week, the room was filled with protesters. Rather than disrupt his speech, which is often the tactic taken at such events, the demonstrators found a much more powerful way to voice their dissent: silence.
After taking their seats, the demonstrators took off their jackets to reveal red t-shirts with signs bearing the names, ages and dates that civilians were killed by Israeli troops. They then took red tape and covered their mouths with it.
Folks in the back of the room held a sign that read: “Giving Voice to Civilians Silenced by IDF Policy.” (I like the emphasis on policy rather than on the individuals within the military, which I think is always an important distinction for nonviolent activists to make.)
Part way through Weinberg’s speech, the group proceeded to stand up and slowly walk out of the room, leaving it close to empty.
A similar action took place at the University of Michigan recently, which is a hopeful sign that IDF soldiers will not be able to share their viewpoints on American campuses uncontested. (h/t Mondoweiss)
We humans can’t help but empathize. It’s in our DNA. And new research shows that we are evolving to empathize on a global level. This is particularly encouraging, as economist Jeremy Rifkin points out in the above video, because it may be the key to our salvation from such things as war and environmental destruction.
Rifkin is the founder of The Foundation on Economic Trends and together with the Royal Society of Arts and Cognitive Media, he created this great illustrated video that explains how emotion has evolved over time. (h/t Yes! Magazine)
Plural + is a film festival organized by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) that honors short videos (1-5 minutes long) made by young people, from ages 9 to 25, that focus on issues relating to migration, diversity and peace.
Once we have announced the recipient of our award, we will be featuring the film on this site and promoting it to other online publications.
The awards ceremony will be on Nov. 12, 2010 from 6-8 p.m. at the Paley Center for Media in New York (25 West 52nd St.).
If you’re in area and would like to attend, tickets are free but reservations are mandatory. Please RSVP at: plural@unaoc.org. I hope to see you there!
Over a period of approximately 92 hours and 26 minutes the CASTOR nuclear waste transport in Germany faced more resistance and peaceful direct action from the local population and their supporters than ever before.
Two female animal rights activists were detained on Tuesday for staging a near-naked protest near the heavily-guarded venue of this week’s G20 summit in South Korea.
A number of student groups in Indonesia staged demonstrations protest President Barack Obama’s Tuesday visit to the country, demanding that the government should stop bowing to America’s foreign policies.
Hundreds of Iraqi Christians took to downtown Chicago streets yesterday to protest the October 31st massacre that killed 58 people at a Catholic church in Iraq.
About 200 employees from seven Chinese ad reselling companies have been protesting the termination of their contracts outside Google’s offices in Shanghai this week. About 40 of those participating have gone on a hunger strike that will last until the group’s grievances are resolved.
A Baltimore woman who is losing her home started a hunger strike on Monday morning to draw attention to the national foreclosure crisis and the difficulty borrowers face when they try to modify their mortgages.
Here is that clip of Jasmine Faustino talking about the campaign that she launched on our site to move George W. Bush’s new book to its rightful place in bookstores on RT (Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel) last night!
We also had an article about the action in the Guardian this morning and Jasmine was just interviewed on the BBC’s World Have Your Say radio program. Listen here:
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Word is also spreading around Twitter, thanks in part to Michael Moore and many others, who are now promoting the effort.
While hundreds have already signed up to take part in this fun protest, we need many more people to participate and more pics of the book after it has been correctly reshelved. Please respond to the invite, take part in the action, post a picture to the Wall of our Facebook event page as soon as possible, and spread the word!
UPDATE 11/10:
We got a mention in the headlines today over at Democracy Now! Jump to the 7:00 minute mark to see:
Since book protests are all the rage right now, here’s another one that started last week, as reported by The Guardian:
Authors found themselves in the firing line this week as fans furious at sudden rises in Amazon’s Kindle prices protested by giving their books one-star reviews on the retailer’s website.
Iain Banks, Stephen King, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Buchan and Michael McIntyre were among those authors whose books were given new, low-ranking reviews on the basis of their Kindle ebook price, as part of a concerted attempt by readers to voice their displeasure.
Earlier this week, Amazon.co.uk was forced to accept new commercial terms from big publishers Penguin, Hachette and HarperCollins, who have switched to the “agency model” for their ebooks. On this model it is publishers, not retailers, who set the selling price.
Amazon’s own discounts disappeared from ebooks overnight. Many digital editions now cost the same as printed books, with some costing more.
Readers responded angrily. Among more than 600 comments on the Kindle forum at Amazon.co.uk were many accusing the publishers of greed.
As I understand it, the big publishers are worried that their hardback prices will be undercut by ebooks, so they’ve raised the price of ebooks to a point that no longer makes them cost effective. It makes total sense that ebook readers would be upset by this. People expect digital copies to be cheaper. It simply doesn’t make sense to pay the hardback price when you are getting less.
At the same time, does giving bad reviews make sense as a form of protest? Who does it affect? On the one hand, publishers surely don’t like seeing their books get bad reviews, as it no doubt hurts sales. On the other hand, it hurts readers by invalidating the user-review system, which is a helpful tool for consumers. I personally rely more on user reviews than company product descriptions to sell me on certain products.
Perhaps a boycott would make better sense here. There is actually a precedent for that type of action in the world of ebooks. Last year, Kindle owners protested e-books that cost more than $9.99 by using Amazon’s tagging system and slapping books with a special “9 99 boycott” tag. In effect, this was telling publishers more explicitly (and without harming the integrity of the book itself), “I’d read this if didn’t cost so much.”
On Saturday, President Obama paid a visit to Gandhi’s home during his first trip to India. In his speech before the Indian Parliament, he reiterated that Gandhi, whose images and quotations can now be found in the White House, is one of his personal heroes.
“Throughout my life, including my work as a young man on behalf of the urban poor,” Obama said, “I’ve always found inspiration in the life of Gandhiji and his simple and profound lesson to be the change we seek in the world.”
He then quoted Martin Luther King, who “called Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance ‘the only logical and moral approach’ in the struggle for justice and progress.”
Unfortunately, Obama clearly does not share that sentiment with King or Gandhi, despite his claims to the contrary. As the New York Timesnoted, this “paradox” could be seen in the fact in addition to celebrating Gandhi, Obama was “also selling military transport planes and bringing along 200 American business leaders.”
As author Vijay Prashad said in his interview with Democracy Now! yesterday, “already it seems some arms deals have been signed. One arms deal will perhaps be signed at the end of the year, and that is for 126 jet fighters. That deal will be about $10 billion.”
Moreover, while Obama was touring Gandhi’s homeland, the Afghan war raged on and in neighboring Pakistan, a pair of US drone strikes killed 14 people. So much for nonviolent resistance being the only logical and moral way forward I guess.
Waging Nonviolence contributor Jasmine Faustino is going to appear on RT (Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel) at 6:30 tonight to talk about the Move Bush’s Book Where It Belongs campaign. Check your cable provider to see if you get RT (note to our NYC readers, it’s channel 135 on Time Warner Cable). If not, the show can be streamed live from their website. Go Jasmine!
Thousands of protesters in France and Germany have attempted to block a train carrying nuclear waste. Some protesters chained themselves to the train tracks while others drove trucks on to the tracks. Hundreds of protesters have been detained.
Hundreds of gay and lesbians protested the Church’s position on gay marriage by kissing publicly as the pope passed by on his way to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona on Sunday.
In Oakland, police arrested 152 protesters who streamed through the streets Friday after a white ex-transit officer received the minimum two-year prison sentence for fatally shooting an unarmed black man on a California train platform two years ago.
A group of 400 survivors of the Bhopal disaster have been protesting Obama’s visit to India. In addition, the cotton growers of Vidarbha, who are suffering immensely due to the prevailing agrarian crisis, staged candlelight protests ahead of US President Barack Obama’s India visit on Friday.
Inhabitants of Jaftelk village, Jericho district, in the Jordan Valley organized a protest sit-in on Saturday with the participation of foreign solidarity activists against Israeli settlement activity.
On Tuesday, November 9, George Bush’s memoir Decision Points comes out in bookstores around the country. Taking a cue from a movement in Britain that called for people to subversively move Tony Blair’s recently published memoir, A Journey, to the Crime section of bookstores, Waging Nonviolence is asking that in honor of the release of the Bush memoir, people reshelve Decision Points to the part of the bookstore where it really belongs: Crime.
In Bush’s upcoming memoir he defends several of the criminal policies that he implemented during his time in office, including the invasion of Iraq and the use of waterboarding.
As another fun act of subversion, back in April the Huffington Post asked readers to send in their new and improved Photoshopped Decision Points covers. The one above was my personal favorite.
Here’s your chance to voice your opinion on what you think about George Bush’s presidential recollections. Is it a crime, humor, horror, dark fantasy? Whatever your opinion, go out on Tuesday and put Bush in his right place.
On Saturday, President Obama paid a visit to Gandhi’s home during his first trip to India. In his 
On Tuesday, November 9, George Bush’s memoir Decision Points comes out in bookstores around the country. Taking a cue from