On Monday, a close friend of Waging Nonviolence, Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Stierle, was arrested while meditating at Oscar Grant Plaza during the early morning raid on Occupy Oakland. (Several moving photos of his arrest can be seen here.) As a petition on Change.org explains:

He is currently being held by the Oakland Police Department on $10,000 bail and they plan to turn him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for immediate deportation. He could be sent to Arizona as soon as tommorrow morning. That means we need to act now!

On Facebook, Leenie Venet offers this update:

Pancho is now at Santa Rita in Dublin, CA.  His arraignment for the civil disobedience charges has been fast tracked to Wed. 11/16/11 at 9:00 AM in Room 107 at the  WILEY W. MANUEL COURTHOUSE.  There is a possibility that he will  be transferred after this hearing to the custody of the immigration officials. Please attend this hearing and show your support for Pancho Ramos Stierle!!

Before he goes to court later this morning, please read and sign the petition to free Pancho, which can be found here. An email from Janine Schwab at the American Friends Service Committee says that you can also:

call the following federal officials NOW and ask them to ask Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release (or lift) the immigration hold on him. Barbara Lee 510-763-0370. Nancy Pelosi 415-556-4862. Diane Feinstein 415-393-0707. We have 12 to 24 hours to act on this.

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The latest issue of The Catholic Worker includes a new article of mine about covering Occupy Wall Street for Waging Nonviolence. Since the paper isn’t published online, you’ll have to see either a (slightly edited) portion of it about Dan Berrigan at Occupy Writers, or a blown-up pdf here. I’ll also be giving a talk—which was gracefully entitled for me “The Ballerina and the Charging Bull”—at Maryhouse (55 East 3rd St., New York) on January 13 at 7:45 p.m.

Through all the dynamic and dramatic progress of the Arab Spring, the pro-democracy campaign in the tiny island nation of Bahrain has tended to be sidelined. It has struggled to attract the world’s sympathy and attention due to a lack of foreign reporters on the ground and little good information circulating in news sources. Additionally, the Bahraini government has silenced local journalists, employed public-relations and lobbying firms to discredit the protesters, even while it regularly pays lip service to delivering reform.

Nada Alwadi, a Bahraini journalist (and Waging Nonviolence contributor), recently delivered a webinar talk from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, D.C., discussing the current challenges faced by the movement. She was formerly a reporter for Alwasat, a popular newspaper in Bahrain, and was detained in April by security forces for covering the protests in the capital of Manama. Nada left Bahrain earlier this year over concerns for her personal safety. She is currently working in the United States to spread awareness about the situation in her country.

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Waging Nonviolence traveled to the fifth annual Gandhi-King Conference in Memphis this past weekend. In addition to making new friends and reconnecting with old ones—which is what it’s really all about—Eric and I presented a workshop on the role of blogging in nonviolent activism. While it has been an exciting year for us, with massive uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Arab Spring—not to mention Wisconsin—the real excitement has been the past two months, with Occupy Wall Street.

Since Nathan couldn’t join us to talk about his exhilarating experience as one of the early journalists on the OWS scene, we shot this eight-minute video (above), where he lays out the chronology and impact of his reporting. As he explains, being able to track the unfolding of a movement first-hand “fit so perfectly with what we’ve been trying to do all this time.”

We were excited to share this experience with the many great folks attending Gandhi-King this year and receive a really nice write-up in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Our good friends at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict are once again teaming up with the U.S. Institute of Peace to offer an eight-week, professional level course called “Civil Resistance and the Dynamics of Nonviolent Confict,” which will run from October 20 through December 8. According to the announcement:

This course is designed to provide an in-depth and multi-disciplinary perspective on civilian-based movements and campaigns that defend and obtain basic rights and justice around the world, and in so doing transform the global security environment.

The course will examine such questions as: What is civil resistance? What determines the success or failure of a civil resistance movement? How can professionals in the field better understand and analyze what elements are at work when civilians use nonviolent tactics? How and when should external agents—governments, NGOs, media, business—act or not act when civil resistance is gaining momentum? How can the dynamics and history of civil resistance better inform the fields of conflict management, development, diplomacy, and peacemaking?

The class will be taught by Dr. Maciej Bartkowski, Daryn Cambridge and Dominic Kiraly. The registration fee is $345 and participants (pending approval) will be able to receive one graduate credit for the course from Rutgers University that may be transferable to their academic institution. To learn more about the class or sign up, click here.

Thanks to his near-comprehensive reporting on Occupy Wall Street for Waging Nonviolence these past three weeks, editor Nathan Schneider has become an authority on this emerging movement for major progressive and mainstream media outlets. Here is a quick roundup of Nathan’s key appearances:

• In an article for The Nation, Nathan reports on the start of the Freedom Plaza occupation last week and its significance in light of Occupy Wall Street.
• As part of a discussion for the New York Times opinion page, Nathan calls attention to the power of sustained occupation, the danger of disorganized civil disobedience tactics, and the threat of co-optation.
• Writing for Harper’s, Nathan explains the origins of the General Assembly.
• Nathan wrote what has become the definitive Occupy Wall Stret FAQ for The Nation. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post called it “the single best place to start.” It was also republished in the occupation’s own Occupied Wall Street Journal.
• After The New York Times published a rather insightful and negative piece, Nathan wrote a letter to the editor, defending OWS from the dismissive attack.
• Nathan has been quoted by the New York Observer, The Week, MSNBC, Slate and others.
• As for television, Nathan has been on New York 1 and Al Jazeera (unfortunately, no video for the former has surfaced yet online).
• Nathan’s been on countless radio shows, the biggest being NPR News, CBC’s The Current and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show.

Today—or yesterday, depending on how you count it—marks a decade since the ongoing war on Afghanistan began. Tomorrow marks the end of the third week since the occupation of Liberty Plaza near Wall Street began. The first might be an utterly solemn occasion were it not for the second. And were it not, also, for the occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., which began yesterday and, at nightfall, held a candlelight vigil for 10 years of war.

I wrote about the Freedom Plaza undertaking yesterday in The Nation:

A group of seasoned activists has been planning it for months already, since before the Wall Street occupation was even proposed by Adbusters. And like those in Liberty Plaza, they are intent on staying as long as it takes to be heard.

Before taking to the streets, the October 6 group gained the support of such familiar mass-mobilizers as the Green Party and Veterans for Peace, as well as newer ones like Peaceful Uprising and US Uncut—though they stress that this is a coalition of individuals above all. As individuals, they’ll be having open discussions on Freedom Plaza about 15 “core issues,” ranging from corporatism and militarism at the top on down to transportation.

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Jeju Island is very far away from all the ferment and fervor of OccupyWallStreet, OccupyChicago and OccupyBaltimore. It is even further away from OccupyNewLondon (which is going to start on Sunday, 4-6pm every day, down by our infamous whale tale).

Jeju is in South Korea and it is apparently very beautiful. Unofficially, it is known as Honeymoon Island, because Korean newlyweds go there after the wedding (obviously). The area is studded with coral reefs and UNESCO designations.

Officially, Jeju was dubbed the “Island of World Peace” by Roh Moo Hyun (South Korea’s president until 2009) because it was the site of a 1948 democratic uprising that was met by slaughter—it is estimated that between 30,000 and 60,000 civilians were massacred by the military.

Against this backdrop of beauty and suffering, there emerges a new kind of struggle. In the tiny fishing village of Gangjeong, the South Korean Government is building a deep water naval base. In the process, they are dredging the sea and destroying coral reefs and upending life for the residents.

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Waging Nonviolence editor Nathan Schneider was on Democracy Now! this morning to report on the ongoing Wall Street protests, which drew significant police repression over the weekend. As the only journalist spending day and night at the protest, Nathan has become a go-to source of information for media seeking to understand #OccupyWallStreet. He has been interviewed by several Pacifica Radio stations, New York’s WBAI and a few international news stations. The New York Observer also interviewed Nathan for its coverage of Saturday’s police violence. As he told me just moments ago on the phone, “It’s bewildering how many interviews I’ve given in the last week and half.”

Nathan has also been mingling with the mainstream media that occasionally stop by, giving them the kind of background information they lack as a result of only showing up after something big has happened. This gap in their coverage and general lack of foresight is clearly problematic (e.g. Sunday’s New York Daily News). Clearly, Nathan’s efforts are showing why diligent reporting on activism is not only needed, but warranted.

Stay tuned for more!

I am headed to Barcelona next week to attend an international seminar called “War Profiteers and Peace Movement Responses.” The meeting is being organized by War Resisters International, the Spanish organization Foundation for Peace and others. Besides my obvious excitement about mi viaje a España, I am looking forward to being part of a discussion on the costs of war and the work for peace involving activists and analysts from all over the world—from South Africa to Venezuela and many places in between.

As the occupation of Wall Street continues, and Wall Street itself falters, and the tenth year of war in Afghanistan approaches, it is a good time to address these issues in a sober and head on way. How do we make the connections between the costs of war and the price of peace? How do we help our communities move from understanding, to outrage, to action, and how do we make those actions meaningful, strategic and impactful?

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