• Century City’s business as usual came to a standstill Thursday afternoon as the janitors who lost their jobs cleaning JPMorgan Chase-owned Century Plaza towers were joined by 500 janitors, community activists, and union supporters at a march and protest in Los Angeles. Thirteen people were arrested for blocking an intersection in an act of civil disobedience.

• Some 10,000 people gathered outside historic Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. on Saturday for the “Reclaim the Dream” march commemorating the 47th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a Dream Speech.”

• On Sunday, an estimated 80,000 Hong Kongers marched in honor of eight people killed in a bus hijacking in Manila, attacking the Philippine government for botching the rescue operation and demanding justice for the dead.

• Teachers on Thursday staged a 24-hour strike and paralyzed Puerto Rican public education to protest what they say is a general deterioration of the school system.

• On Thursday, two protesters associated with Climate Ground Zero blocked the entrance to the headquarters of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to bring attention to what they believe is the DEP’s failure to enforce the Clean Water Act by permitting mountaintop removal mining.

• A protest of Nigerian women shut down a Shell plant last Wednesday, just one week after a group of Ugborodo women blockaded a Chevron natural gas pipeline.

• Oil workers calling for compensation for recently fired employees maintained a blockade at a storage plant in southern Argentina on Friday.

On August 28, conservative radio/television host Glenn Beck, 2012 Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the National Rifle Association, and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation will conduct the “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The date and location are significant. It was on August 28, 1963, on the steps of the memorial that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. Beck has billed the rally as a “non-political event” that will pay tribute to America’s service personnel and “help us restore the values that founded this great nation.”

Although unaware of the date’s significance at first, Beck has since claimed its selection as “divine providence.” He has further justified the planning of his event by saying, “Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln. Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King … Too many have forgotten Abraham Lincoln’s ideas and far too many have either gotten just lazy or they have purposely distorted Martin Luther King’s ideas.”

Beck, of course, is the same man who told listeners on his March 2 radio show, “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. ‘Social justice’ and ‘economic justice,’ they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

The March on Washington and King’s life work, of course, were dedicated to the pursuit of social and economic justice. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, King stated that marchers had come to Washington “to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ … So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Social activists and civil rights leaders, concerned that the “Restoring Honor” rally will co-opt the historical significance of the March on Washington to advance a political message that is directly at odds with the vision of King, have planned their own event on the same day. The National Action Network, the National Urban League, the Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, United for Peace and Justice, and others are sponsoring the “Reclaim the Dream” rally and march. The rally will take place on August 28 at Dunbar High School (1301 New Jersey Avenue NW—Mount Vernon Square/7th Street/Convention Center Metro Stop on Green/Yellow Line) in the District of Columbia from 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM. At 1:00 PM, participants will march from Dunbar High School to the site of the King Memorial on the National Mall. All Americans are welcome and encouraged to participate in these events.

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The history of nonviolent social change is filled with injunctions to refuse compliance with unjust laws and policies. As Gandhi once famously said, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” Reflecting on the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. observed that “what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system. … We were simply saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system. From that moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation.” In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau mapped out the terrain in ways that would later influence both Gandhi and King:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? … It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. … Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

These teachings were alive and well during the demonstrations in Arizona against SB 1070, the state’s anti-immigrant law that was partially struck down by a federal judge two days before it took effect. In recognition of the larger issues raised by the bill, as well as the realization that open persecution of “illegals” would remain official state policy going forward, hundreds of people took to the streets on July 29th under the banner of the movement’s mantra, “We Will Not Comply.” Almost 100 people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience during these protests, and a clear message of the refusal to cooperate with injustice was communicated to both local officials and an international audience alike.

While many of the events of that day have been well-reported, the opening salvo that set the tone of noncompliance and civil resistance seemed to slip by almost without notice. It was, however, a poignant and powerful action that reflected the best qualities of the nonviolence paradigm. Here is my recollection of what transpired that night as SB 1070 was to take effect: Read the rest of this article »

Since the recent passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, scheduled to go into effect on July 29, those of us working for social justice in the United States have a rare opportunity to register a particularly effective form of protest.  The inherently unjust nature of this legislation presents conscientious individuals with a real chance to go back to what many might say civil disobedience was originally intended to do: promote the repeal of an unjust law by openly and nonviolently breaking the law itself.

This is what has come to be known today as direct civil disobedience.  It is distinguished from indirect civil disobedience, where the law being broken is not itself the target of the protest.  Not many would argue, for instance, that a law prohibiting people from sitting in the middle of the street is unjust.  When used to draw attention to an issue of social importance, however, violating this law with a willingness to accept the consequences may be an effective tool.  Although the merit of such tactics can vary depending on any number of factors, to score a direct protest by violating an unjust law is very likely to be viewed as more legitimate.

The distinction is useful because in recent years we in the United States haven’t had to worry much about severely repressive, overtly dictatorial laws.  Not so very long ago, in certain parts of the country, violating an unjust law was as simple as ordering food at a lunch counter, sitting near the front on a city bus, or going swimming at a public beach.  More common in the US today we find people courting arrest by blocking entrances to buildings, occupying government offices, or chaining themselves to fences, seeking to address an injustice more or less unrelated to the law actually being transgressed.  Since these injustices don’t always allow for direct, public defiance, we try to create that tenuous link between issue and protest method as best we can.  But while indirect civil disobedience always beats inaction, from a strategic standpoint, if the opportunity is there, direct beats indirect every time.  And with this new Arizona law, the opportunity is definitely there.

Indeed, not since the end of the draft in 1973 has there been a law in the United States that seems to render itself so well to direct civil disobedience.  Arizona SB 1070 requires non-citizens to keep registration documents on them at all times, and forces police officers to inquire about immigration status during any kind of arrest or routine stop if they encounter “reasonable suspicion” that the person might be in the country illegally.  In addition, the new law gives police leeway to arrest someone solely on the basis of there being probable cause that they may be undocumented, at which point they’re to be turned over directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This basically boils down to the police in Arizona having new license to stop anyone looking remotely Hispanic – for no other reason than that they look remotely Hispanic – demand papers from them, and take them into custody if satisfactory documents are not immediately produced.  Predictably this has led some people, such as Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony, to draw parallels to the lives of those in Europe forced to live under the Nazi régime.  Additionally – and this concerns all of us – the new Arizona law makes it a crime to “transport or move”, or “conceal, harbor or shield” undocumented immigrants, reminding me more of something out of the Fugitive Slave Acts from this country’s dark past.  Against such blatantly unjust, potentially far-reaching legislation, at least we’re armed with a chance for everyone to participate in its direct disobedience, instead of just abandoning our undocumented brothers and sisters to their fate.

In a relatively short amount of time, Martin Luther King, Jr. became somewhat of an expert on unjust laws.  In a speech he delivered before the Fellowship of the Concerned in 1961, King defined an unjust law as “a code that the majority inflicts upon the minority, which that minority had no part in enacting or creating, because that minority had no right to vote in many instances.”  Although close to 50 years old, this definition holds up in modern-day Arizona quite well.  The undocumented minority, having virtually no recourse to its voice being heard, is at the mercy of the majority – in this case that of the Arizona Senate – 60 percent Republican, and 100 percent white.

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Over at Alternet, Devona Walker has an interesting piece about how the rally that Glenn Beck is staging at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in August to unveil his “100 year plan” for America is only the latest attempt by conservatives to claim King as one of their own. For example:

In 2006, the ultraconservative think-tank Heritage Foundation also took to spinning King’s legacy. In an essay titled “Martin Luther King’s Conservative Legacy,” it directed conservatives to lay claim to King.

“King was no stalwart conservative, yet his core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are profoundly conservative,” wrote Carolyn Garris. “Modern liberalism rejects these ideas, while conservatives place them at the center of their philosophy. Despite decades of its appropriation by liberals, King’s message was fundamentally conservative.”

[...]

Conservatives cherry-pick and exploit particular phrases, or quotes, while entirely ignoring the totality of what King stood for, what he fought against and why he died.

One snippet, in particular, seems to routinely find its way into conservative talking points. It’s taken from a 1963 address in which King said we should be judged by “the content of our character.” That simple phrase was re-branded and re-packaged into a rallying cry against affirmative action.

In 1994, right-wing media critic David Horowitz said on “Crossfire”: “Martin Luther King, in my view, was a conservative because he stood up for, you know, belief in the content of your character–the value that conservatives defend today.”

In 1991, Charles Krauthammer pitted King against diversity. Progressives, he wrote, “have traded King’s dream for something called diversity….It is the opponents of race-conscious public policy who today speak in the name of values that King championed.”

Then, in 1996, when Gov. Mike Foster abolished affirmative action, he presented the act as somehow being a fulfillment of King’s dream. In fact, one of the original astroturf groups waging an ongoing battle to repeal affirmative action cynically goes by the name American Civil Rights Institute.

Another effort to distort Martin Luther King is being undertaken with the construction of a corporate-funded memorial to the Civil Rights leader on the National Mall in Washington, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2011. While these efforts to co-opt King are infuriating, I still doubt that in the end they will be successful. One doesn’t need to read very deeply into his biography or writings to discover how radical he truly was. And unless there is some Orwellian rewriting of history, that is something that will never change.

Last week, I had the good fortune of attending the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict at Tufts University in Boston, hence my absence from this site. The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which organized the week-long institute, did a phenomenal job in bringing together some of the most inspiring theorists and practitioners of nonviolent action to share their knowledge and experiences in the field.

One of the highlights for me, was getting a chance to hear Rev. James Lawson speak on the opening night and the conversation that we had later in the week. Rev. Lawson was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States who taught Martin Luther King Jr. and many other leaders of the struggle about nonviolence, and organized the student-led sit-ins in Nashville in 1959 that led to the desegregation of the city.

Fortunately, ICNC has made Rev. Lawson’s talk (video above) and several others available online. I’ll share at least a couple other presentations as the week goes on, along with my reflections on the experience as a whole.

The recent attack on the Mavi Marmara has inspired discussions of the techniques of nonviolence in the mainstream media. Here at Waging Nonviolence, we have already lamented what appears to have been a lack of discipline on the part of the protesters. However, an interesting commentary by Lane Wallace in The Atlantic shows how misunderstandings about the basic principles of nonviolence play a role in skewing coverage of and opinion about the events.

Information is still murky, but what Wallace gets right in her piece is that Gandhi was insistent that one should always defend oneself with nonviolence, not physical force, if one is able. When the Israeli military raided the ship, they hoped to send the message that the blockade of Gaza would remain firm. In the aftermath, Israel has claimed the activists had terrorist connections.

By breaking from strict nonviolent discipline, the activists played into this narrative, giving it a measure of plausibility and shifting the field of interpretation. Wallace says, expressing the sentiments of many:

[T]here is at best a naivete, and at worst a disingenuousness, in provoking a fight and then complaining noisily that a fight broke out. The activists decided to take on the Israeli military. It doesn’t matter whether the military should have resisted their passage to Gaza, in a moral sense; the fact remains that Israelis had been very clear that they were going to take whatever measures were necessary to stop the boats. So the activists knew they were going to meet resistance. […] There are no lack of individuals, groups, or nations who use violence as a means to an end. But if you decide to step in that world, you can’t complain when your opponent uses violence in return.

Wallace is sympathetic to nonviolent activism and her piece is an indication of the extent to which the Free Gaza movement has lost control over the interpretation of the events. Even while inspiring worldwide condemnation of the unjust Gaza blockade, what has most disturbed me is the character of much of the outrage it has inspired. The Turkish president’s assertion that Turkey will “never forgive” the killing of the ten protesters, protests in Ankara featuring hardliners burning Israeli flags and offering chants of “death to Israel.” This in turn has predictably inspired protests by Israeli hardliners equating Turkey and Hamas and claiming, “We came with paint guns and got lynched.” Israel’s bellicose actions and statements are of course responsible for this, but the activists on the Mavi Marmara bear some responsibility as well.

However, Wallace makes a critical, faulty assumption in her analysis of nonviolence and one that is frequent among those who are casual observers of it. She writes that the problem with the flotilla was that it “went into the confrontation looking for conflict, to draw attention to their cause.” Citing Gandhi and King she says that “[q]uiet, uncomplaining courage is harder and less satisfying than provoking an opponent.” Unlike the Gaza protesters, when “Martin Luther King, John Lewis, the Freedom Riders and the rest of the non-violent protesters for civil rights set out, they knew what they were walking into. And if we admire their courage, it’s because they walked into a hailstorm without so much as a word of complaint.”

Both Dr. King and Gandhi were very keen to use nonviolence to inspire confrontation and they did so in conjunction with some of the most profound words of complaint the world has ever known. Even in particular instances of direct action, “complaining” was important (think of C.T. Vivian confronting Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma). They were also persistently held responsible for being agitators who caused violence. The purpose of nonviolence is to put the violence that is the lifeblood of segregation and colonialism on display and excavate the hatred and fear that drives it. The problem with the flotilla was not in provoking and revealing the character of Israel’s death grip on Gaza. The provocation worked perfectly in demonstrating that only deadly force can support Israel’s current policies. The problem is that by failing to stick to the principles of nonviolence the Free Gaza movement failed to take the opportunity that was given to them.

Nonviolent means usually have a more direct relationship to political outcomes than violent means. When militants fire rockets into Israel for the purpose of protesting the Gaza blockade, the substance of what they are doing is completely divorced from the political outcome. When a flotilla of aid tries to break the embargo, there is consistency between the means and the ends. But attacking commandos—even those trying to stop a flotilla—is not. Maintaining consistency in means and ends can be extremely difficult, but it is why Gandhi thought the methods were more truthful.

Wallace both underestimates how difficult it is to maintain nonviolent discipline in the face of highly trained uses of violence and misunderstands the purpose of nonviolent protests. But her impressions of nonviolence are not uncommon and something those of us who use nonviolent means should keep in mind going forward.

Apparently Glenn Beck has taken a fancy to nonviolence. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer he recently made “a metaphoric plea for a Gandhi-and-Martin-Luther-King-inspired nonviolent resistance to what he claims is the government’s march toward socialism.”

“Get God on your side, and then pick up a hammer,” Beck said Saturday at a tent-revival-meets-politics rally that nearly packed the University of Central Florida basketball arena. Quoting Gandhi, he took the hammer to an anvil onstage and said: “With nonviolence, take your hammer and pound that truth every day, and everything that doesn’t fit, toss it out! We have the truth . . . With nonviolence, be the anvil of truth every single day!”

The Orlando rally was the first of at least two heavily promoted, daylong American Revival events featuring the TV-and-radio star and some of his favorite pundits, designed to answer a question that might have seemed ludicrous just a year ago but which on Saturday attracted followers from up and down the Eastern Seaboard, including the Philadelphia region:

Now that Glenn Beck has captured everyone’s attention, just where exactly is he trying to take America, anyway?

Beck plans to slowly roll out the answer over the course of 2010. He’ll be publishing a not-surprisingly apocalyptic political thriller this spring, hosting an audacious rally at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in late August – on the 47th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech there – and has claimed he’ll release another book right before the fall elections with a 100-year plan for reviving America.

Of course the one major thing stopping Beck from being the next great nonviolent leader is the very “anvil of truth” he references. If we were to follow what Gandhi said and reject “anything that does not stand the test when it is brought to the anvil of truth and hammered with nonviolence” we would have to reject most of what Beck says because to be truly nonviolent you must have a just cause. Most of Beck’s rhetoric is based on lies (calling Obama a socialist and likening him to Hitler), as well as a violent agenda (opposing health care and other would-be social services that save lives).

It is interesting, though, that he chose to promote nonviolence. Perhaps he realizes its power of persuasion and the legitimacy it tends to give to a particular movement. Unfortuantely he has yet to realize his ideaology doesn’t fit with nonviolence. You can’t tell people to be nonviolent at the same time you tell them the apocalpyse is coming and that they’d better “stockpile food.”

Watch out for that anvil, Glenn.

More than 25,000 people gathered in Montgomery, Alabama 45 years ago on this date to protest racial discrimination—the culmination of a month of hardships many now refer to as the turning point for the Civil Rights Movement.

Several hundred marchers had just completed the 54 mile trek from Selma as part of the historic Alabama Freedom March. The New York Times captured the moment with a front page story, mostly centered on Dr. King’s address to the crowd:

He referred to the tumultuous events at Selma in the last two months, during which time the voting-rights campaign that he began there turned into a general protest against racial injustice, with two men dead and scores injured.

“Yet Selma, Alabama, has become a shining moment in the conscience of man,” he said. “If the worst in American life lurked in the dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it.”

“The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma, generated the massive power that turned the whole nation to a new course,” he said.

“Alabama has tried to nurture and defend evil, but the evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this state.”

Dr. King spoke with passion, and the thousands sitting in the street beneath him responded with repeated outbursts of approval.

Several times he urged his followers to continue their support of nonviolent demonstrations, with the aim of achieving understanding with the white community.

“Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man,” he said, “but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society that can live with its conscience.”

He ended his address with a peroration on the theme, “How long must justice by crucified and truth buried?” a spirited quotation of a verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and finally a burst of “Glory, hallelujah,” repeated four times.

The crowd rose to its feet in one great surge, and the applause and cheering reverberated through the Capitol grounds.

On Sunday, voters in Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych as their new president, marking an end to the Orange Revolution. Yanukovych, for those who don’t remember, was the pro-Russian former prime minister who was ousted by the mass nonviolent movement after a rigged vote in 2004.

While I’m not one of the conspiracy theorists who see the “color revolutions” as orchestrated by the US, the election of Yushchenko was undoubtedly in the interest of the West, as was the Rose Revolution in Georgia the previous year.

Yushchenko had long been an advocate of economic “liberalisation,” according to an interesting piece by Niall Green, and oversaw the privatization of state-owned assets in the 1990s while he was head of Ukraine’s central bank.

His continued pursuit of these “free market” policies as president – including pushing for the country’s ascension to the World Trade Organization and turning to the International Monetary Fund for a massive $16.5 billion emergency loan (with all the usual strings attached) in 2008 – led to worse conditions for Ukrainian workers and a serious decline in the standard of living for the majority of the population during his tenure.

While some believe that Yanukovych has come around on these neoliberal economic policies in recent years, everyone seems to be arguing that he will also reorient Ukraine back towards Russia.

This story of dashed hopes after nonviolent movements or the leaders they install embrace toxic economic reforms – sometimes with little or no input from the public – is unfortunately not new. A tale similar to Ukraine’s could be told about South Africa after Mandela’s election, Georgia after the 2003 Rose Revolution, and Poland following Solidarity’s victory at the polls in 1989, as I document here.

Some responded to my article very critically, saying that we shouldn’t expect these movements to right every wrong. And I completely agree. Every movement is human and will make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that we should remain silent about where nonviolent movements fall short. That is the only way we will avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.

Therefore, when a nonviolent revolution pushes more people into poverty, which Martin Luther King wrote is a form of violence that “hurts as intensely as the violence of the club,” we shouldn’t shy away from critiquing them.

On what should be a sad occasion, I’ve found myself uplifted by the many great remembrances floating around the internet of Howard Zinn’s long and productive life. They serve as a reminder that a life well lived is to be celebrated, not mourned. His single greatest accomplishment was not writing A People’s History, but living an active life worthy of inclusion in such a book. He stands as an equal among the American heroes he wrote about for his organizing and speaking out against the Vietnam War, which, on one occasion, as Daniel Ellsberg recalled, led to him being beaten and arrested by police.

I was fortunate enough to have my own interaction with Zinn a few years ago. I was in the midst of discovering the power of nonviolent social movements and had come across his famous article “A Just Cause, Not A Just War,” published a few months after Sept. 11. Being somewhat blinded by my own passions and interests, I seized not upon his wonderful message that war is inherently unjust and must cease no matter the cause, but on this one little statement:

There might be situations (and even such strong pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil would be justified.

It struck me as an unfortunate disclaimer from a man I wholly admired, in an article I otherwise loved. Furthermore, I was not aware of any justification for violence given by Gandhi or King. So I wrote him and asked for an explanation. To my surprise, he wrote back:
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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.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, not the national holiday which is Monday. As an activist member of Jewish Voice for Peace, I have at times faced counter-demonstrations while I speak out against unjustifiable atrocities being committed allegedly for me and by “my” side. Being from the United States, I could be doubly responsible for the US/Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. As a long-time member of the War Resisters League, King and I share a belief that (in his words) “social change comes more meaningfully through nonviolence,” that the “business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love,” and that God didn’t choose “America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.” 42 years have passed since he was assassinated.

So I am perplexed when I see “pro-Israel” signs that extol Martin Luther King’s defense of Israel, using quotes (which I also am fond of doing) by the late revolutionary, but in their case, highlighting things he said that seem to place him on “their” side of the police line, not mine. On the occasion of his birth, newsletters of synagogues may even have articles touting King as a staunch defender of Israel’s right to defend itself. They take quotes from 42 years ago as I do, to make our points. Certainly, after the Six Day War of 1967 (and before), King defended Israel. However, events of the last two score years I think would have reinforced King’s pacifism and “eternal hostility towards militarism, racism and economic exploitation.” He never would have become an anti-Semite, but I do think facts on the ground would have led him to become quite critical of Israel. I want to briefly mention five specific issues that would have negatively effected King’s perspective on Israel:

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Over at Foreign Policy In Focus, I had an article yesterday in response to Obama’s dismissal of nonviolence during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. As often as the new peace laureate references the influence that Gandhi and King have had on his life, he was sure quick to write off any alternative to war in dealing with our most pressing problems.

So, I decided to tell a few stories of how nonviolence worked against the Nazis, and provide a few pieces of evidence that the threat of terrorism will only be exacerbated by sending more troops to Afghanistan. To check out the whole piece, click here.

The picture above was taken by Ed Hedemann, a good friend from the War Resisters League, at a protest that I took part in on the day Obama delivered his speech. We walked from the UN headquarters in New York to the military recruiting center at Times Square. I volunteered to carry a coffin –  made of cardboard and drapped in a black cloth - and wore a protest shroud bearing an image of a civilian killed in Afghanistan by a US bomb, which brought home the real human cost of the war in a way that I have never experienced by simply holding a sign.

Thankfully, there was a lot of media covering the demonstration. For whatever reason, the irony of Obama accepting the world’s most prestigious peace award on the heels of making the decision to escalate a bloody war was too hard for even the mainstream press to ignore.

For anyone who speaks German, the video of an interview I did with Reuters during the protest can be seen in an article on the website of Die Zeit, the largest weekly German newspaper. To watch that clip, click here.

Last June was the 27th anniversary of one of the largest protests in history, when upwards of one million people gathered on the Great Lawn in New York’s 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.

One of the seminal figures of this movement was author Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 book The Fate of the Earth reinvigorated the anti-nuclear movement with its rallying call for a nuclear freeze. Though still very much focused on the issue today, Jonathan has started to pursue climate change with a like-minded passion, which is fitting given the similarities of the two movements. (Something about protesting outside a UN meeting sounds all too familiar right now.)

I met him at the Brooklyn Bridge March for Climate Leadership, which was one of 5,000 plus actions that took place on October 24, the 350-organized International Day of Climate Action. Although very little came of the march, it ended up being a great opportunity to hear Jonathan trace his interest in the issue back to when his good friend Bill McKibben first started writing about global warming two decades ago.

Not long after that, we sat down for a more formal discussion of climate activism. Drawing from his deep knowledge of nonviolent movements–which was the focus of his 2003 book The Unconquerable World–Jonathan offered tactical suggestions for climate activists, compared the threat of climate change to nuclear war and spoke of the general mystery surrounding the rise of mass public movements.

Bryan Farrell: Why has it taken so long for a climate justice movement to emerge.
Jonathan Schell: We just haven’t seen all that much in the way of social movements recently. We had the anti globalization movement in late 90s which flared up and died away. We also had the antiwar movement against the Iraq War but that also has kind of died away. There just hasn’t been much energy in social movements. Why that is is a very deep question. It’s a crippling disability when it comes to changes in policy that are on a deep and fundamental level, whether that’s changing the economic system or opposing these wars and the whole imperial mindset behind them or addressing global warming. If you just look historically, it’s very hard to find fundamental change in policy that wasn’t preceded by a very powerful social movement. So if you don’t have that card in your deck, I think it’s incredibly difficult to get fundamental change. In terms of public awareness [climate change] has been stronger than some of the other movements. Certainly it’s been longstanding and there are lots of strong organizations. Read the rest of this article »