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:
Read the rest of this article »

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:

Read the rest of this article »

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 »

I work in a field where violence is part of daily life. At the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, my day will typically start with a run through the national headlines, where one can readily find gory details about the 30,000+ gun deaths that occur each year in the United States. If that doesn’t sufficiently dampen my spirit, I can easily scroll to the comment threads of these articles and see pro-gun activists minimize this loss of life and argue for even weaker gun laws.

It can be depressing—and also intimidating. Recently, I spoke to gun violence prevention activists in Virginia who were preparing to support their mayor at a city council meeting. You see, this mayor had the temerity to join a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns and that outraged the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), who believe there should be no regulations concerning gun ownership. One other thing about VCDL: their members pack heat 24/7, including at city council meetings. Several well-meaning individuals concerned about gun violence felt compelled to stay home that evening after considering the prospect of facing 60 some-odd armed men at the meeting.

I really can’t blame them. I’m not scared of these guys myself (I’ve been around them long enough to think of them more as weird uncles, or the like), but what am I supposed to tell the mother of two young children who’s trying to be supportive and do the right thing? “Don’t worry about that guy with the Glock 40 and ‘Guns Save Lives’ decal on his jacket”? That would be a tough pitch even for Ricardo Montalban.

If one person can inspire the courage necessary to face such situations, however, it is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I find myself repeatedly going back to a passage in his autobiography that is striking—and absolutely inspiring.

As we all know, Dr. King faced constant threats to his life during his time as a prominent civil rights leader in America, and was eventually felled by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. During his life, he wrestled often with the question of whether or not to carry a gun for self-defense. After his house and the house of a friend were bombed in 1956, Dr. King wrote the following: Read the rest of this article »

As mentioned on this blog before, President Obama’s frequent citation of nonviolent leaders as his heroes is completely inconsistent with, well, just about every aspect of his job. The most obvious, of course, is leading the military. And unfortunately Obama has not approached the task any differently than his predecessors. He is dead set on maintaining our presence in Iraq, bombing Pakistan and increasing troops in Afghanistan. So, to show just how inconsistent this is with the beliefs of his heroes, Rethink Afghanistan compiled a video that combines clips from the movie Gandhi, Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnman speech, and a documentary on Cesar Chavez.

Originally designed after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 to help the US Navy repel unwanted approaching boats, the non-lethal Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has not surprisingly worked its way down to the level of local law enforcement.

At two different town hall meetings and a sand castle building competition in San Diego recently, local police had the LRAD – which generates a narrow beam of intense sound that can be physically painful and even permanently damage hearing – on the ready in case any shenanigans broke out.

This is the first I’ve heard of this weapon being deployed domestically at political gatherings, although I’m sure it won’t be the last.

In a recent episode of Bang Goes The Theory, a new popular science show on the BBC, the team sees whether the LRAD can be defeated by a ridiculous looking sound proofed helmet. To see what happens, check out the video.

David Hambling over at Danger Room puts this latest effort at “foiling non-lethal crowd control weapons” in context:

Ever since police and security forces started using non-lethal weapons for crowd control, people have been looking for ways to counter them, trying everything from onions, tinfoil and Viagra.

Take tear gas, which has been around in various forms since the First World War and has been a regular feature of demonstrations from Seattle to Tehran to Khartoum. Experienced protesters expecting a blast of tear gas bring eye protection in the form of goggles and use a bandanna soaked in water or vinegar as an improvised gas mask. Real pros bring actual gas masks. An alternative approach is to use onion juice, which allegedly reduces the effect, a technique which is used everywhere from Israel to Iran. Read the rest of this article »

Photos of Obama's hero's include Dr. King (top middle) and Gandhi (lower right)

President Obama’s speech to the nation’s students earlier this week sparked an outcry (as well as some boycotts) from the far right over fears of “socialist indoctrination.” The administration did its best to assuage such fears by making the text of the speech available to schools beforehand. But what they didn’t prepare for was the question asked by a ninth grader named Lily: “If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”

Obama stumbled, forgetting that the correct answer was Ronald Reagan, and instead blurted out the name Mahatma Gandhi and called him, gasp, “a real hero of mine.”

Of course, the real joke here is not that Obama fell into the conservative trap by naming a radical like Gandhi as his hero. Hardly anyone took notice, perhaps because few people regard Gandhi as a radical. What little they know about him they associate with independence from Britain. And we Americans have no trouble embracing that notion.

The real joke, that seems lost on just about everyone, is that the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world looks up to perhaps the most staunch pacifist who ever lived.

Obama then laughed about the imagined situation of having dinner with Gandhi, saying, “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn’t eat a lot.”

Haha. That’s hilarious. What a funny joke about Gandhi’s practice of fasting to the brink of death so that his followers would stop using violence.

But seriously, don’t you think dinner would be strained for a different reason? Oh, say the fact that Obama is waging two wars, using drones to drop bombs on his Pakistani friends and increasing what’s already the world’s largest defense budget?

Obama is clearly familiar with Gandhi’s sayings since he borrowed one for his election campaign. So what doesn’t he understand about the one that goes: “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”?

Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Obama is a smart man and I’m sure he’s well aware that Gandhi devoted his life to nonviolence. He did after all lightly trace Gandhi’s influence on subsequent generations for the students, explaining how “the non-violent movement in India” inspired Dr. King and César Chávez.

But as much as Obama may understand the importance of nonviolence, it doesn’t seem to translate into practice. He’s not exactly the right person to be telling students to learn from “people who are able to bring about change, not through violence, not through money, but through the force of their personality and their ethical and moral stances.”

At least not at this point in his life. The presidency has a way of forcing good men to do terrible things.

Take former President Jimmy Carter, for instance, who called the nuclear arms proliferation “a disgrace to the human race” when he was running for office. Then, as soon as he became president, he built the Trident nuclear submarine base in Georgia. His administration also maintained an enormous military machine and aided right-wing tyrannies abroad.

But in the years after his presidency, Carter has worked hard for peace, particularly through the establishment of his own non-profit organization that promotes nonviolence and social justice. In fact, he is set to receive the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award from James Madison University’s Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence later this month.

Perhaps Obama will find himself there too one day. And he will feel greatly honored to receive not just the award, but the accompanying replica of his hero’s shawl. It just won’t be for anything he’s done as president.

According to Time magazine, “Phase 2 ” of the Iranian protest movement has begun.

Six weeks after millions took to the streets to protest Iran’s presidential election, their uprising has morphed into a feistier, more imaginative and potentially enduring campaign.

The definitive tone of this proclamation is very interesting. For starters, the article doesn’t exactly explain why “Phase 2 ” has begun at this particular moment. Other mainstream media outlets have made similar claims over the past few weeks. And much like the others, Time seems to be relying on wishful editorializing more than concrete reporting.

Tactics may be evolving to deal with the crackdown on mass street protests—such as the boycott of goods advertized on state-controlled television, attempts to overload the electrical grid and “blitz” street demonstrations—but there is little sign of them having any kind of effect on the Iranian regime. And, therefore, it’s hard to imagine a “potentially enduring campaign” emerging.

Furthermore, the situation seems to have changed very little from when it started over a month ago. Back then, Middle East expert and foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes described the protests as “scattered” and “lacking in discipline.” Time calls “Phase 2 ” as “unorganized” and “largely leaderless.” The only difference between these two descriptions is the conclusion that follows. For Zunes, a scattered and disorganized protest movement is “easily suppressed,” whereas for Time it’s “only just beginning.” Except that it’s not. How can it be the beginning if it’s Phase 2? Read the rest of this article »

As I read through my emails yesterday morning, I came across one that had been sent by the Popular Committee of Bi’lin (West Bank). It’s subject line read: “Bi’lin Invaded by Israeli Soldiers.” The email, sent by Iyad Burnat, the head of the Popular Committee, describes a 2:30 am raid by close to 70 soldiers. Declaring Bi’lin a “closed military zone,” the soldiers broke into a number of homes. In the process, they seized and took away – for no stated reason — two sixteen-year-old boys, Mohsen Kateb and Hamoda Yaseen.

Burnat’s home was also broken into and his nine-year-old-son, Abdal, threatened with seizure. At that point, a number of Popular Committee members as well as those of the International Solidarity Movement stood repeatedly in the path of the soldiers. Though they were brusquely pushed aside, they did manage to prevent Abdal from being arrested. They also managed to prevent the arrest of Haitham al-Katib, an activist, who was video-taping the raid. Burant reports that similar types of raids haven taken place almost every night for the past two weeks and that, all told, seven Bi’lin community members have been arrested.

Throughout the morning, I have read and re-read this email. Perhaps it’s because I was just in Bi’lin two weeks ago and met Burant along with many other Popular Committee Members. Perhaps the memory of being bombarded by tear gas cannisters and rubber bullets during the Committee’s Friday afternoon protest march to the separation fence (the building of which has claimed 60% of the community’s farmland) has yet to dissipate. Or, perhaps it’s simply because human beings are suffering terribly and there seems to be no end to that suffering in the near future.

Burnat’s email closes with a note of gratitude, “Thank you for your continued support.” Perhaps this is the line, most of all, that keeps me returning to my computer. How can I continue to support those whom I have known for two years in this community? What does solidarity with the Popular Committee’s nonviolent movement look like from here in the US, thousands of miles away from Bi’lin? If I am not there to put my body in the way, as did the folks of the Popular Committee and the International Solidarity Movement, what else can I be doing?

Read the rest of this article »

In a provocatively-titled essay at Killing the Buddha today—”Gays Are the New Niggers“—Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou calls on the memory of Bayard Rustin. More than anyone, perhaps, Rustin is responsible for bringing Gandhian nonviolence to the civil rights movement in the American South. He was an officer in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a war resister, a close advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and a key organizer of the 1963 march on Washington, D.C. He was also a gay man, a fact that landed him in jail, drove a wedge between him and other movement leaders, and made him the target of diatribes by Strom Thurmond on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

For Rustin, gay rights was inextricably part of the larger struggle for civil rights. This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, which helped to launch the modern gay rights movement. In an essay of Rustin’s which Sekou quotes, “From Montgomery to Stonewall,” he insists on the continuity between the two causes:

That was the beginning of an extraordinary revolution, similar to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in that it was not expected that anything extraordinary would occur. As in the case of the women who left the Russian factory, and in the case of Rosa Parks who sat down in the white part of the bus, something began to happen, people began to protest. They began to fight for the right to live in dignity, the right essentially to be one’s self in every respect, and the right to be protected under law. In other words, people began to fight for their human rights. Gay people must continue this protest.

Rustin’s legacy, which was often hidden in order to protect the civil rights movement from homophobic distractions, has been profoundly underappreciated. We can only hope that today, finally, we are arriving at a place where his tremendous contribution can be appreciated for what it was and his call can be heard. Sekou concludes:

All niggers—historical and contemporary—must join forces to achieve freedom for all. Rustin places a moral challenge on those in the struggle: “Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don’t fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return on me.”

During his highly publicized speech in Cairo last week, President Obama urged Palestinians to use nonviolence in their struggle for independence.

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Obama’s nod to nonviolence “one of the most important points that he made.” But many others have had trouble sidestepping the hypocrisy of such words coming from the man in charge of the world’s greatest military power. As Starhawk, a panelist for the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, pointed out:

For the powerful to demand that the less powerful renounce violence, without making the same demands on themselves or on their allies, is simply to say: “I reserve the weapons of death for myself and my friends.”

The obvious friend is of course Israel, which receives about $3 billion a year from Washington. Right behind them, interestingly enough, is the dictatorship in Egypt, which received $7.8 billion from the U.S. over the past five years. Making matters worse, the Obama administration is requesting a 60 percent cut in funding for pro-democracy groups and initiatives in the country. So even the location of Obama’s speech adds to the hypocrisy of his call for nonviolence, especially considering he made no direct reference to the dictatorship.

While the president may not have a leg to stand on when it comes to espousing nonviolence, he could have at least acknowledged efforts made by Muslims and Arabs to reach a peaceful reconciliation. For one, on the day of his speech in Cairo, CodePink delivered a letter to Obama from Hamas that called for a meeting “on the basis of mutual respect and without preconditions.”

Without mention of this most people are left to assume that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, know nothing but violence. As McClatchy Newspapers‘ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dion Nissenbaum noted, there is “a question long raised in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Where is the Palestinian Mahatma Gandhi?” Nissenbaum then went on to describe the most recent exploration of that question–a rather comprehensive and insightful article in the Weekly Standard–and quote several leading theorists.

Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement that organizes largely non-violent protests of Israeli actions in the West Bank, argues that there are “many Palestinian Gandhis” who have been killed by Israeli soldiers, including Bassem Abu Rahmeh, who was killed when he was hit in the chest by a tear gas cannister fired by an Israeli soldier.

Salil Tripathi of Forbes also touched on this idea, saying that Obama should have mentioned the nonviolent Muslim leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who is known as the “Frontier Gandhi” for raising a nonviolent army of over 100,000 members in the Northwest Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A sharper endorsement of non-violence, citing the many standard-bearers, including those from the region, could have planted the seed of an idea. And, maybe, the paradigm would have shifted.

There is still a chance that it may. But it is unlikely to be inspired by an American president.

Last weekend 17 environmental activists were arrested in a series of protests against the coal industry in West Virginia. Most were given trespassing tickets and released, but six were slapped with a $2,000 cash only bail. The organizing groups–Coal River Mountain Watch, Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice–tried to persuade the judge to lower the amount. He refused, so they raised enough money to get two of their members released. The other four were forced to spend the weekend in jail. Afterward, at a press conference, some of the activists spoke about their arrest. Here’s what one of the two who made bail had to say:

“Family was real good for me,” he said. “My wife and grand-kids scraped up enough money to get me out. It’s wrong they charged us a $2,000 cash fine over a trespassing charge. Kind of silly to me but I was real glad to get out. I just feel sorry for the fellas who had to stay in there longer.”

As someone who has spent the better part of a weekend in jail, I can attest to the desire to want out. It’s not something that anyone, with even the purest of motives, can prepare themselves for. The fact that your fate is in the hands of some uncaring bureaucracy is nothing-short of a panic-inducing nightmare. And the thought did cross my mind to find some way of getting bailed out before my hearing. But thankfully I was with a group of civil disobedience veterans, who taught me that jail is as much a part of the process as the action itself. And furthermore, so is going to trial, something I unfortunately avoided by taking a stet agreement, but now regret, having seen the attention my friends were able to draw to their issue in court.

Of course, knowing all this hasn’t made the decision to risk arrest any easier. In fact I’m far more reticent now than before. But, in a way, it’s all for the better because if I do get arrested again sometime, I will be doing it with complete commitment to the cause and practice of nonviolence.

As King once said, “An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” Similarly, Gandhi warned that punishments may be harsh, but that “wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer.”

I mention all this not to disparage last week’s urgently necessary and wholly admirable action, but to raise a question all of us interested in nonviolence have to consider, which is: Do we accept everything, the good and the bad, that comes with an action? If the answer is yes, then I think it can only make us and our movements stronger.