Fighting broke out in Lebanon…it’s really bad. Friends have told me of RPGs and snipers throughout the streets of Beirut. One of my dearest friends just told me that a bullet entered his apartment in Hamra and exploded near his son. He’s blogging about the situation. Friends who usually don’t use words like “war” are using them now. Friends who don’t normally think about leaving Beirut in such scenarios are packing their bags. I hope it’s not war…

May 1, 2008

ACTION WEEK FOR SAMI AL-ARIAN
www.FreeSamiNow.com
Important Update!

Dear friends,

Thanks to your swift action, the Hampton Roads Regional Jail has taken Dr. Al-Arian out of segregation and has started treating him properly. This is an important victory which has brought much relief to Dr. Al-Arian and his family. This is again proof that your calls and emails DO make a difference.

At the same time, we must not lose sight of the greater battle at hand: Dr. Al-Arian is still being illegally held in prison, while rogue US Attorneys are working feverishly to indict Dr. Al-Arian on criminal contempt to keep him imprisoned for at least five more years, and very possibly an entire decade.*

If you have not done so already, please do these 3 SIMPLE BUT POWERFUL ACTS:

1. Call Vincent Archibeque, Assistant Field Office Director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): (703) 285-6221.

Stress that Dr. Al-Arian’s prison term ended on April 11th and that his imprisonment since then has been completely illegal. Ask Mr. Archibeque to do everything he can to ensure that Dr. Al-Arian is released and deported as soon as possible in accordance with the terms of his plea agreement.

2. Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (Department of Homeland Security): (866)-644-8360 (press 1 for English and then press 5 to leave a message).

Stress that Dr. Al-Arian’s prison term ended on April 11th and that his imprisonment since then has been completely illegal. Ask that Dr. Al-Arian be released and deported as soon as possible in accordance with the terms of his plea agreement.
Again, always be polite but firm.
If you don’t speak to a live person:

simply leave a message on the answering machine; and
call back later that day or the next day to try to get through.

3. Email Attorney General Michael Mukasey: ASKDOJ[at]usdoj.gov

Ask Mr. Mukasey to ensure that Dr. Al-Arian is deported as soon as possible in accordance with the plea agreement. (For a letter template, please go to http://www.freesamialarian.com/letters/sample1.doc)
Before sending the email, make sure to BCC samialarianactioncommittee[at]gmail.com

NOTE: In any given civil rights campaign, there are always more people willing to make a phone call than write an email. Your emails are very important. Just use our letter template and take five minutes to write out your message. Precisely because so few people ever write their own letter, yours will be exponentially more powerful for that.

If you have not signed our petition, please do so by visiting petition.freesaminow.com

To learn how you can help EVEN MORE, please visit: http://www.freesamialarian.com/help.html

Lastly, don’t forget to PRAY for Dr. Al-Arian and his family.

My last couple of days on the bus we had a number of interesting experiences in Northfield, Minnesota. This little town does so much and I couldn’t have imagined that such a small town could be home to something like Northfielders for Palestine. Most of these folks who we met are Americans whose age ranges from fifty to late seventies and many of these people have been to Palestine so they’ve seen for themselves how horrible the situation is. These are the people who helped to make our visit in Northfield seamless and who were wonderfully hospitable and generous.

Sunday morning began with driving around a part of the neighborhood where most of the churches are located. Most people were already inside praying, but we waved at passersby on the street. Then we went to a Baptist Church to do a quick version of our talk to a group of people there who have a regular study group on issues related to the Middle East. It was a mix of adults from that group and some middle school aged youth from a Sunday school class and their teacher. The talk went well and the people asked some really interesting questions that were specific and engaged. But one guy at the end of my presentation, who had his Bible on his lap, said that “God gave the Holy Land to the Jews because they are the chosen people” and therefore my talk was biased. Of course, I explain at the beginning of each talk that I am Jewish and also that I am presenting information about Palestinians that we don’t get in our media here in the U.S. It’s difficult to debate someone who is using a literal interpretation of the Bible, but from a Christian perspective–from Jesus’ teachings, more specifically–should one group of people be more privileged and special than others? Can one steal land and remove the indigenous population? Would Jesus support such behavior (aside from the fact that it’s been done all over the world precisely in this context…)? It just seems so contradictory to me.

Afterwards we went to the Unitarian Church where the former U.S. ambassador to Rwanda spoke. He left his post about five months prior to the genocide there. We missed his talk because of our own, but he told us about his time there and how he tried to lobby the U.S. government to intervene, but because of what had happened in Somalia it was too difficult to get the U.S. to do anything. I wanted Paul to say something to him about his experiences in the Congo and Rwanda because from his time there he sees so much money flooding into Rwanda and so much corruption, including their incursions into the Congo where there is a large-scale genocide happening that we never hear about in the U.S. and Rwanda exacerbates that problem. Apparently, his wife is quite Zionist and prior to his ambassadorship in Rwanda he was in Tel Aviv. She didn’t want us to speak in their church which is why we just went to socialize with the congregation after the service.

Our next event was at another grocery store (who knew that speaking engagements could happen in such spaces?), though this one was a food coop. They had a lovely room where we served some Palestinian olive oil and Arabic bread with za’atar. The olive oil was for sale and apparently the Canaan Fair Trade people who supplied Northfielders for Palestine with it have been asked to take off the “made in Palestine” logo on their label by Homeland Security so this may be one of the last batches with that label. I think this is something that happened only two weeks ago.

After our two talks at the grocery store we went out to dinner with more Northfielders for Palestine and then to a woman’s house who has been to Palestine 21 times. She is supportive of Palestinians, though her interest in biblical archeology and her understanding of the context was a bit off. I couldn’t discern whether this was due to old age or what. She would talk about “Arabic restaurants” in Nablus, but that’s what all the restaurants are. She also thought my kuffiyeh was a Jewish prayer shawl.

My time on the bus was finished up by going to a retirement home to meet with a woman who can’t get around too well, but she is a part of the Northfielders for Palestine. We visited with her and finished up with some tabling at St. Olaf’s College. And then I was off to the airport. Paul and I made a list of interesting questions and comments we heard over the course of our time on the bus which I thought I’d list here:

1. After showing a number of maps of Palestine I was asked what the West Bank was west of given that the Mediterranean wasn’t near there.

2. Do those people over there have a culture of revenge?

3. So how was it being kidnapped? (This one was for Paul)

4. They have been fighting for hundreds of years.

5. The language in Iran is Arabic.

6. A vet from the Iraq war (1991) shared that she got to Saudi Arabia and had to ask where Iraq was after arriving.

7. What is No Man’s Land (after Paul mimed, showed detailed maps, and explained thoroughly)?

8. In relation to Iraq, so they don’t want us there?

9. And, in the Baptist Church, apparently there is some new paradigm to look at the world through two poles: Jesus/Caesar.

Of course, Paul and I answered all such questions with patience, but it certainly demonstrates that there is a lot more mileage that the bus needs to cover in order to continue its work of educating people, even those who are already engaged, interested, concerned. There are so many other questions and comments we got that indicated that there is so much more people need to know. This is why the bus is so amazing and the people on the ground are so fabulous to help us get the word out. Most importantly there were many people interested in divestment and boycott, which would be great if we could turn Northfield into a Sommerville town and mimic their divestment project.

Our last couple events in South Dakota were amazing. On Thursday night we spoke in a Unitarian Church a bit outside Sioux Falls. The audience was filled with mostly older people and their pastor was an amazing woman who has done a lot of work for raising awareness about Palestine. One of the members of the church is a cousin of Rachel Corrie and at the end of our talk she spoke a bit about Rachel and I mentioned Rachel Corrie’s collected writings, which I just finished and which is quite remarkable, Let Me Stand Alone. I had wanted to bring it with us so that I could read a poem from it, but we didn’t have time to go back to our rooms before heading off to the church. In any case we took a photograph together after the talk:

Interestingly, it does not seem like many people from the church had been over there so I talked to them about groups like Interfaith Peace Builders and Holy Land Trust that do some of these historical/political/religious tours through Palestine. I think that the pastor is motivated to take the group in the near future. All of this in spite of the fact some Jewish member of the community recommended that they not have the bus come to the church. Fortunately, they stood up for defending truth and morality.

Our last events in Sioux Falls were on Friday morning. We started out at the University of Sioux Falls in a class that we were told was a Middle East History class, but in reality was a European history class that included some on the Nazi Holocaust and the state of Israel. But unlike the William Jewell class of students this group had a number of inquisitive questions for us. They didn’t seem to have a whole semester of propaganda under their belts and were genuinely interested in Iraq and Palestine. There was, however, one Vietnam veteran in the room who was adamant that Arabs and Jews have been fighting for hundreds of years and would not ever be able to stop. He seemed rather skeptical that this was not the case by any stretch of the imagination. But he also, of course, had no facts to argue his perception. We had a number of questions about the one-state solution and Paul, who often works in Rwanda, brought up a good point about how it is there now after a massive genocide–that things are getting back to “normal” (whatever that means), but that things can evolve beyond the bloodshed is the main point. I also think it is useful to think of U.S. history and its bloodiness in the Civil War or Civil Rights movement or other aspects that we have not gotten over. Certainly we live with racism in ways that are deeply problematic (most troubling through the prison industrial complex). That is important with respect to imagining a possible, though perhaps difficult, future.

Afterwards we went to the Hyvee supermarket to speak (who knew that that grocery stores had community spaces for lectures?!) for the Democratic Forum, which seems to be a space for the democratic party to meet, discuss local issues, and present information about relevant subjects. Former Senator Jim Abourezk helped to set this event up for us and it was a really interesting group of people. It was also mostly older people again with varying degrees of knowledge. Here is where we encountered the most interesting debate by far on this trip. For one thing there seemed to be a slightly jovial/somewhat hostile bantering between Jim and a local congressman named Mark Feinstein, whom Jim repeatedly referred to as the “Israel lobby.” But Mark never spoke or really asked any questions except when one older gentleman was speaking about Zionism and Mark accused him of mixing up his terms. But the man was correct; he was speaking the ideology not Jews and not the state of Israel. I’m not quite sure what Mark’s point was by all that. Afterwards things got even more interesting. We were leaving the grocery story and a young employee named John approached us and asked a few simple questions about Iraq and Palestine. I answered him, walked to the bus, and a few minutes later he was knocking at our door. He came on and sat with us for about a half hour. He was asking us about so many issues–from Hamas, to presidential candidates, to immigration, to Iraq, to Palestine. He said that he was very interested in understanding more and that he supports President Bush and that he is very interested in all of these subjects from a Roman Catholic perspective. But at the same time he was very open minded, until he wanted to know our position on abortion. Paul helped to save us on that one by diverting the conversation, but I agree that there are far more urgent issues affecting people who are alive and we need to attend to them before we can deal with such issues. Anyway, I sent him off with a copy of Kathy Kelly’s book Other Lands Have Dreams because I think it will help him to continue to question these issues he seems to care about and wants to learn more about.

At the end of the Democratic Forum we learned that there are 39 people from the Yankton reservation who are in jail and won’t be arraigned until Tuesday, I think. Jim Abourezk’s son is handling the legal case and they updated us. We were going to head down there for a few hours before leaving, but we had a blizzard! In late April! It was totally depressing to see snow on trees that are just budding. But didn’t Prince have lyrics to a song that said something like “sometimes it snows in April”?

So instead we drove straight through to Northfield, Minnesota. We arrived at a lovely couple’s warm and cozy home that i quite spacious. The husband spent some time in Beit Sahour last year working for imemc.org in Palestine. Northfield is home of Malt-o-Meal, apparently, something that I now notice in the air as you can smell it. It smells like maple syrup and it’s nice. It’s a cereal that is supposed to be like Cream of Wheat, but I haven’t ever had it. I hope to have some for breakfast before we leave. We also missed something cool last night before we got here Phillis Bennis was speaking at a local church where last fall they had a Palestine fair. Apparently, this town is amazingly active. Our host helped to start Northfielders for Palestine, which is a group of six churches that raises money, awareness, and sends delegations there, I believe.

Today we had one small event in the morning, a vigil in downtown Northfield, and then we went to Carlton College for a really nice, long presentation sponsored by the Amnesty International chapter on campus. There was one Jewish professor there who thanked me for what I said and there were a number of really eager students who wanted to learn more and who asked wonderful questions. They were also interested in divestment and boycott, which is fantastic so I talked about the Motorola campaign. It was interesting to speak on a campus where Paul Wellstone used to teach.

But after the event I got to meet a friend of a friend who filled me in on a very different Carleton College. Apparently there is only one Arab student on campus and there is a policy of not giving scholarship to international scholars from Arab states. The dean of admissions is apparently quite the Zionist and she has even taken a group of 50 students on Birthright, the Zionist free trip to Israel for all Jews under the age of 25. I also learned that there is this odd phenomenon of students wearing “free Darfur” t-shirts while also wearing IDF (Israeli “Defense” Forces) bracelets. Such an odd juxtaposition (unless one realizes how Zionists in the U.S. like to control discussion of and work around genocide so that they can ensure that Jewish suffering is always already elevated to the most important. Of course, the Zionists love Darfur because it enables them to mythologize another history and pretend like it’s an Arab-Black African conflict when it’s nothing of the sort). This student has done some really cool stuff on campus that has gotten her into trouble such as Boxes and Walls, which sounds like the Tunnel of Oppression that we did at Boise State. This is a series of rooms that are set up with actors performing guerrilla theater who are acting out various scenes from the lives of daily Palestinians: at Huwara checkpoint, the Apartheid wall, curfew in Bethlehem for example. For performing this educational service, however, faculty members created a petition against her saying that the exhibition was anti-Semitic. There have been other issues there, too, though there seems to be a stronger group of supporters at St. Olaf College, where we’ll be on Monday. They have a Palestine solidarity group so it should be good.

Back outside, now, to the blizzard here…

The past couple of days have been filled with amazing people, food, and experiences on the Wheels of Justice tour. Yesterday we drove up from Sioux Falls to Marshall, Minnesota to speak at Southwest Minnesota State University. We spoke in a conference center in the student union building and a bunch of professors attended with their students. The students seemed predominantly quiet, but professors asked Paul and I a number of good questions. Unlike other stops people here were curious and genuinely interested in learning more about other sides to the story than those they receive from the mainstream U.S. media. We had some good discussions about what it means for victimized people to become victimizers as well as the viability of a one-state solution and why it is important for everyone’s rights to be met. The drive up there was long (about 2 hours each way), and apparently we traveled through the plains areas where America’s darling (aka its favorite writer of settler colonialism for youth to consume on tv and in storybooks), Laura Ingalls Wilder, comes from. There were enormous windmills everywhere along the farm landscape, which was mostly flat.

We reached Sioux Falls and went to our favorite local haunt here, Black Sheep Coffee, which has a fabulous bumper sticker on its door:

This coffee shop is in a neighborhood near a refugee resettlement support center and it seems as though historically Ethiopians and Vietnamese people are those who have populated this area. The coffee shop always seems to be filled with local Ethiopian folks (some of whom own an Ethiopian restaurant next door) all of whom love our bus. One man we met asked us to photograph him with the bus this morning:

Suffice it to say that parking the bus out front, on a main thoroughfare through the city, has attracted a number of great conversations among the locals here in Sioux Falls (in fact when we first pulled up here a woman greeted us exclaiming, “I love the bus!”).

When we got back from Minnesota yesterday we drove over to a local public library in Sioux Falls where we spoke for two hours, which was great as it afforded Paul and I time to add other aspects of the occupation of Iraq and Palestine that we feel overlap (particularly refugee stories in Lebanon and Israeli aggression against Lebanon and its effect on Palestinians and Lebanese alike there). We had a great conversation with the group of community members, including a local pastor whose church we’ll speak at tonight. There was another young man who is a welder who was interested in learning about the great strides labor unions in Canada are making with Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions. There was one young man there last night who appears to be the son of a Jewish professor at Augustana College who, along with another Jewish professor, both of whom are staunchly Zionist, kept us from speaking on their campus. Fortunately, this young man knows how to think for himself and was there to learn more about Palestine and Iraq in ways that depart from what he has learned at home. After the lecture we returned to our host’s home for a lovely homemade dinner. He’s someone who volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement, too, a few years before me and he works at Augustana.

Although we were not able to speak at Augustana, we were able to set up a table in their student union this morning for a few hours, which frankly was one of the better moments of this tour. We put out informational flyers and such about Palestine and Iraq and were able to have lengthy conversations with genuinely curious people who were not necessarily on the same page as us, but who certainly wanted to have a conversation. I was very impressed with the students on this small campus. They were engaged and committed and I imagine that these are the sorts of young people who will follow up on things like the UN Resolutions and Geneva Conventions that we discussed. Funnily enough our table was set up underneath a cheerleading promotional sign:

After that we were scheduled to have an interview on KCSF 90.9 on a show called Dakota Midday with Paul Guggenheimer. Actually, someone called the station and tried to get him not to interview us (well, me in particular) because he was told that I advocate for the destruction of the state of Israel (which I do, technically speaking, given that creating a one-state solution involved not having a Jewish state, but it doesn’t involve exiling Jews). But we talked for a good fifteen minutes on the phone yesterday and found that I wasn’t the extremist that people assume me to be by surfing the Internet and finding random libelous stories about me. But when we arrived he was not aware that I was not speaking as myself, but as a part of the Wheels of Justice tour and that the point of the bus is that we never separate the issues. They are intertwined as dual occupations and that is why Paul and I are here together. So when we got there and they wouldn’t interview Paul, we had to leave. Strange that it is so hard to get Iraq on the table. Even stranger that someone who interviews people for a living on a public radio station can’t just wing it given whatever the latest morning’s headlines are about Iraq and ask questions and take from there by letting the conversation emerge naturally.

In the end it was fine because someone from the station wants to put us on TV tomorrow morning. But we got to go to lunch earlier as a result, which was an incredible treat. Amazing kibbe in Sioux Falls. Former South Dakota Senator Jim Abourezk (of Lebanese origin) and his wife Sanaa (Syrian) have an amazing restaurant called Sanaa’s. The food is really high quality, organic, and the restaurant is certified as green (even take away containers are made from biodegradable materials). She has a great cookbook that Paul and I bought, too. The food reminds me a lot of Aunt Salwa’s in Beirut near my old apartment. So we had kibbe and kofta!

The food was amazing, the decor was bright, cheery, and beautiful. We also found an old cash register that belonged to Jim’s grandfather when he first came over to the U.S. from a village in South Lebanon as a peddler in the late nineteenth-century. Later he opened a shop on an American Indian reservation where Jim was born. Here is the cash register:

Jim’s life has been amazing. His parents’ story is wonderful to listen to as is his life in general. He’s done so much for people in South Dakota, particularly the indigenous here, and also for people around the world. His office wall was an amazing feast for the eyes, filled with pictures of him with people from Abu Jihad, to George Habash, to Yassir Arafat, to Fidel Castro, to American Indian Movement leaders….the list goes on and on. Here are some photographs of Jim pointing out these photographs to us and giving us his mesmerizing life story:

Jim has been to Tibet with National Geographic reporters, advised filmmakers like those producing Lakota Woman, founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and authored legislation like the Indian Children’s Welfare Act. And that’s just the beginning. Here is one recent award he received that he shared with us:

Sioux Falls is turning out to be an amazing experience, a fascinating place. More soon…

Take Action: House to Vote on Resolution Today on Israel’s 60th Anniversary

TAKE ACTION

Today the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on H.Con.Res.322, “recognizing the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the modern State of Israel and reaffirming the bonds of close friendship and cooperation between the United States and Israel.”

In addition, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has reserved time each week through June for Representatives to make statements on the floor of Congress on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary.

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation urges all of its member groups and individual supporters to contact their Representative in Congress and ask him/her not to vote for resolutions or make statements that recognize Israel’s 60th anniversary but fail to recognize the historic injustices that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people and the injustices that it continues to inflict daily. To send your message today, please click here.

Below is a copy of talking points which the US Campaign faxed to each Representative yesterday.

Talking Points on H. Con. Res. 322 and Israel’s 60th Anniversary

On Tuesday, April 22, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote under suspension on H. Con. Res. 322, “recognizing the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the modern State of Israel and reaffirming the bonds of close friendship and cooperation between the United States and Israel.” In addition, Speaker Pelosi has reserved floor time each week through June for Representatives to make statements on Israel’s 60th anniversary.

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of more than 250 organizations working to change U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine to support human rights, international law and equality for all, has prepared the following talking points for the consideration of Representatives voting on resolutions and making statements on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary.

* The establishment of the State of Israel was accompanied by the widespread ethnic cleansing and dispossession of indigenous Palestinians from their homes and lands. Israel destroyed at least 418 Palestinian villages and towns and caused to flee or forcibly exiled at least 711,000 Palestinians. Palestinians recall this record of destruction, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing as the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, in Arabic.

* To this day, Israel has prevented these Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who now number nearly 4.5 million people, from exercising their right to return despite the fact that this right is guaranteed generally under international humanitarian law and specifically by UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Meanwhile, Israel adopted a law of return which guarantees Israeli citizenship to Jewish people worldwide. By treating people differently based on ethnicity or religion, Israel’s differential treatment of Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants is one manifestation of its apartheid policies.
* Palestinians who were not ethnically cleansed from their homes and lands in 1948 were given Israeli citizenship but remain subject to discriminatory policies. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship were forced to live under military occupation until 1966. The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel today counts more than 20 Israeli laws that explicitly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel who comprise approximately 20% of Israel’s population. Palestinian citizens of Israel are also discriminated against in land use policies and Palestinian communities in Israel receive disproportionately less government funding than Jewish communities. The second-class citizenship of Palestinians in Israel and the discrimination they are subjected to are another manifestation of Israel’s apartheid policies.
* Since 1967, Israel has illegally occupied the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. Israel’s brutal record of collective punishment, torture, killing of civilians, building illegal Israeli settlements, walls, barriers, and checkpoints is well-documented by Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations. The fact that Palestinians are subjected to military laws under perpetual military occupation while Israeli settlers are subjected to civil law and can drive on Israeli-only roads in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is yet another manifestation of Israel’s apartheid policies.

Given Israel’s 60-year record of ethnic cleansing, dispossession, discrimination, military occupation, and apartheid against Palestinians, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation urges Representatives not to vote for resolutions or make statements that fail to recognize the historic injustices that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people and the injustices that it continues to inflict daily. Members of Congress have an obligation to pass resolutions and make statements that accurately reflect the historical record and not unambiguously applaud the anniversary of countries such as Israel with such dismal human rights records.

Don’t forget to send your message to your Representative by clicking here.

We arrived from Missouri this evening to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We started out this morning with the presentation at William Jewell College in the political science professor, Alan Holiman’s class (see post on him two entries ago). The class, as it turns out, is one that focuses solely on the political system within the Israeli state, and somehow Palestinians do not seem to enter into the equation. He told me that he did have the students read one chapter on “Arab Israelis.” When pressed he admitted that those he identifies as “Arab Israelis” are actually Palestinians though it seems as though such a fact was likely not shared with his students–especially judging from the questions they asked. It seems that he had invited the bus to come because he thought the speaker would be an Israeli American and that there would be only one speaker. Although he had received my biography and also Paul’s (our Iraq speaker) he did not register through email, in his office, or in the classroom that both of us were speaking and that this is the point of the tour. After he only introduced me I reminded him that Paul was speaking as well and that our bus is about not separating the occupations of Iraq and Palestine. So Bill the bus driver introduced the bus and we introduced ourselves. After we spoke we engaged with the students for a while; the first student, however, had read my earlier blog post about his professor and defended him, particularly my comment about the brainwashing. While it may have been “unprofessional” as Holiman himself told me at the very end in private, I think that not revealing the sorts of Zionist entities one involves oneself in while conducting research or going on fact-finding missions is unprofessional, deceptive, duplicitous (on his part as well as the alumni magazine that published his article, see two posts down). In any case, given the level of indoctrination and one-sidedness these students have experienced this semester I think it was an amazing opportunity that we had to speak to them about the situation in Palestine and Iraq. Most of them wanted to know about “terrorists” and other typical questions leading me to believe that their knowledge of Palestinians remains in the realm of the stereotypical.

One big thing I forgot to share yesterday is that on Sunday, the day we spoke at the Methodist Church in Missouri (or Kansas?) there was a full-page ad taken out in the Kansas City Star that stated: “Teshuvah A Night to Remember, the Call to Repentance for Sins Christians Committed Against the Jewish People; We Christians Humble Ourselves Before the Almighty One in the Witness of the Jewish People to Confess and Repent for our Sins.” It was advertising some event on May 13th at the Kehilath Israel Synagogue in Overland Park, Kansas with Christian leaders. Here are photographs of the very disturbing ad:

Anyway, after the talk at the college we hit the road towards Sioux Falls. While we were headed north on I-29 I received an email on my phone from a friend about a protest near where we were headed:

There is a protest going on right now as we speak in Marty, South Dakota home of the Ihanktowan aka Yankton Sioux. There have been multiple arrests, including minors, as protesters seek to block front loader bulldozers from breaking ground on a new pig farm that will be occupied by thousands of pigs and their waste near a Head Start Program filled with Native children. A man was struck by the metal scoop of the front loader (which is used to excavate tons of dirt) and was medically evacuated by ambulance. State Troopers have violated their jurisdiction by arresting protesters on a BIA controlled road which is considered Federal land and therefore off limits to State Agencies and Law Enforcement. It was said that the arrests of the minors and others were conducted illegally by the State Police on the Federal Road and they were escorted to State Land nearby to receive their citations and were released. South Dakota Highway Patrol has informed the Officers that they are in fact in violation of their jurisdiction as this is being written and being told to stand down and not to detain anymore protesters. Dakota, Lakota and Nakota and other Native Activists including a AIM chapter are mobilizing to this spot to support and join their Indigenous Families to protect their Native children and community from this gross violation of Tribal Sovereignty and Basic Human Rights.

There is a video report from a local news channel showing the intense police presence, especially compared to the protesters. They also have a written report. I had asked my friend if he had any contacts there so we could take the bus and stand in solidarity with them, but unfortunately his sense was that it’s so difficult to do that sort of work here as white people have so totally screwed over American Indians again and again that trust levels bottomed out a long time ago. It’s sad that this is the state of affairs here as I know how powerful it can be in Palestine to have solidarity among internationals (technically what we are given we’re the colonizers here, the foreigners) and how much that helps–especially when it comes to police who are racist and trigger happy.

I’ll be watching the news to see what develops in any case and to see if I hear a response from the person in the tribe whom I emailed. For now here are a couple more photos from the road:

…Well, not Manhattan, Kansas as I thought. It’s Merriam Kansas, and more specifically Shawnee, Kansas. Shawnee is the name for the tribe of indigenous people who used to live here before it was overrun with European settlements (signs are everywhere indicating where this “pioneer” or that “pioneer” once crossed here–hmmm…sound familiar? This language of the “pioneer” is the same settler-colonial language used by the Jews who colonized Palestine), strip malls, and people who find it necessary to build their communities so that they have to drive everywhere. We have a day off today so Paul and I decided to take a walk to a cafe where we imagined we could drink some coffee, have a snack, and do some work for a while. The closest spot was a two mile walk away. On our way there we were given the finger by drivers by at least three times (perhaps my End the Occupation t-shirt was what led to this neighborly gesture). We kept thinking that if we were in some small village in Lebanon everyone would have been pulling over, asking us if we were okay, if we needed a ride or directions, and would have given us plenty of tea or coffee to drink. No one was on the street (okay, we counted ten people) walking around and shops and things were seemingly deserted. We did find one particularly disturbing sight along the way:

I’ve never seen something so strange in my life. In small town America it is apparently important to have a Red Cross flag over a doll store and an ambulance to fix broken dolls. Odd.

We escaped this downtown Shawnee area and tried to find a bus. It turns out that the buses only run at night. We called a taxi company. They told us they have no cars. So we walked a bit until we got to a mall. Huge shock. We went inside to get some juice and then called Bill to rescue us with the Wheels of Justice bus.

Truth be told yesterday was far better when we were actually speaking. We went to a local Methodist Church and spoke in between services. The church took the old historic part of the church with beautiful stained glass windows and made it into a coffee bar, which was beautiful.

The crowd was not as lively as the previous night, but it was larger and people listened attentively. Afterwards I got one question that was a bit odd, though I suppose expected given our context. An elderly man asked me about the Israelites. Either his context is entirely biblical and he doesn’t understand that the Jews who colonized Palestine are not in any way related to the Israelites in the Bible or he’s attended the local political science classes here where Palestinians are referred to as the biblical Philistines by at least one university professor. Most of the audience seemed interested and took the informational materials from us at the conclusion of the lecture.

We spent the time after church getting lost yet again, this time trying to find a Kinkos to copy some more flyers. One would think that this would be ubiquitous in suburban Amrika, but it’s not. We finally found one, but after staring at the Kansas map for hours I realized that we’re not far from Leavenworth Federal Prison where political prisoner Leonard Peltier has spent most of his prison sentence. I think he is in Terre Haute, Indiana now, but I find it interesting as my students are watching the film Incident at Oglala this week while I’m gone.

So…all of this would have been posted earlier but I had to have one last adventure on the bus. My computer keyboard decided to die today. Thankfully, in nearby Missouri there was a Mac store where I could diagnose the problem (though not enough time to fix it…) and get a new keyboard which resolves the situation for the time being. I have to say that this yuppie-ville place where the Apple store is seemed quite different than everything out here. The architecture was Moorish with some really beautiful mosaic patterns and gardens in between the different sides of the road.

So one last bit here before we take off for South Dakota tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully there will be no more mishaps along the way.

Day one and a half of the Wheels of Justice Tour… These will just be a few fragments as I only just arrived in Manhattan, Kansas yesterday, but we have started speaking. It’s very interesting to be on the other side of this tour–not just hosting them, but being on the bus and being taken in by strangers in a strange town and being welcomed.

My trip started off with something rather startling for me. I was waiting to board my plane in the Boise airport and all of a sudden I realized that the man sitting across from me had chains around his ankles and wrists, which he struggled with as he tried to read a newspaper. Apparently it is not uncommon for prisoners to fly on passenger airplanes, but in all my flying this is not something I’ve ever witnessed. I found it extremely upsetting to see this man paraded about in such a dehumanized fashion. But no one seemed to take notice or seem disturbed by it. I heard later that they often will take prisoners off surrounded by various law enforcement officials fully armed and ready to shoot. I’m not sure if this happened as I was off of the plane already. But I suspect that they moved my seat to the front of the plane (as they did with three others) because they didn’t want us to sit on the back of the plane with this man. This man who is put on display as a criminal, though I suspect that it is American society that is the criminal that put him in this position in the first place.

I arrived to the home of the family hosting us in Manhattan, Kansas after a brief lay over in Denver (thank God for airports with restaurants/bars that allow you to smoke!). The family consists of a woman who teaches in a Catholic high school and her husband who is a professor at a Baptist university here (where we’ll be speaking on Tuesday). They are really active and extremely hospitable (I almost feel like I’m back in Palestine or Lebanon…but alas ma fi kibbe ). I got to spend some time meeting the new Iraq speaker Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence who is amazing. She has worked so long on this issue and is so devoted in every way. She has spent time in jail, helped Iraqi refugees, and taken something like 27 trips to Iraq to help since the time of the sanctions. She has a recent article on Truthout.org and she is really inspirational.

Our first gig together was on a radio show this afternoon in Missouri on a show called “Every Woman” on KKFI community radio. It was a bit odd as it was the first time I had an interview with someone who didn’t do a bit of research about the subject on which she was interviewing. This was especially unusual for me in dealing with community radio. She didn’t know I was the Palestine speaker (she thought ever fabulous Nora was still on the bus) and when I mentioned Lebanon it was literally almost as if she had never heard the word before. But it was fine, that is what I’m here for: to educate people. I think the interview went pretty well and both Kathy and I had time to get major points across, but it is so hard to compress such a complex issue into even just an hour radio interview or presentation.

Tonight we did our presentations at a house party/potluck at someone’s house (I don’t know if we were in Missouri or Kansas: another reminder that there are no historical, architectural features that distinguish one state from another in any visible way). The people there were lovely and interesting, though typical peace activists in so many respects. Wanting to do good and trying to help, but not having time to do as much as they would like because they work too much, have family responsibilities. Another affirmation about why I don’t want a family. Don’t want to get married. The ability to be free enough to speak and do the political work one needs to do is always already diminished by such commitments. Anyway, two people at this event were folks we met randomly today. The bus is parked on the suburban street in front of the people’s home where we are staying. A guy named Pablo came up to the house asking about the bus. Apparently he’s got his own bus of sorts. He has a van that he drives around town that says “Democracy Now!” the sides of it as his one-man crusade to get the news program broadcast here. Here is a picture of Pablo and his van:

Pablo came with his sweet son who had just graduated from high school and is far too hard on himself because he doesn’t yet know what he wants to do with the rest of his life. I say bravo! I wish more young people were that honest and open to figure it out rather than rushing into college (or God forbid the military) before they are aware enough to make such choices.

After we ate from array of typical American potluck dishes Kathy and I spoke. She started first with a delightful and rather performative story about what happened when she spoke in Ireland and inspired some activists to disarm a U.S. war plane, which led to their arrest, and thankfully their acquittal. I found a snipped of her speech online which I liked above, but I want to quote it here too because it’s quite amazing:

Mr. Nix told us he had recently been in a park where he’d listened to children laugh and shout as they happily chased ducks and each other around on the green grass. He thought a sound of universal happiness must be the sound of children playing.
But now his tone darkened. “Now Lebanon is burning,” he thundered. “Today, children swimming in a pool were bombed. A swimming pool is now filled with burning children. This is war.”

From the The Guardian that morning (7/18/06, p.4):
“Whatever the Israelis’ intended target, the bomb fell on a small water canal next to the Qasmia refugee camp [near Tyre, in southern Lebanon], home to about 500 Palestinians. Its victims were 11 children taking an afternoon swim in the canal. The first blast left a crater nearly four metres deep, burying many of the swimmers deep under the orange earth. Seven of the children were injured, three critically. Three others have not been found.
‘The scene was littered with small plastic sandals, several caked in blood.” Ismael, the father of one of the children, sat on the edge of the crater, his head in his hands weeping. “Children! Children!” he roared through his tears, “Children here! My son here.” He stood and looked down into the crater: “Is Hizbullah here? Only children here,” he said.’”

When he had finished his talk, Mr. Nix asked the jurors and all of us present: “What would rise you to action?

And that’s a question we all need to think about. As I write, the jury in Ireland is still deliberating. Five brave men and women in Dublin tonight wait to learn their futures. Thousands more in Lebanon and Iraq and in so many other places look towards theirs with utter dread and uncertainty - many will not have futures. The peace movement is on trial in Dublin, where a media blackout has eclipsed nearly all reporting of the trial. But it’s on trial everywhere, every time one of us makes our decision either to get more involved, or perhaps to sit back and watch a little. We are left with their bravery, with the suffering of so many, and with Mr. Nix’s final accusation: “What will rise us to action?” We are all of us on trial tonight.

Afterwards I spoke about Palestinian refugees in Jordan (who fled Iraq after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq), in Lebanon (including the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in summer 2006), and in Palestine. I went on too long, I fear, but I find it so impossible to compress and condense this subject matter. And I fear if I leave something out that so much context will be lost along the way. I wasn’t sure what to expect tonight as when I went to Drew University to speak last week I was confronted with a room full of Zionists and Hillel folks (first time this year surprisingly enough). But I found it so easy to deal with them because all they seemed to come at me with were statements like “you seem anti-Israel or anti-Zionist.” Which, on one level, yes I am both of those things, but predominantly because I am pro-human rights and pro-international law and anti-colonialism. Anyway, no such people seemed to be here tonight. Instead, there was a room full of engaged people who asked some really great questions, especially in relation to what they might read or where they might find alternative information. Of course, I plugged Nora’s Flashpoints.

One of the more interesting things I heard buzzing about the room all night, which I found a bit frightening and disturbing was this new Zionist lobbying group J Street. Some people were even stating that they have donated money to them already. Amazing how ready people are to just grasp at straws because the climate here is so dismal. But it doesn’t take much poking around on their website to figure out that this is a wolf disguised in sheep’s clothing. First obvious point is that they are pro-Israel. One cannot be pro-justice for Palestinians and pro-Israel. It just doesn’t work like that. This organization stands by the two-state solution, and its description of borders and swapping land sounds extremely fishy, plus their idea of the Right of Return under UN Resolution 194 is sending everyone back to Ramallah. And on their two-state proposal I see no mention of international law or human rights. It’s just unbelievable. Really, how different is their agenda than AIPAC’s? Okay, I guess they don’t want to bomb Iran. That’s great. But with respect to justice for Palestinians? I see no evidence of this on their website or in articles I’ve read about them thus far. Very disturbing development. How easy it is to deceive.

Speaking of human rights and Israel…here’s one for the record books of the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East”:

Israel has said it will not allow a UN official appointed to investigate Israeli human rights abuses to enter the country or Palestinian territories.

This was reported widely, but this bit was taken from the BBC. It seems that Richard Falk is not allowed to enter Palestine or Israel. Hmmm… do democracies block human rights workers from entering their countries? This doesn’t seem very democratic. Might we want to ask what it is that Israel wants to hide? Not that we really need to wonder if we read Ma’an News or IMEMC and see what’s really going on every single day.

So tomorrow we speak in a Methodist church in the morning in between services. Then on Tuesday we’re going to speak at William Jewell College, I believe we’re speaking to one particular class. His name is Alan Holiman and he is either deeply brainwashed or just not very clear on the subject of Palestine if I may judge from an article he wrote after joining Defense of Democracies and spending time in Israel. This organization is very scary–one of those Orwellian name twists that is exactly the opposite of what it purports to be. Holiman’s view may or may not have come from working with that organization, but wherever it came from it is frighteningly disturbing:

The Bible records that Jonathan and Saul died fighting the Philistines at Gilboa, in Galilee, now in northern Israel. Today Gilboa is home to Israel’s primary maximum security prison for convicted terrorists. It holds 850 of the approximately 5,500 terrorists in custody nationwide.

Amazing that a university professor can blur the line between stories in the Bible with modern day people and events. Moreover, he names Palestinian political prisoners, most of whom are not convicted but rather administrative detainees and definitely not terrorists. As Kathy remarked in one conversation tonight when she was sharing a story about a conversation she had with a U.S. soldier. She asked him if a foreign army invaded and occupied the U.S. would he defend the U.S. After considering it he admitted that he would risk his life to defend his country. But then why is it we are so quick to label those who engage in that same activity in Iraq and Palestine as “terrorists”?

And with that I will rest for my church gig in the morning. Tisbah ala watan to all my lajaeen friends!