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Announcement :: Peace |
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Call To Action! May 3: Voices For Peace Day In Madison, WI ! |
Current rating: 0 |
by Generations For Peace
Email: may3event (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) |
22 Apr 2003
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Calling all those wanting peace and social justice, to those who oppose militarism, interventionism, and imperialism!
Calling all those willing to defend democratic rights, the right to peacefully assemble and dissent; all those who uphold the right to petition for redress; all those who oppose Patriot Act surveillance and repression, racial profiling and the mass round-up of immigrants!
Calling activists of all age and description - Green, Red, and Black, faith-based and secular; all performance artists and musicians, poets and magicians!
We call you to join with others throughout the region to raise our "Voices for Peace"!
Come to Madison on May 3rd for a day of peace activities, starting with a RALLY and MARCH at 11 AM on the Library Mall at State and Lake Streets. Following will be an afternoon and evening of workshops, teachins, street theatre, tree plantings and other events presented by peace organizations, churches and community groups. Join us in a broad exploration of the plans and intentions of U.S.government, the future of the Middle East, and the methods for building the peace and justice movement. |
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PLEASE CIRCULATE AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE!!!
VOICES FOR PEACE DAY - SATURDAY, 11AM, MAY 3RD, U.W. LIBRARY MALL IN MADISON, WISCONSIN
Calling all those wanting peace and social justice, to those who oppose militarism, interventionism, and imperialism!
Calling all those willing to defend democratic rights, the right to peacefully assemble and dissent; all those who uphold the right to petition for redress; all those who oppose Patriot Act surveillance and repression, racial profiling and the mass round-up of immigrants!
Calling activists of all age and description - Green, Red, and Black, faith-based and secular; all performance artists and musicians, poets and magicians!
We call you to join with others throughout the region to raise our "Voices for Peace"!
Come to Madison on May 3rd for a day of peace activities, starting with a RALLY and MARCH at 11 AM on the Library Mall at State and Lake Streets. Following will be an afternoon and evening of workshops, teachins, street theatre, tree plantings and other events presented by peace organizations, churches and community groups. Join us in a broad exploration of the plans and intentions of U.S.government, the future of the Middle East, and the methods for building the peace and justice movement.
Are you concerned that the US military conquest of Iraq is just the next war in Bush's endless "war on terrorism"? More "pre-emptive strikes"
are already forecast. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush have made it clear that Syria, Iran and North Korea are next on the list.
Are you unsure why the U.S. government attacked Iraq? Does the government appear less interested in peace than in military and corporate domination?
Are you worried about our civil rights? We are told we fight for "freedom" and "liberty" abroad. Yet John Ashcroft increases domestic surveillance, curtails civil liberties and locks up suspects and accused without access to counsel or a speedy trial here at home.
Are you upset at the costs? Our government spends over $400 billion a year on the military while cutting veterans benefits, defunding our schools and raiding the Social Security funds intended for our retirement. To 'stimuate' the economy, the Bush government has given away trillions in tax breaks to the rich - knowing full well that the resulting government deficits will lead to more cuts in social spending to 'balance' the budget. The end result for people who have to work for a living, for the increasingly insecure middle class, the elderly, the young and the poor? For us? It will likely mean more unemployment, lower wages, decreased benefits, deferred retirement and a shredded social net.
And are you concerned for our youth, our kids? They are growing up in a poor economy, with decreasing opportunities - will a "career choice"'
in the military end up as their only option?
Join with friends and neighbors, with those desiring a meaningful lasting peace from across Wisconsin and the region. Gather in Madison, our historic center of resistance to war and intervention abroad, on May 3rd. Help raise a collective popular "Voice for Peace", a call for a safer and saner society based on rational and just foreign and domestic policies. Say NO TO WAR and YES TO A NEW VISION FOR THE UNITED STATES.
PARTICIPATE!
* MARCH in the parade! If you are a group, even an informal group of neighbors, make a banner to identify your group in the parade!
* Be in the ROLL CALL FOR PEACE - groups with banners are invited to participate in the Roll Call at parade end!
* There will be a TABLING AREA where you can distribute your group's literature. Contact may3event (at) yahoo.com for details.
* Sign up to JAM FOR PEACE - Musicians please contact jam4peace (at) yahoo.com for stage time!
* RUN A TEACH-IN/WORKSHOP on a topic relevant to peacework. Space is very limited! Contact may3event (at) yahoo.com as soon as possible.
* ORGANIZE A COMPLEMENTARY EVENT FOR THE DAY - sunrise peace ceremony, sunset ceremony, peace singalong, etc. Let us know and we will cross-promote by listing your event in the day's schedule!
* ENDORSE the event! Your group will be added to the Endorsements List. Please send notice of endorsement to kinbote (at) charter.net
* HELP PUBLICIZE! Spread the word! And print and distribute the Posters!
http://voicesforpeaceday.org |
See also:
http://voicesforpeaceday.org
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Comments
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Puppets?! Oh Boyohboyoboy!!! |
by bfd
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -1
22 Apr 2003
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Puppets? Chock full o' meaningful content, per usual.
It's pretty telling that you have to find events going on 300 miles away to keep the momentum going behind the pro-appeasement movement. |
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Re: Plenty Of Local Peace Activity |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
22 Apr 2003
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You need go no further than North Prospect Avenue, just north of the I-74 interchange, to participate in peace activism, just so no one is led astray by bfd's ignorant statement. It happen's every Sat. from 2pm until at least 3:30pm.
There are lots of other activities going on in town, but I'll let others take care of posting about those.
BTW, bfd, this is a long way from being over. Even the more intlligent pro-war types acknowledged from the beginning that defeating Iraq was going to be the easy part. Occupying it will be the hard part. |
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Re: Call To Action! May 3: Voices For Peace Day In Madison, WI ! |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -2
22 Apr 2003
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PEACE IS AT HAND. Iraqi citizens thanked us. Now we will rebuild their country and make it into an oasis of democracy in a world of hate. WE WIN AGAIN.
Jack |
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When In Doubt, Revise |
by bfd
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -2
23 Apr 2003
Modified: 11:18:43 AM |
ML, please, please, please keep making predictions.
"We won the war - but can we win the peace?" Let me just beat you to the empty, flip slogan of the day, now that the other ones have been refuted, exhausted, or just gone out of style (and by the way, the answer is yes, we can, and yes, we will). I'll even make it easy for you and provide you with the next one, free of charge. "Well, yeah, Iraq worked out okay, but what about Palestine, huh? What about that?" |
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Unintended Consequences: U.S. Planners Surprised By Strength Of Iraqi Shiites |
by Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
23 Apr 2003
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As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.
The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.
"It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out," a State Department official said. "I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
Complicating matters is that the United States has virtually no diplomatic relationship with Iran, leaving U.S. officials in the dark about the goals and intentions of the government in Tehran. The Iranian government is the patron of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Iraqi Shiite group.
Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, a major strategic goal of the United States has been to contain radical Shiite fundamentalism. In the 1980s, the United States backed Hussein as a bulwark against Iran. But by this year, the drive to topple Hussein -- who had suppressed Iraq's Shiite majority for decades -- loomed as a much more important objective for the administration.
U.S. intelligence reports reaching top officials throughout the government this week said the Shiites appear to be much more organized than was thought. On Monday, one meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq's Shiites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq.
The administration hopes the U.S.-led war in Iraq will lead to a crescent of democracies in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Israeli-occupied territories and Saudi Arabia. But it could just as easily spark a renewed fervor for Islamic rule in the crescent, officials said.
"This is a 25-year project," one three-star general officer said. "Everyone agreed it was a huge risk, and the outcome was not at all clear."
The CIA has cultivated some Shiite clerics, but not many, and not for very long. The CIA is helping to move clerics safely into towns where they can build a political base. In Najaf, for instance, agency case officers worked with a couple of clerics.
"We don't want to allow Persian fundamentalism to gain any foothold," a senior administration official said. "We want to find more moderate clerics and move them into positions of influence."
One major problem is that Hussein executed hundreds of Shiite clerics and exiled thousands more, leaving behind few Shiite civic or religious leaders of national standing.
Shortly after Baghdad fell, Abdul Majid Khoei, a London-based Shiite cleric who was working with U.S. Special Forces, was stabbed to death at a shrine in Najaf, apparently by followers of a young anti-American Shiite leader. They also surrounded the Najaf home of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the nation's top Shiite cleric, and ordered him to leave the city before tribal elders persuaded them to disperse.
U.S. officials are hoping to combat fundamentalism by helping the Iraqis build a secular education system. Before 1991, Iraq had what was regarded as one of the finest education systems in the region, but years of economic sanctions have devastated it.
"The most radical aspects of Islam are in places with no education at all but the Koran," an official said. "There is no math, no culture. You counter that [fundamentalism] by doing something with the education system."
The Shiites of Iraq make up about 60 percent of the population, compared with less than 20 percent for the Sunnis that have long dominated Iraqi political life. Shiite Muslims, who make up less than 15 percent of the world's 1 billion Muslims, formed their own sect shortly after the death of Muhammad, founder of Islam, in 632.
While Shiites are the majority in Iran and Iraq, the Shiites in Iraq are Arab, not Persian, giving U.S. officials hope that a strong sense of Iraqi nationalism and a tradition of resisting the concept of a single supreme Shiite ruler will keep Persian fundamentalism in check. "There is a big difference, a tremendous difference, between Persian and Arab Shiites," a U.S. official said.
Indeed, some experts believe ending the suppression of Iraqi Shiites will begin to turn the center of the religion away from Iran. The shrines of two of its most revered imams -- the Shiite successors to Mohammed -- are in Najaf and Karbala.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts and Iraq experts said they warned the Bush administration before the war about vanquishing Hussein's government without having anything to replace it. But officials said the concerns were either not heard or fell too low on the priority list of postwar planning.
Chalabi's influence, particularly with senior policymakers at the Pentagon, helped play down the prospects for trouble, some officials said. "They really did believe he is a Shiite leader," although he had been out of the country for 45 years, a U.S. official said. "They thought, 'We're set, we've got a Shiite -- check the box here.' "
"We're flying blind on this. It's a classic case of politics and intelligence," said Walter P. "Pat" Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. "In this case, the policy community have absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much."
U.S. officials have tried to make inroads with Iraq's most important Shiite group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), starting with contacts in Kuwait about five years ago. A senior representative of SCIRI met with Vice President Cheney in August when U.S. officials gathered leaders of the Iraqi opposition groups in Washington.
But SCIRI, which is based in Tehran and is closely linked with the Iranian government, boycotted the first U.S.-sponsored meeting of Iraqi political and religious leaders in the town of Ur to discuss the country's political future. Over the years, "there was not as much contact as there should have been," the State Department official said.
"They expected a much warmer reception, and as a result it would be unnecessary for them to deal with some of these issues," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a Brookings Institution scholar, who was one of President Bill Clinton's top Iraq specialists. "That flawed assumption is at the heart of some of the reasons they are scrambling now."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com |
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Re: Call To Action! May 3: Voices For Peace Day In Madison, WI ! |
by Jack Ryan
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: -2
27 Apr 2003
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Dear by Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest
So the Shite's held a parade. It is similar to one viewing are war protesters and thinking that many people in the USA felt as you left wingers do. In fact, 70 + percent of the American people supported President Bush. So, the lesson is do not be fooled by a bunch of Nutbags marching down the steet. We were not.
If you happen, for once, to be right, all the more reason to make a right turn with our tanks and troops and hit the Iranians just as hard. They fought Iraq to a stalemate over and eight year war. We kicked the crap out the Iraqis twice in three weeks. They can learn to behave. Relax.
Jack |
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