Badge of Honor

By Dee Aker, Emiko Noma and Laura Taylor
(750 words)

This commentary is unpublished.

Around the world, one in three women is physically, sexually or otherwise abused in her lifetime, with rates reaching 70 percent in some countries. Most often, the perpetrator is someone she knows. She is not safe in her home, or in the public sphere.

Men must stand up and be equal partners to end violence against women. “I call on men around the world to lead by example: to make clear that violence against women is an act perpetrated by a coward, and that speaking up against it is a badge of honor,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed as he launched UNITE, the new U.N. campaign to end this scourge on society. “No country, no culture, no woman young or old is immune,” he said.

The last 15 years have witnessed the increase of statistical research on the subject, and while new protection laws and public awareness campaigns are also on the rise...

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The Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice (IPJ) at the University of San Diego sent a delegation to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. This article was written by IPJ staff Dee Aker, Emiko Noma and Laura Taylor.

Free speech threatened when speakers are attacked

By George Beres
(652 words)

Free speech is indivisible. Yet we witness a growing effort to diminish that freedom nationwide. Here in Eugene, Ore., we see it in resistance to a forthcoming public appearance by historian, Mark Weber, editor of the Journal of Historical Review.

Spoken words of Weber and of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu may vary in their importance. But the freedom for them to speak, and for us to hear, should have equal merit. Ominously, recent developments on the college campus suggest that freedom-- our freedom-- is threatened.

Tutu's scheduled talk in Minnesota is the center of controversy that has mushroomed in higher education over cancellation of a number of speakers at universities because of alleged critical attitudes toward Israel. At the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, had been invited to speak next spring.

Following a pattern of behavior in academia nationwide, St. Thomas withdrew its invitation, it said, for fear it might offend local Jews. It has happened in recent months at the University of Montana, Barnard College, DePaul University, and with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. In each case, a professor has been cancelled as a speaker or denied tenure because of allegations of anti-Semitism...

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George Beres is founding director of the University of Oregon Speakers Bureau.

Priests Protesting Torture at Fort Huachuca Jailed for Justice

(723 words)
By Bill Quigley.

Louis Vitale, 75, a Franciscan priest, and Steve Kelly, 58, a Jesuit priest, were sentenced to five months in federal prison for attempting to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Both priests were taken directly into jail from the courtroom after sentencing.

Fort Huachuca is the headquarters of military intelligence in the U.S. and the place where military and civilian interrogators are taught how to extract information from prisoners. The priests attempted to deliver their letter to Major General Barbara Fast, commander of Fort Huachuca. Fast was previously the head of all military intelligence in Iraq during the atrocities of Abu Ghraib.

The priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer halfway up the driveway to Fort Huachuca in November 2006. Both priests were charged with trespass on a military base and resisting orders of an officer to stop.

In a pre-trial hearing, the priests attempted to introduce evidence of torture, murder, and gross violations of human rights in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at Guantanamo. The priests offered investigative reports from the FBI, the US Army, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Social Responsibility documenting hundreds of incidents of human rights violations...

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Bill is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He served as counsel for Frs. Vitale and Kelly. You can reach Bill at Quigley@loyno.edu For more about their trial, see http://tortureontrial.org

End This Travesty

(620 words)

by Tom H Hastings

It was mid-day, in Baghdad. When Iraqi citizens—not soldiers, not police, not insurgents, not terrorists—approached Nisour Square on September 16 of this year, little did they know that an incident had occurred a few blocks away. They are people caught in a war zone, but they are simply trying to live, to run errands, to get to work if they are lucky enough to have any, or to bring their children someplace.

Those mothers, daughters, fathers and sons were also unaware that Blackwater USA mercenaries, hired by the Pentagon, were there with a massive arsenal that would rain hellfire and lethal explosions on them, killing 17 and wounding 24.

Meanwhile, Erik D. Prince, CEO of the Blackwater corporation, was enjoying his massive personal wealth and luxury. Prince, a heavy contributor to Bush’s ...

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Tom H. Hastings is director of PeaceVoice and a founder of Whitefeather Peace Community in Portland, Oregon. He is core faculty in the Portland State University Conflict Resolution masters program.

Burma and the Press

(681 words)

As of this writing (Thursday, September 27) a nonviolent movement is reaching its crisis in Burma. In 1988 over 3,000 students were killed — massacred would not be too strong a word — when they protested the military takeover of their country. Their courageous, charismatic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, though she had faced down rifle squads in at least one critical confrontation (superbly dramatized in Beyond Rangoon, with Patricia Arquette), and won an overwhelming electoral victory to boot, was not able to prevail over the regime, which has kept her under house arrest and basically pillaged the country for these nineteen years.

Commentators are noting, correctly, several features of the uprising today: it is a massive, disciplined outpouring — the photographs of tens of thousands of red-robed monks and nuns filling avenues for as far as the eye can see are nothing short of inspiring. It relies on the immense prestige of religious orders in that predominantly Buddhist country. And — among other differences between now and 1988 — the world is watching.

But how closely? We who follow nonviolence have to point out what the mainstream media are missing in this “saffron revolution,” as they have missed in most episodes of nonviolence that have been accumulating with increasing frequency in this post-Gandhian world. 1) They mis-characterize this movement as ‘spontaneous,’ while in reality it has been well-planned for months. More to the point, it has not, like Athena, ‘sprung from the head of Zeus’. ...

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Michael N. Nagler is Emeritus, English, UC-Berkeley. He has written several books on nonviolence and taught Gandhian nonviolence for many years.

Two Democrats Take Nuclear Attack Threat Off the Table — For a Minute

(600 words)
By John LaForge

Two leading democratic presidential hopefuls have recently said they’d take the threat of nuclear attack “off the table,” hinting at their deep psychological discomfort with the idea of deliberate mass destruction. Call it the Hiroshima Syndrome.

Both New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton — albeit before she announced her run — and Illinois Senator Barack Obama, dismissed the long-standing U.S. threat to keep “all options open,” regarding the government’s willing readiness to wage nuclear war anywhere in the world.

On August 2, Obama said in an interview with the Associated Press, “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” pausing before he added, “involving civilians.” Although Obama quickly retracted the statement saying, “Let me scratch that,” his message needs repeating: H-bombs cannot be used without the grossly indiscriminate killing of civilians.

Senator Clinton publicly chastised Obama for temporarily ruling out the threat to push the button, but she has also said that she would not use nuclear weapons.

In April 2006, nine months before she announced her Oval Office bid, Clinton was asked in a TV interview about her position toward Iran. She said, “... no option should be off the table, but I would certainly take nuclear weapons off the table. This [Bush] administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons in a way we haven’t seen since the dawn of the nuclear age. I think that’s a terrible mistake.”

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LaForge works on the staff of Nukewatch -- an environmental action group -- and edits its quarterly newsletter. His articles on nuclear weapons and reactors and militarism have appeared in Z magazine, the Progressive, Earth Island Journal, the New Internationalist and on the opinion pages of the Miami Herald, the Minneapolis StarTribune and the Madison Capital Times.

9-11 Forgotten

by Johnny Barber

(700 words)

The sixth anniversary of Sept 11th has come and gone, and Americans have forgotten the lessons of that fateful day. As the U.S. continues to lash out blindly in the Middle East, causing death and destruction everywhere it turns, we at home continue to wave our little flags, put metallic ribbons on our cars and call for support of the troops. That Americans are now responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent peoples- exponentially higher numbers than those killed in the towers- is a fact. Few people here recognize the level of carnage unleashed on the civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Few people seem concerned with the anguish of others as they try to survive the US military occupation of their countries. Few people recognize in the anguished eyes of the Iraqi people the very same fear, desperation, determination and heroism of the people who suffered on September 11th at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in a flight over Pennsylvania.

In the days after September 11th we as Americans stood together, and reached out to each other. Much of the world reached out to us as well. In our grief and disbelief there was a moment to recognize community- not just the community of New York City, or even the community of our nation, but the community of humankind.

For a moment, however brief, ...

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Johnny Barber (Dodger8mo@hotmail.com) has travelled to Iraq, Israel, Occupied Palestine and Lebanon to bear witness and document the suffering of people who are affected by war. Barber is a member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship as well as the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He lives in Deerfield Beach Fl

Above the fray: Congress ignores victims

(600 words)

by Tom H Hastings

Visit Washington DC sometime; lobby your elected officials. It is a lesson is how our elite manage to avoid being touched by our problems, by the problems of those who are hurt by their policies, and by reality as experienced by regular folks.

Oh, they sound like regular folks. They cultivate that persona and get elected on the basis of it.

But most of them are above it all.

Few of them have prostheses from service in war; the wars are permitted by these chickenhawks.

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Tom H Hastings is director of PeaceVoice and a founder of Whitefeather Peace Community in Portland, Oregon.

"Nuclear policy" by Marc Pilisuk

"Nuclear policy" by Marc Pilisuk (word count: 694)

"Within the past year, a statement by Linton Brooks, who speaks for the National Nuclear Security Administration on nuclear weapons issues, should worry those who are concerned about the possibilities of a nuclear war. Brooks told the East Tennessee Economic Council in the city of Oak Ridge , (home to a major nuclear weapons complex), 'The United States will, for the foreseeable future, need to retain both nuclear forces and the capabilities to sustain and modernize those forces. The end of the Cold War did not end the importance of nuclear weapons….I do not see any chance of the political conditions for abolition arising in my lifetime, nor do I think abolition could be verified if it were negotiated'."…

Reply to: peacevoice.thais@gmail.com

Marc Pilisuk, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of UC-Berkeley and the author of International Conflict and Social Policy and a co-chair of the Psychologists for Social Responsibility Work Group on Global Violence and Security Peace.