By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Pro-Israel neoconservatives may beat the drums for war, but dozens of antiwar activists gathered in Des Moines, Iowa’s Nollen Plaza on the evening of February 21 to urge Washington politicians to “Talk to Iran” instead.

“We’ve had way to much war in the Middle East,” declared Tony Salem of Des Moines.

“I’m out here to send a message to politicians that we don’t need another war in the Middle East,” said Ismael Hossein-zadeh, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Drake University.

Hossein-Zadeh described the situation as “quite frightening, because the constellation of forces in the region, especially in the Persian Gulf is such that a small mistake could lead to a big confrontation with unpredictable consequences.”

Furthermore, economic sanctions can be acts of war under international law, and increasingly punitive sanctions may prompt Iran to defend its people by trying to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, which could lead to hostilities, said the author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism.

A war against Iran would be much more destructive than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and would have many more consequences, said Hossein-zadeh.

Israelis are the most influential and insistent proponents of an attack on Iran, while, “as far as the United States in concerned, the signals are mixed.  There are those who are supporters Israel and who are supporters of aggression against Iran, but there are some hesitant and ambivalent forces like the president himself, who I am afraid is not leading here.  When you don’t lead, then you are going to be led,” said Hossein-zadeh.

“The time is now for diplomacy,” said Jeffrey Weiss, Director of Catholic Peace Ministry and a rally organizer.

“Iran has recently made a number of overtures.  The time for talking is now, and we are here because we are concerned that a shooting war, a major catastrophe, could begin.  It is time to talk to Iran,” said Weiss.

Lewis and Winnie Pinch, who lived and worked at the American Presbyterian Hospital at Mashad from 1967 to 1970 and who visited Iran more recently, drove from Omaha to take part in the rally across from the Civic Center where Ariana Huffington was speaking.

“An attack on Iran would be a serious problem, not just for Iran but for the United States and for Israel, where we hear that most of the war talk comes from, Israel” said Lewis Pinch.

“We get a distorted picture of Iran from our media here in the United States.  The Iranian people are lovely people by and large.  Some of them agree with their government, some of them don’t, just like here in the U.S.  The people are very friendly to the United States, in contradistinction to what you might hear, and I don’t think most people here realize that,” said Pinch.

“They loved us when we went back, October a year ago.  They’d come up to us and we were the people to be celebrated.  They wanted to know where we came from and after they found out it was the United States they said, ‘Oh we’re so glad you’re here.  We love you.  We wish more of you came here.’  They’d want photos of us with them.  They’d telephone their friends to tell them that they were talking to Americans,” said Winnie Pinch.

“I’m out here tonight because I don’t want to see more homeless veterans out under the bridges and having PTSD and TBI,” said  James Marren, Treasurer of the Veterans National Recovery Center and a member of the Des Moines Chapter of Veterans for Peace.

“The money that is being wasted on war could be spent on social issues, helping out with healthcare, helping people get jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure here.  It’s time to bring that money home and help our people.  The people of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are victims of our war policy just as much as our veterans are.  We see the neocons pushing for their agenda – permanent war – and there are victims on all sides.  We don’t need more homeless veterans; they don’t need their families destroyed by our war machine.  That’s why I’m here tonight,” said Marren.

“There may be some people who wouldn’t like to hear this,” said longtime antiwar activist and member of the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting Sherry Hutchison, “but I think Israel is permanently paranoid about Iran.  I think it would be a good idea if our government would say, ‘If you bomb them, no more aid to Israel from the U.S.’”

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

“Don’t do what we did!” exclaimed Mark Rudd before an audience of about 75 activists who gathered at Occupy Iowa headquarters in Des Moines on March 7.

Rudd, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, together with others founded the violent SDS off-shoot, the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) that engaged in a campaign of bombings of government buildings during the 1970s.  Today, Rudd’s activism in behalf of progressive social change draws on the lessons of his radical and revolutionary past while emphasizing the importance of nonviolence and political organizing.

Rudd’s presentation in Des Moines featured, first, a viewing of The Weather Underground, a 2002 documentary film depicting the rise and fall of the WUO.   The film, which includes archive footage as well as interviews with various former WUO members taped much later after the group disintegrated, places a narrative about the militant communist organization within the larger context of the Vietnam War and the social and political turmoil of the era.  Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, The Weather Underground won the audience choice award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award in 2004.  Following the film, Rudd spoke eloquently and at length, his comments rich with self-deprecating humor, irony, and insight, responding to questions from an appreciative audience during an extended Q&A that lasted for well over an hour.

The Independent Monitor asked Rudd how his experience might benefit and inform the activism of Occupy Iowa.

Rudd explained that SDS organizers, many of them ‘Red Diaper Babies,’ attempted to create an antiwar movement in the 1960s based on political organizing.

“This is actually a different method than Occupy used.  Occupy used a method called exemplary direct action, and Occupy’s success was enormous.  My heart goes out to you.  Occupy accomplished what decades of organizing in the union movement [has not] … You got across the narrative, the story of the 99 percent and the 1 percent, the basic, fundamental economic and political injustice at the heart of this society.  The unions have been trying to do that for decades, and you did that in a matter of a few weeks.  It was phenomenal,” declared Rudd.

“What you did was the same thing we did in 1968 at Columbia, which was you demonstrated moral commitment.  The difference was, it took us years to get there, organizing,” said Rudd.

“Since 2003 I’ve been traveling around with this movie and talking to activists and organizers about how movements are built,” said Rudd.

Rudd said one of the big mistakes he and others made was that, “We forgot completely about organizing.  …  We stole [the SDS] and we took it in a crappy direction. … “We transformed SDS from being a radical reform and resistance organization to being revolutionary.  We wanted to go all the way.  It wasn’t enough to just be antiwar, to just end the war in Vietnam.  So, we attacked the antiwar movement because it wasn’t radical enough, it wasn’t militant enough, and it didn’t critique the entire system, the entire system being imperialism,” said Rudd.

“We quoted Che Guevara.  We loved Che Guevara!  ‘The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’, meaning: You don’t talk about it; you do it, just like Che Guevara did it, but we hadn’t noticed that he was already dead [general laughter] in 1967.  This was 1969.  His strategy was terrible.  It was called the ‘foco’ theory.  I was a Guevarista; I was of the cult of Che.  ‘Pick up the gun!  The time of the revolution has come,’” said Rudd.

“I was elected national secretary of the SDS in June of 1969.  Within six months, my leadership clique had decided to kill off the largest radical student organization in the United States, 100,000 members in 400 chapters.  We did it in ’69, which was the height of the war.  We did it because we knew that it was not revolutionary enough, and that the only way, that the only thing that needed to be done now, was not to organize on college campuses but to pick up the gun.  That is … the arrogance that led us to kill SDS, which I incidentally consider to be an historical crime that I committed because of my ideas about revolution,” said Rudd.

Rudd described “a trajectory:  good organizing, followed by bad organizing, followed by the [Weather] Underground [Organization], which was horrible, no organizing,” and explained that he wrote his autobiography, titled Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, in order to “present this story so that people can get the distinction between how mass movements are built, which is a process called organizing – relationship building, coalition building, education, a lot of work! – versus self-expression, which is what we moved into.”

The Independent Monitor then asked Rudd to talk about how and why, after the accidental explosion that killed three WUO members on March 6, 1970 in a townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, the group adopted a strategy of bombing buildings after hours and on weekends to avoid injury or death.

“There was a moment that led up to the townhouse [explosion] in which we actually fell into a classic definition of terrorism, which is attacking innocent people,” said Rudd.

The people in the townhouse, explained Rudd, were building a bomb which they planned to plant at Fort Dix to explode at a non-commissioned officers dance, a bomb that might have killed soldiers and their wives, girlfriends, or others who attended the dance.

“Thank God the accident happened and we only killed three of our own!  Because the effects on the whole antiwar movement would have been horrendous,” declared Rudd, who recalled that a few months later an antiwar group in Madison, Wisconsin planted a bomb in Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a bomb accidentally killed an antiwar grad student who was working late in the building.

“They called in a warning.  They were following our example.  But somehow the police didn’t know there was a student working late that night, and he got killed. …  The Madison movement was hit really badly.  They simply died for a number of years.  We were lucky; those people following our lead were not lucky.  I feel, in retrospect … I lost my fire, my will, my courage; it was my failing in 1970.  I think what happened was we were unwilling to break with the entire strategy of bombings.  And Underground and revolution was wrong!  We should have been organizing on the college campuses, and we shouldn’t have tainted the essentially nonviolent antiwar movement with this violence that we were promoting,” declared Rudd with evident emotion.

“To this day – I don’t like to blow my own horn – but I am probably the only one in this film who is as critical of this strategy, and I think the other people are very ambivalent and confused.  Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who are wonderful people who are like brother and sister to me, but I feel that they make the same mistake that a lot of people make when looking at this, which is that you confuse good intentions with results.  It’s very easy for us to take a subjective point of view of all of this and say, ‘Well, you meant well.  Your ideas about imperialism were right.  You were reacting to the violence,” said Rudd.

“Tom Hayden, on the other hand, analyzes it very well.  There is a brilliant book that has an essay on this called The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, and in it Tom says, ‘We were a perfect mirror for a violent society.  The more violence in Vietnam, the more we talked violence.’  Now that’s reactive, and it’s expressive, but it’s not strategic.  Strategy is the question, How do we build a mass movement?  Our goal is always a mass movement.  We have to believe that the large majority of Americans will eventually take some action against this injustice, against militarism, for justice, our fellow citizens, the 99 percent, which is a brilliant metaphor that you’ve developed, we have to believe that those people will be involved.  So, my question to you is, What can we do to help the other 98.99 percent get involved?  What would be a reasonable thing to ask them to do?  What kind of education is necessary?  What kind of coalitions need to be built?

Responding to a question from an Iowa Occupier, regarding Occupy activists who espouse a strategy of violence or “diversity of tactics,” which Rudd characterized as code for violence, the college professor, author, and former SDS and WUO leader said, “My first thought is that those people are police agents.”

Rudd explained that he has met many times “with young people who are Black Bloc, Green Anarchists, or followers of an idiot named John Zerzan, a guy my age who doesn’t believe that mass movements have ever helped anybody in the world.   He’s teaching that.  So, I’ve got to know the kids, but I’m not good at it. … I’ve told them, and they don’t want to hear this because I am crude in the way I say it: The only people who advocate violence are either cops or very stupid.  I didn’t add that I was very stupid.  I was one of these people.  I was so angry I wanted to overthrow the whole system, and I thought that everybody in the world was gonna think like me.  A friend of mine calls it existential politics.  We have to substitute real politics,” said Rudd.

“I like to draw a clear line, and you have done this really, really well here in Iowa, better than in Albuquerque and better than in New York.  You’ve said, ‘Our movement is a nonviolent movement.  Any violence that there is comes from the state, it doesn’t come from us.’  You haven’t given them anything.  You’ve figured this out for yourselves: Anyone advocating violence is working for the other side.  I know, because I worked for the FBI – I did their work for them!  Without knowing it!  Just because I thought my ideas were so smart.  I was no different from these stupid Black Bloc kids.  So, I think we’ve got to draw this clear line,” said Rudd.

“This [Weather Underground] story is a great story of what not to do,” said Rudd.    

Rudd was invited to speak in Iowa by David Goodner, a Des Moines Catholic Worker (DMCW) and community organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Involvement. DMCW hosted Rudd while he was in Des Moines.

By Richard Falk

The latest occupation crime in Afghanistan was a shooting spree on March 11, reportedly committed by a lone American soldier in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province.

Sixteen Afghan civilians, including women and children, were shot in the middle of the night without any pretence of combat activity in the area. Such an atrocity is one more expression of a pathological reaction, allegedly by one soldier, to an incomprehensible military reality – a reality that seems to be driving US military personnel on the ground crazy. The main criminal here is not the shooter, but the political leader who insists on continuing the mission in face of the evidence.

US soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, the burning of Qurans, and troops convicted of killing Afghan civilians for sport or routinely invading the privacy of Afghan homes in the middle of the night: whatever the military commanders in Kabul might say in regret, and Washington might repeat by way of formal apology, has become essentially irrelevant.

These so-called “incidents” or “aberrations” are nothing of the sort. These happenings are pathological reactions of men and women caught up in a death trap not of their making, an alien environment that collides lethally with their sense of normality and decency. Besides the desecration of foreign lands and their cultural identities, US political leaders have, for more than a decade, unforgivably placed young Americans in intolerable situations of risk and enmity. Equally revealing are recent studies documenting historically high suicide rates in the lower ranks of the US military.

Senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behaviour. Afghanistan, like Vietnam 40 years earlier, has become an atrocity-generating killing field. In Vietnam, the White House finally accelerated the US exit when it became evident that soldiers were murdering their own officers, a pattern that became so widespread that it gave birth to the word “fragging”.

Whatever the pretext after the 9/11 attacks, the Afghanistan War was misconceived from its inception. Air warfare was relied upon to decimate the leadership ranks of al-Qaeda, but instead its top political and military commanders slipped across the border. Regime change in Kabul, with a leader anointed by Washington to help coordinate the foreign occupation of his country, was a counterinsurgency formula that had failed over and over again.

But with the militarist mindset prevailing in the US government, failure was once again reinterpreted as an opportunity to do it right this time. Despite the efficiency of the radical new tactic of killing targets using drones – the latest form of state terror – the outcome is no different.

What more needs to be said? It is long past time for the United States and its NATO allies to withdraw with all deliberate speed from Afghanistan, rather than to proceed on its present course: negotiating a long-term “memorandum of understanding” that transfers the formalities of the occupation to the Afghans while leaving private US military contractors – 21st century mercenaries – as an outlaw governance structure after most combat forces withdraw by the end of 2014.

As in Iraq, what has been “achieved” in Afghanistan is the very opposite of the goals set by Pentagon planners and State Department diplomacy: the country is decimated rather than reconstructed, the regional balance shifts in the direction of Islamic extremism, and the United States is ever more widely feared and resented, solidifying its geopolitical role as the great malefactor of our era.

The United States seems incapable of grasping the pathologies it has inflicted on its own citizenry. The disgusting 2004 pictures of US soldiers getting their kicks from torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib should have made clear once and for all to the leaders and the public that it was time to bring troops home, and keep them there if we cared for their welfare. What the pattern exhibits is not only a criminal indifference to the wellbeing of “others”, but a similar disregard of the welfare of our collective selves. The current bellicose Republican presidential candidates calling for attacks on Iran favours taking a giant step along the road – a road that is heading towards an American implosion. And the Obama presidency is only a half step behind: counselling patience, but itself indulging in war-mongering – whether for its own sake, or on behalf of Israel, is unclear.

President Obama was recently quoted as saying of Afghanistan: “Now is the time for us to transition.”

No, it isn’t. “Now is the time to leave.” And not only for the sake of the Afghan people, but for the sake of the American people Obama was elected to serve.

Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).

He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Follow him on Twitter: @rfalk13

Article Courtesy Al Jazeera.com

By Editor, The Palestine Monitor

Tuesday 13 March 2012- A series of Israeli attacks on the besieged population of the Gaza Strip that began on Friday until today have resulted in the killing of 25 Palestinians, including two 13 and 15 year old boys.

The attacks were initiated by Israel as on Friday afternoon, it broke the fragile truce negotiated by Egypt in October 2011 by firing an F-16 missile directly at a car in the neighborhood of Tal el-Hawa. 44 year old Mahmoud Hanani, who is originally from Nablus and was freed in the October prisoner deal, was immediately killed along with his father-in-law Zuhair Al Qaisi, the secretary-general of the Palestinian Resistance Committee.

The Gaza Strip was rocked with explosions throughout the night, and by Saturday morning, a further ten Palestinians, all from the Islamic Jihad’s armed wing Al-Quds Brigades were killed, bringing the number of casualties to 12. Three of the resistance fighters were killed as they were walking next to the Palestinian Legislative Council building in the neighborhood of As-Shajaiyyeh. A reported 20 people were injured.

Israeli warplanes opened fire at one of the funerals on Saturday, injuring four people. A further five Palestinians were killed in separate air strikes, four of who belong to the Islamic Jihad group, with the fifth identified as 21 year old Mansour Abu Nusaira.

Sunday morning arrived with the murder of two more civilians: 13 year old Ayyoub Asseleya in Jabalia who was torn into pieces, and 52 year old yard keeper Adel El Issi in Gaza City. More than 30 people have been injured by the non-discriminate bombings.

Evening brought about no reprieve for the Palestinians in Gaza, as Israeli air strikes shelled two houses in the Jabaliya refugee camp that were mostly full of women and children, resulting in dozens of injuries. The following day another schoolboy, 15 year old Naef Qarmout was killed near his school in Beit Lahya in northern Gaza. An elderly father and his 30 year old daughter also killed in the same area.

2 resistance fighters were killed on Monday night, bringing the death toll to 25 Palestinians killed and over 100 injuries.

The past five days have been the bloodiest since late October of last year, where Israel claimed 10 Palestinian lives in its targeted assassinations.

Dr Mustafa Barghouti strongly condemned the attacks. “The escalation of violence on Israel’s part must be stopped,” he stated. “It is simply outrageous that the international community has continued to allow Israel to act with impunity. The world must pressure Israel to cease its practice of extra-judicial assassinations, and to hold it accountable to all of its crimes it has committed against the Palestinian people.”

Egypt stepped in to broker yet another ceasefire between the resistance groups and Israel, which will be in effect at 1:00 am Wednesday morning.

The list of Palestinians killed in Gaza is below:

Zuhair Al-Qaisi, 49
Mahmoud Hanani, 44
Yahya Dahshan, 27
Mohammad Haraha, 24
Obeid Al-Gharabli, 22
Hazem Qureqi, 22
Shadi Seqeeli, 27
Fayeq Samir, 28
Motasem Hajjaj, 22
Ahmad Hajjaj, 22
Mohammad Al-Mogari, 25
Mahmoud Al-Ghamri, 26
Husain Barham Hammad, 51
Mansour Abu Nusaira, 21
Mahdi Abu Shweish, 24
Ayyoub Asseyela, 13
Adel El Issi, 52
Hamada Abu Mutlaq, 24
Raafat Abu Eid, 24
Hamadah Salman Abu Mutlaq, 24
Muhammad al-Hasoumi, 65
Faiza al-Hasumi, 30
Naef Qarmout, 15
Bassam al-Ajla, 32
Muhammad Thaher, 25

Article and Image: The Palestine Monitor

By Brian Terrell

On the long flight to the Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain on February 10, I had been studying the Lonely Planet guide to the region in order to be able to explain at the airport, if needed, that I had come as a tourist. As it happened, while most passengers on our plane sailed through passport control, my travel companion Linda Sartor and I were pulled from the line and subjected to a closer examination. My sketchy knowledge of the historic and cultural sights that I had come to see was good enough to satisfy official scrutiny. We were granted tourist visas and sent on our way.

That we had come as tourists was true. We had intentionally neglected to mention, though, that we had been invited to Bahrain along with a few other international activists to monitor the government’s response to demonstrations marking the one year anniversary of Bahrain’s “Arab Spring” pro-democracy uprising on February 14. This demand for basic rights was brutally suppressed by Bahrain’s police and military backed by the army of Saudi Arabia.

We certainly would have been barred entry to the country had our full intent been told—but, as Daniel Berrigan once mused, “How much truth do we owe them?” In fact, our invitation from Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, came because the government had made it known that observers from established human rights organizations would not be granted visas until the next month and that access to the country by the international media was to be severely limited during that period. The regime’s resolve that there be no witnesses to the events surrounding the anniversary made our presence for those days all the more crucial.

The morning after our arrival, we met with local activists and the small group of U.S. citizens who had come before us. Before long we were in the streets of Manama, the capital city, accompanying a march to the Pearl Roundabout, the focal point of last year’s demonstration. This peaceful march of men, women and children was quickly set upon by police in full riot gear and dispersed with tear gas and percussion grenades. Our first encounter with the Bahraini police appeared to be vicious, but our local friends assured us that our presence was a restraining factor. Two of the Americans we had just met, Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath, were taken into custody at this march and later that evening deported, the government said, for activities not consistent with their status as tourists.

Our small group, called Witness Bahrain, grew over the next days, even as several friends who traveled to join us were turned away at the airport by a regime made even more hyper-vigilant after deporting Huwaida and Radhika. While being careful to remain at large at least until the events of the 14th, we toured Manama and the villages over the next couple of days, hearing testimony of government abuses and accompanying demonstrations and marches.

On February 13, Tighe Barry and Medea Benjamin of the peace group Code Pink joined us, and our Bahraini guide Wafa took some of us on a tour of the zoo and the National Museum. In the afternoon we witnessed a march of tens of thousands through the main thoroughfares of Manama.

This march was tolerated by the authorities until a large group split off to walk to the Pearl Roundabout. The police response was immediate and appalling. Tear gas in Bahrain is not used as a means of crowd control so much as collective punishment—crowds dispersed by gas are not allowed to escape but are pursued, cornered and gassed again. Many are injured by direct hits from gas canisters and percussion grenades.

We witnessed beatings and heard reports of injuries by birdshot and rubber bullets.

On the actual anniversary, the police had the country locked down. Patrols of armored cars sped through the streets of Manama and the roads out of the villages were blocked by tanks. Many hundreds still made it to the streets, many were injured, many arrested. Six more of us were taken by the authorities.

In my case, finally getting pinched by the Bahraini police was anticlimactic. Four of us Americans with a Bahraini friend were taking a back way along a quiet street to catch up with others to attempt reaching the roundabout when a passing police patrol stopped us and asked for identification. One more time, we explained that we were there as tourists. “If you are tourists,” we were asked, “why do you have gas masks?”

A few hours later we were in a police station where we met two more from our group who had been captured under more dramatic circumstances. One by one, we were summoned to talk with representatives from the Ministry of Information and were told that we would be put on a flight to London at 2 a.m. as our visas had been cancelled. Our claim to be tourists was regarded as a deception by the authorities. My protestations to the contrary were to no avail.

Bahrain is a tiny island kingdom that is home to about a million people—half of whom are not citizens—that is visited by 8 million tourists a year. Many of these, we were told, are Saudis drawn there by the night life and legal alcohol. Others visit the museums and beaches. In the brochures produced by the government, tourists are encouraged to meet the friendly people of Bahrain. This is what we did and it was for this that we were deported.

We were privileged to tour this beautiful and afflicted country and to live the reality of its people, if only for a little while. Not content with having our photos taken with camels, we spoke with emergency room doctors who, after treating victims of last year’s crackdown, were themselves tortured and charged with sedition. We met with mothers mourning their children who were killed or imprisoned, and workers barred from practicing their professions for being in favor of freedom.

We were in Bahrain as tourists, not of the malls and golf courses and museums but of the streets and villages where real people live and struggle. Anyone who visits Bahrain and never gets a whiff of tear gas is a poor tourist, indeed. To the police who arrested us, a tourist with a gas mask is a hopeless contradiction and proof of culpability. For the tourist who wants to learn the present reality of Bahrain, a gas mask is more indispensable than sunscreen.

The faithfulness and solidarity of the people of Bahrain will prevail over the perfidity and cruelty of its backward and crude monarchy, supported as it is only by the brute force of its sponsors, the governments of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. “Sumoud,” meaning be strong, hold fast, is the Arabic word by which the resisters in Bahrain greet and encourage one another. Their peaceful strength is a challenge and an inspiration as we continue our common struggle on the far ends of the globe.

Sumoud.

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

After 10 years of war, a massive bail-out of Wall Street, and the worst recession since the Great Depression, Washington has run out of money.  As the pro-Israel lobby’s frantic efforts to foment war with Iran increase, the Obama administration is finally winding down the ill-conceived, immoral, counter-productive, and unsuccessful but hideously destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The U.S. military is reducing troop levels, not hiring new recruits.  Unable to find work, many Americans have thrown themselves into an effort re-invent the corrupt system that is failing them.

In a word, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), which owes so much to the Arab Spring, was – and is – brilliant.  It has reinvigorated a flagging antiwar movement and rekindled interest in progressive ideas and ideals.  On a conceptual level, with its emphasis on nonviolent protest, direct democracy, and direct action in support of economic justice, honest government, accountability, and an end to oppression, exploitation, and war, OWS has shown itself to be everything that official Washington and Wall Street are not.  Though corporate media outlets were slow to recognize the importance, authenticity, and vigor of the new popular movement, once they did the national security apparatus quickly began to coordinate efforts by municipal, county, and state law enforcement agencies around the nation to stifle OWS dissent.

In many cities, including New York, Seattle, and Oakland, unnecessary violence has characterized law enforcement reactions to OWS encampments and activities.  New York Police Department Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was filmed pepper spraying, without provocation, a group of women standing in a police pen near Union Square on September 24, seemed to set the nasty tone.

CounterPunch author Pam Martens reported on October 10 that, “If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

“The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

“New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.”

The taxpayer pays for each officer’s training, his uniform, his gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits resulting from official acts by police personnel following the illegal instructions of their corporate masters. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program, according to Martens.  Bologna has been sued by OWS protesters.

Oakland police shot Scott Olsen, 24, in the head with a tear gas canister on October 25.  Olsen, a member of Veterans For Peace, was peacefully protesting when he was shot.  The former Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq was hospitalized with a concussion and head trauma.

In Seattle, police pepper-sprayed 84-year-old Dorly Rainey, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, and a priest involved in nonviolent protest on November 15.

“Cops shoved their bicycles into the crowd.  . . .  If it had not been for my hero [Iraq Vet Caleb Walez] I would have been down on the ground and trampled,” Rainey told reporters.

In December, the Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that Seattle PD engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Oakland PD is currently under investigation for excessive use of force. NYPD is facing persistent calls for investigation of a stop and frisk policy that disproportionately targets Blacks and Latinos, while civil rights groups are calling for an investigation of NYPD’s monitoring of Muslims across the Northeast.

During a mid-November interview, Oakland mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that the crackdown on OWS was a coordinated effort involving the mayors of other major cities.

“I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment no longer in control by the people who started them,” said Ms. Quan.

In an article posted on the World Socialist Website, Andre Damon reported on November 17 that a, “spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Mayors told Mother Jones magazine Wednesday that the call Ms. Quan mentioned was one of numerous conference calls—which included mayors and top police brass—that focused on discussing “efforts cities have made to accommodate the demonstrators and maintain public health and safety,” a statement that the real Mother Jones, labor activist and organizer Mary Harris, would have dismissed as ludicrous.

Nationwide, OWS arrests number well over 6,000 according to published reports, but given that the co-ordinated campaign against OWS involves copious amounts of disinformation and propaganda, all corporate media reports about OWS are best viewed with skeptical eye.

Author and journalist Chris Hedges limned the national security state’s strategy to contain, disrupt, and marginalize insurgencies and popular movements such as OWS in a February 13 Truthdig article.

“Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations … to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries. … Provoke the movement – or front groups acting in the name of the movement – to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative,” wrote Hedges.

OWS is a popular nonviolent movement, one which has much, much more in common with the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. than with the violent tactics of Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Irish Republican Army, or the Weather Underground, but some in government are determined to destroy it and are using many of the same tools they would employ were OWS a terrorist insurgency.  That mistake may prove profoundly detrimental to what remains of civil liberties in the USA.

Some municipal law enforcement agencies have avoided violence in dealing with OWS citizen activists.  Iowa, a state with a long history of progressive politics and one that has perhaps the strongest antiwar movement in the nation, responded to OWS in ways that other states and cities might profitably examine.  After Republican governor Terry Branstad refused to extend a permit for an Occupy Des Moines (ODM) encampment on the state Capitol grounds, on October 9, Iowa State Patrol officers arrested more than 30 Occupiers who refused to leave.  Days later, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie stepped in and offered ODM a city park on the opposite side of the Capitol complex.

“One of the original purposes of parks was for people to gather. We want you to feel like you can gather,” Cownie told ODM Occupiers on October 14. “I want my police force out chasing the bad guys and arresting criminals.”

The mayor’s administration and the Des Moines Police Department (DMPD) worked cooperatively with ODM for months, allowing the encampment to exist, inspecting the park regularly, talking with neighborhood residents, and respecting the rights of the Occupiers.

During November and December, as their plans for direct action during the weeks before the Iowa Caucuses advanced, Des Moines Catholic Workers and other experienced local peace and social justice activists worked with ODM Occupiers to conduct several nonviolence training sessions.

Kathleen McQuillen of the American Friends Service Committee in Des Moines, and Frank Cordaro of the Des Moines Catholic Worker facilitated a three-hour nonviolence training workshop at the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting House on December 4.

“What we’ve got going for us is that we have collectively said to each other and to the world that, ‘We’re going to be nonviolent.  For this day, for this action, this group is going to be nonviolent.’  That empowers us,” Cordaro told activists during a small group session at Friends House.

“This is entry-level civil disobedience, there’s minimal risk.  I’m not saying that it’s insignificant, but it’s not that serious.  If we were taking on serious risk, we’d do a lot more than three hours training,” said the former priest whose anti-nuclear weapons and antiwar activism in the USA and in Europe spans decades and began long before he left the priesthood in 2003 after 18 years.

From their encampment at Stewart Square Park and rented space in a building in Des Moines’ East Village, ODM Occupiers, along with Catholic Workers, representatives of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and members of several local churches and peace and justice organizations mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign of nonviolent direct action that involved several marches on and occupations of local banks and protests at both Democratic Party and Republican Party campaign events and candidate campaign headquarters during the run up to the Iowa Caucuses.  The Occupy the Iowa Caucuses coalition developed and maintained communications and cooperation with municipal law enforcement agencies in the Des Moines area, attracted over a hundred OWS movement activists from across the nation, conducted nonviolent direct actions, and staged a Peoples Caucus that attracted hundreds of activists, interested onlookers, and media personnel from around the world.

Between October 9 and January 3, local police forces made more than 100 Occupy-related arrests, and DMPD costs alone in regular and overtime pay for officers monitoring dozens of Occupy actions amounted to more than $75,000. But the Iowa Occupiers training in and commitment to Jesusonian/Gandhian/Kingian nonviolence proved remarkably successful.  No violent confrontations between municipal police officers and occupiers occurred – not even one.  Police officers respected the rights of Occupy activists, and Occupy activists cooperated peacefully with police.

That’s an accomplishment that all Iowans can be proud of.  It’s also a model that other American cities and states might explore and seek to emulate as spring approaches.

The OWS movement is evolving, and a continuing commitment to nonviolence is essential to its success.

Nonviolence, peaceful evolution rather than violent revolution, is what democracy looks like – when Americans work together for the common good during a crisis.

Courtesy IfAmericansKnew.org

On January 13th the Atlanta Jewish Times featured a column by its owner-publisher suggesting that Israel might someday need to “order a hit” on the president of the United States.

In the column, publisher Andrew Adler describes a scenario in which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would need to “give the go-ahead for U.S. based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel.”

The purpose? So that the vice president could then take office and dictate U.S. policies that would help the Jewish state “obliterate its enemies.”
Adler writes that it is highly likely that the idea “has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles.”

Numerous Jewish leaders quickly condemned Adler, who has now apologized for the column, resigned, and put the newspaper up for sale. An Israeli columnist noted that the hatred being stirred up against Obama is similar to conditions in Israel that led to the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist.

Many of those criticizing Adler claim that he had defamed Israel by suggesting that it would ever do such a thing. Abe Foxman, head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) proclaimed: “There is absolutely no excuse, no justification, no rationalization for this kind of rhetoric. It doesn’t even belong in fiction.”

In reality, however, Adler’s expectation that Israel’s inner circles have explored such a course of action, and would be willing to undertake it, may be entirely accurate. The fact is that Israel has killed and plotted to assassinate people throughout the world; a number have been Americans. One alleged plot was chillingly similar to Adler’s suggestion.

There is evidence that in 1991 an Israeli undercover team planned to assassinate a U.S. President. The intended victim was George Herbert Walker Bush.

The first person to write of the plot was a former 11-term Republican Congressman from Illinois, Paul Findley. In a 1992 article in the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, Findley described the alleged scheme and how it was revealed.

Findley writes that the U.S. Secret Service had received a warning that elements of Israel’s spy agency might target Bush when he went to Madrid for the opening day of the peace conference to be held that year.

According to Findley, a former Mossad agent named Victor Ostrovsky who had written a book exposing Israel’s spy agency told a group of Canadian parliamentarians that he had received secret intelligence suggesting that the “the Mossad’s hatred of Bush – and support for Vice President Dan Quayle – might lead to an attempt on the president’s life.”
Israel considered Quayle much closer to Israel than Bush. Bush had particularly angered Israel by attempting to pressure Israel into ending its illegal settlement expansion on confiscated Palestinian land by withholding loan guarantees until Israel ended this practice.

Findley writes that Ostrovsky’s statements were relayed to Findley’s friend and former colleague Paul “Pete” McCloskey, a prominent former Republican Congressman from California who had recently been named by Bush to the National and Community Service Commission.

McCloskey, a decorated Marine veteran and graduate of Stanford law school who had at one time been considered a presidential contender, flew to Ottawa to debrief Ostrovsky in person and evaluate his information.

Findley reports that Ostrovsky told McCloskey that the Mossad wanted “to do everything possible to preserve a state of war between Israel and its neighbors, assassinating President Bush, if necessary.” Ostrovsky said that a PR campaign was already underway in both Israel and the United States to “prepare public acceptance of Dan Quayle as president.”

Convinced that Ostrovsky was legitimate and his information significant, McCloskey jumped on the next flight to Washington, where he reported Ostrovsky’s intelligence to the Secret Service and State Department.

The apparent plot never went forward, perhaps because Ostrovsky and McCloskey had given it away.

Ostrovsky gave more details about the plot two years later in his 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad’s Secret Agenda,” published by HarperCollins.

In the book Ostrovsky writes that an extremist group within Mossad was responsible for the plan. He says they kept the plan secret from then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, though they believed that Shamir would have ordered such a hit himself if he hadn’t been constrained by politics. In the lead-up to Israel’s 1948 founding war, Shamir had headed up a terrorist group known for its assassinations.

In his review of Ostrovsky’s book, Ambassador Andrew Killgore, a retired career foreign service officer and publisher of the Washington Report, called the book an “insider’s probing exposé of some Middle East realities that have been hidden too long from all but Israeli eyes.”

Ostrovsky writes that the Israelis planned a “false flag” operation in which they would pin the assassination on Palestinians. They kidnapped three Palestinian militants from Beirut who were to be the scapegoats, took them to Israel’s Negev desert, and held them incommunicado.

“Meanwhile,” Killgore writes, “Mossad-generated threats on the president’s life, seemingly from Palestinians, were leaked. These were designed to throw suspicion on the organization of rogue Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Names and descriptions of the three terrorists were leaked to Spanish police so that, if the plot was successful, blame would automatically fall on them.”

Ostrovsky reports that after the assassination plot was eventually cancelled, the three Palestinian prisoners were “terminated.”

If the plot had gone forward, this would not have been the first time that Israel targeted Americans for death. Nor would it be the first false flag operation.

•    In 1954 the Mossad planned to firebomb American installations, libraries, and other gathering places in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood was to be blamed for the attacks, thus causing American animosity toward Egypt. An accidental early detonation of one of the devices caused the plot, known as the Lavon Affair, to unravel before it could kill or mutilate the intended Americans.
•    In 1967 Israeli air and sea forces perpetrated an almost two-hour assault in which they tried to sink a US Navy ship with a crew of 294. While the attack failed to sink the ship, it succeeded in killing 34 Americans and injuring 174. Some analysts have conjectured that this was also a false-flag operation; it is highly likely that Egypt would have been blamed for the attack if the ship had gone down.
•    In 1973 Israeli fighter pilots were ordered to shoot down an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance plane (at the time the U.S. was delivering massive weaponry to Israel to prevent it from losing the “Yom Kippur” war with Egypt and Syria). While the Israelis were unable to reach the altitude of the U.S. plane, they did manage that same year to shoot down a civilian Libyan airliner that had strayed over Israeli territory, killing 104 men, women, and children. One was an American.
•    In 1990 a Canadian-American scientist and father of seven, Gerald Bull, was assassinated in Belgium. All indications are that it was an Israeli Mossad hit team that drilled five bullets into the back of his head and neck. (Israel has assassinated a number of scientists of various nationalities. The most recent is a 32-year-old Iranian father with a young son.)
•    In 2003 it came out that Israeli leaders had officially decided to undertake assassination operations on U.S. soil. An FBI spokesman, queried about the Israeli plans, said only: “This is a policy matter. We only enforce federal laws.”
•    In recent years a growing number of American peace activists have been intentionally killed, maimed, and injured by Israeli forces, including 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, 21-year-old Brian Avery, 37-year-old Tristan Anderson, 21-year-old Emily Henoschowitz, and 21-year-old Furkan Dogan.

All of this has been minimally reported in the U.S. press. While major news media from England to Israel to Australia covered the Jewish Times’ apparent endorsement of a possible Israeli assassination of a U.S. President, the scandal has been largely missing from U.S. media. Even Atlanta’s AP bureau inexplicably initially decided not to write a report on it, only finally sending out a story many days later.

Such news omissions concerning Israeli partisans are not rare. In 2004 a fanatic Israel loyalist wrote a letter saying that he was going to burn down Presbyterian churches while worshippers were inside (he was furious at the Presbyterian Church’s decision to divest from companies profiting from the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land).         This grisly threat also received minimal media play.

Despite Israeli violence against Americans (even while American taxpayers have given Israel far more of our tax money than to any other nation) American presidential candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, continue to vie over who is most devoted to Israel.

It is ironic that Adler considers Obama so bad for Israel, given that Israeli analysts have rated him second only to Mitt Romney in his fidelity to Israel. And Obama has now released a seven-minute video that may catapult our first African-American president into first place in pandering to an apartheid nation.

But perhaps he’ll be safe from assassins.

BY GAIL EVELYN ALFAR
Guest Writer, Austin, TX

Omar Barghouti is a member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s (PACBI) Founding Committee and Steering Committee.  From January 4-12 he embarked on a speaking tour.  He spoke in Seattle, the Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Diego, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

In Seattle, he spoke about how the patches of land left for Palestinians to live on are very much like the Bantustans of former apartheid South Africa.  Some highlights of his speech include:

“Israel can colonize land, but it cannot colonize people’s minds.  Hope will always be there that Palestine will be free.  This hope cannot be taken from people…The Jewish National Fund facilitates a policy making almost all of the land of Israel “Jewish-only” land.  It’s impossible for non-Jews to buy, or rent land on 93% of the land in Israel.  The indigenous Palestinians who are citizens of Israel cannot buy this land or even lease it.

The State of California pays 3.48 billion dollars a year to support Israel.  That amount could provide 42,254 affordable housing units to Californians, or train 57,766 in “green” jobs.  3.48 Billion could provide 2,818,173 uninsured people with primary health care…Since the United Nations fails to stand up for Palestinian rights, the BDS movement was created to ask people of conscience around the world to stand up for justice.

All people have an obligation to end complicity in crime.  Silence is complicity.  It is a moral obligation to end this complicity.  At the very least, “do no harm.”
Any dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed should be in the context of co-resistance.  As long as oppression exists, we should have co-resistance, not co-existence.  We have to end oppression, and then we can live like normal human beings.

Trade Unions have joined the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions against Israel) movement in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, Scotland, France, Italy and Ireland.  Dockworkers in Oakland set a historic precedence when they refused to unload Israeli ships for 24 hours in response to the Freedom Flotilla Massacre of May 2010.

BDS yields effective results:  The Veolia, Alstom and Agrexco Campaigns have been very effective. The Codepink  Ahava actions and Adalah-NY Flashmobs are both very creative BDS campaigns.  Author Alice Walker and activist Judith Butler have both voiced support for BDS.  Living legend and Holocaust survivor Stephane Hessel (France) also strongly supports BDS.  Hessel is most known as the co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…Israel should not be allowed to speak on behalf of world Jewry.  It is a colonial state, an occupier, so it cannot speak on behalf of all world Jews.

The PACBI launched an official facebook page in mid-January.  www.facebook.com/PACBI. In a statement dated 2 January, the PACBI wrote: “…looking forward to 2012, we call on activists to intensify all aspects of BDS, but to especially focus, whenever possible, on academic boycott. Specifically, we call on faculty and student activists to pressure their academic organizations to end collaboration with complicit Israeli academic institutions or organizations, and not to organize or participate in conferences in Israel. Furthermore, we appeal to academics not to publish in Israeli academic journals and to withdraw from editorial boards of international journals based at Israeli universities. We also urge academics and students to oppose study-abroad programs that place students from the US and Europe at Israeli universities.  The ongoing campaign by California State University (CSU) faculty and students against the renewal of the CSU-Israel study abroad scheme is an inspiration.  In short, we call on BDS activists around the world to mobilize over the implementation of the academic boycott guidelines, and for those in Europe to rally against Israeli collaboration under FP7. As Archbishop Desmond tutu wrote in support of the University of Johannesburg’s boycott of Ben Gurion University:

Israeli Universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice. While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation.

It is time to take a stand to end all forms of complicity with Israeli academic and cultural institutions; they are key partners in the Israeli regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid.”

By DR. ARTHUR B. KEYS, JR.
Guest Writer

As Egypt marks the first anniversary of the January 25 revolution, we must remember that the primary driving force in Egyptian electoral politics has not changed. The same energy that propelled hundreds of thousands to peacefully demonstrate for weeks against Hosni Mubarak, and later against the military council, fuels the hopes of Egypt’s young people, especially working people.

Every poll and survey indicates that Egyptians want equitable and honest social and economic development. And real, sustainable development begins with young people. They have the energy, the openness, and the hope to turn ideas into reality.

Nowhere is this truer than in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa whose underdevelopment squanders talent, restrains ambition, and fosters instability. Nearly one in five people living in the Middle East and North Africa is between ages 15 and 24. It is this group that will build the next generation of businesses and civic institutions, infusing them with their own attitudes and expectations.

Investment in the youth of Egypt and the Middle East has the greatest potential return. However, a large and sustained commitment by governments and nongovernmental organizations will be needed to initiate, program, and monitor this public investment—a challenge in today’s fiscal environment. But my organization believes it is a reasonable, even self-evident, investment compared to what we might have to spend should the hopes and expectations of today’s demonstrators again be frustrated. More than just a voice, youth in the Middle East need resources to forge their own futures.

In Egypt and other countries, investment in social and economic development can accelerate the transformation into a more democratic, civilian-dominated state that at the same time can be influenced and shaped by Islamist groups and shared religious attitudes. Such a state may be less pro-Western in the narrow sense of that term. It will pursue an independent foreign policy and may challenge US priorities on occasion. But it will be much more able to participate in and contribute to the social, political, and economic development of the international community. Turkey has successfully made this transformation and, like Turkey, Egypt is a culturally and religiously rich society driven by youthful energy. If Western values are about representative and accountable institutions that release and effectively channel the pursuit of universally shared values, a democratic Egypt infused with the great values of Islam is sure to be a friend of the United States.

Engaging Middle East youth, and the political parties and religious groups they join, is a tremendous opportunity for all of us. These are active citizens and creative workers. Their energy, whether motivated by religious or secular hopes, will create and sustain change for the long term. As a nation and a member of the international community, we must do what we can to eliminate roadblocks to the legitimate desires and energies of Egypt’s young citizens.

Dr. Arthur B. Keys is President and CEO of International Relief & Development, a global development organization based in Arlington, Virginia. He is the recipient of the William Sloane Coffin Award for Justice and Peace from Yale Divinity School.

Suzanne Manneh
Guest Writer
San Francisco, CA

Tareq, a Syrian American graphic designer living in Silicon Valley, says his life has “completely changed 100 percent over the past year,” a change he credits to protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square exactly one year ago today. That date has since been enshrined as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the Arab Spring.

The toppling of Tunisia’s Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, followed by the fall of Libyan strongman Moammar Ghaddafi have defined what Tareq, who requested that his last name be withheld because of safety concerns for relatives in Syria, calls “the most important time of the region’s history.”

“[These events] have broken the barriers of fear for Arab Americans and Arabs abroad against oppression and reinforced pride in being Arab,” says Tareq, before striking a note of caution.

The road ahead, he says, is long and unpredictable. Events in his native Syria, where an ongoing struggle to oust President Bashar Al-Assad has claimed over 5,000 lives, checks his optimism.

Mohammed Bouazizi was not unlike many young Tunisians. A recent college graduate, he was reduced to selling fruit to support himself and his family. On December 17, 2010, Bouazizi immolated himself to protest policies blamed for rising unemployment and poverty.

That singular event launched a wave of protests, beginning in Tunisia and rapidly spreading across the region, culminating in an 18-day rally that drew on Egyptians of all stripes and from all corners who descended on Tahrir and eventually succeeded in ending Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Egyptians have since celebrated their gains, recently holding the country’s first, if controversial, democratic elections, with the moderate Egyptian Brotherhood sweeping into power ahead of secular and more religiously conservative rivals.
Tunisia also held elections in October 2011, with the moderate Islamist Ennahda Movement winning a majority of the vote.

But for others in the region — including Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria — the ripple effects of the Arab Spring continues to make waves.

“These uprisings toppled the whole idea of Arab equals terrorist, backwards, or illiterate,” said Momen El-Husseiny, an Egyptian and currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Architecture and Global Metropolitan Studies. “All these notions that had been so potent were no longer so. We are now in communication with the entire world,” he said.

El-Husseiny, who spent the past year in Egypt and recently returned to Berkeley to complete his dissertation, said he immediately saw those changes within himself and in others.
Mokhtar Alkhanshali, of Yemeni descent, says the Arab Spring has altered the way Arabs are seen globally, dispelling widespread notions including that of Arab women being absent from the realm of civic engagement.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the Yemeni organization Women Journalists Without Chains, Tawakkol Karaman, he noted, was “one of the first voices that came out in this movement in Yemen,” having “led the first protests in front of the University of Sanaa.”

Women also played an active and prominent role in Egypt’s Tahrir protests. Such actions, broadcast for a global audience thanks to the proliferation of mobile technology and social media, “changed the face of Arabs,” says Alkhanshali.

“For a Yemeni woman to be the first Arab woman and youngest person to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and play such a role…I feel very proud of that,” he added.
Alkhanshali shared another experience, one closer to home, that spoke to the new light under which Arabs are now being seen. It was last Halloween, he explained, when he encountered a stranger dressed in military fatigues and a Kiffyeh, a traditional unisex headscarf.

“He told me he was a Libyan revolutionary,” Alkhanshali recalled, saying it was then he realized that mainstream society was beginning to replace the image of Arabs as “riding camels and oppressing women” to “fighters for democracy.”

“I take my daughter to a (private) Arabic school,” says Hany Elhak, originally from Egypt and now living in San Jose. Recalling the events of the past year, he says that when the revolution first swept through Tunisia, students and parents with roots spanning the entire Arab world celebrated.

“People were bringing in food… We never felt that close,” he says, adding that a resurgent pride in Arab American identity and culture, long overshadowed by conflict in the region and fears of terrorism at home, were evident in recent protests in San Francisco.

“During demonstrations in support of the Syrian struggle, there have been Yemeni’s, Egyptians, everyone there in solidarity. There has definitely been a renewed sense of Pan Arabism, a sense of Arab pride,” noted Tareq.

And inspiration. For if nothing else, the Arab Spring helped precipitate what has become the largest protest movement to hit America since the Vietnam War.

At a recent Occupy Oakland rally, Tareq remembers hearing protestors chanting “The people want to topple Wall Street.” That chant, he says, found its precedent in Tahrir and Tunis, where protestors cried, Asha’ab ureed isqaat anizaam. “The people want to topple the regime.”

“Of course we can’t take the credit, but I do believe that if the Arab revolutions were not this powerful, the Occupy movement would not have been (as powerful) either,” he notes.
Arabs across San Francisco and the Bay Area are preparing to commemorate the anniversary of the Arab Spring with an event that organizers say will “bring the community together… to reflect on this last year of revolution in Egypt and honor all Arab struggles.”

Janaan Attia, a community organizer and one of the individuals responsible for putting on Wednesday’s event in the city’s Mission District, says it is “vital that Arabs gather and connect” with one another.

Discussions are sure to touch on issues of democracy and the continuing violence in countries like Syria, though many are hopeful and say they’d like to return when conditions improve.
Others are more cautious.

“I’m sure we will see democratic states,” said Tareq in reference to Syria, “but unfortunately (the violence) will continue. We won’t get democracy for free.”