[Afsckc-peacealert] KC AFSC Peace and Justice Alerts - November 11, 2011
Ira Harritt
IHarritt at afsc.org
Fri Nov 11 20:45:23 EST 2011
KC AFSC Peace and Justice Alerts - November 11, 2011
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Educate Yourself. Share your knowledge. Take Action!
For information about the American Friends Service Committee,
contact us at 816 931-5256 or afsckc at afsc.org<mailto:afsckc at afsc.org>
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"First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you.
Then you win."
~ Mahatma Gandhi
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Dear Peacemakers,
I am awed at the power and beauty of the Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan exhibit as it has been set up at the Central Library, 14 West 10th Street, Kansas City, MO.
It has been installed and officially will open to the public tomorrow, Saturday, November 12. Many thanks to wonder volunteers and workers: Denis, Ron, Bob, Roena, Charlie, Sharon, Mike, Jan and Roz for all of their time and energy getting the exhibit hung. Thanks also to Margaret Clark and the KCMO Public Library for partnering with us on this project
We encourage you to join us at an opening reception and program on Sunday, November 13 beginning at 1:00pm.
Delicious Samosas, Porkas and spiced Mango from Chia Shai will be served at the reception. And the program will include a talk by Mike Ferner, interim director of Veterans for Peace, offering a veteran's reflections on the Exhibit and the Afghan war. (See below for the schedule of Windows and Mirrors programs.)
Thank you for your support and your work for a peaceful and just community and world. Hope to see you on Sunday.
Peace,
Ira Harritt
KC AFSC Program Coordinator
iharritt at afsc.org<mailto:iharritt at afsc.org> 816 931-5256
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Get involved in KC AFSC Peacemaking Work
Meetings will take place at the AFSC office, 4405 Gillham Rd., KCMO
unless otherwise noted
We have restructured this work and are forming three committees to better plan and carry out peace campaigns. We are dividing our work among:
· Cutting Military Spending / U.S. Budget Priorities Committee- will organize education and advocacy campaigns on military spending and budget issues including passage of "Move the Money" budget resolution campaign- Directed toward organizations and city councils. Campaign will also collaborate with organizations who will be conducting candidate forums to include this issue in forum debates - Note change of meeting date to the fourth Monday of each month, Next meeting ->Monday, November 28, 6:00pm;
· Anti-War Committee - will organize campaigns to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Libya...) including: organizing actions to mark the 10th Anniversary of 9-11 and the Afghan war and planning events for the Windows & Mirrors Afghan Mural exhibit in November and December - (http://afsc.org/project/windows-and-mirrors) - Next meeting Tuesday, December 13, 6:30pm ;
· Peace-building Committee - will organize activities to promote a positive vision of peace including holding an annual Visions of Peace at the Crossroads Festival. We have decided to postpone the festival so that it will take place in the spring of 2012.
Meetings will take place at the AFSC office, 4405 Gillham Rd., KCMO
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Windows & Mirrors Exhibit Programs
Reflections on the War in Afghanistan
A powerful art exhibit on the human cost of the war including 45 murals from the traveling exhibit plus murals created by students in the KC area.
November 12 - December 30, 2011
at the Central KCMO and Johnson County Libraries
KCMO Central Library, (Exhibit opens November 12)
14 West 10th Street, Kansas City, MO
November 13, Sunday, 1:00 pm
Reception
2:00 to 3:30pm
A Veterans Reflections on the Afghan Windows and Mirrors Exhibit - a talk by Mike Ferner, interim director of Veterans for Peace and a Vietnam War veteran. He has traveled to Iraq twice, and authored the book, Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq. In 2010 he traveled to Afghanistan with a Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation.
December 11, 2:00pm
Courage for Peace: Perspectives from Afghanistan" - a talk by Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare. Since May 2010, she has visited Afghanistan four times with small delegations intent on learning more about conditions faced by ordinary people in Afghanistan. Kathy has been working closely with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers in search of non-military solutions to end the war.
Johnson County Central Resource Library. (Exhibit opens November 19)
9875 W. 87th St., Overland Park, KS
November 19, Saturday, 1:30pm
Reception
2:00pm
KC Area Youth Reflections on Afghan War
Panel Discussion of KC area youth and artists who created murals for the Windows and Mirrors exhibit -And
Afghanistan: What's Next?-a talk by Peter Lems, American Friends Service Committee's National Program Director for Education and Advocacy on Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008 he went to Afghanistan to contribute to a conflict assessment, and help design the organizations program work for the coming year.
December 4, Sunday, 2:00pm
'Forbidden Lessons' from Afghanistan -a talk by Suraya Sadeed, of Help the Afghan Children and author of "Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse: The true story of a women who risked everything to bring hope to Afghanistan," will speak on her experiences founding the humanitarian organization. She will discuss witnessing the humanitarian crisis on her trips to her home country since 1993 and changes she observed. She will also read from her book and comment on hope for Afghanistan's future.
For information: Contact the American Friends Service Committee,
816 931-5256, afsckc at afsc.org<mailto:afsckc at afsc.org>,
http://windowsandmirrors.org/ or www.afsc.org/kansascity<http://www.afsc.org/kansascity>
(Click this link to an online Windows and Mirrors schedule.)<http://afsc.org/document/windows-and-mirrors-kc-schedule>
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Upcoming Peace and Justice Activities
Click on link or scroll down for more information about the peace and justice activity
November 12 - December 31, Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the U.S. War in Afghanistan. A powerful art exhibit on the human cost of the war including 45 murals from the traveling exhibit plus murals created by students in the KC area. At the Central KCMO (opening 11/12) and Johnson County Libraries (Opening 11/19)
November 19, Saturday, 1:30pm, Reception; KC Area Youth Reflections on Afghan War and Afghanistan: What's Next?-a talk by Peter Lems, AFSC National Program Director for Education and Advocacy on Iraq and Afghanistan, Johnson County Central Resource Library. (Exhibit opens November 19), 9875 W. 87th St., Overland Park, KS
November 28, Monday, 6:00pm, Military Spending / Budget Priorities Committee Meeting will organize education and advocacy campaigns on military spending and budget issues including passage of "Move the Money" budget resolution campaign- Directed toward organizations and city councils. Campaign will collaborate with organizations conducting candidate forums to include this issue in forum debates.
December 13, Tuesday, 6:30pm, AFSC Anti-War Organizing . Join us to organize campaigns to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plan for the Windows & Mirrors Afghan Mural exhibit... At 4405 Gillham Rd., KCMO. For more information call 816 931-5256 or afsckc at afsc.org<mailto:afsckc at afsc.org>.
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EVERY Tuesday, JOIN THIS Peace Demonstration Every Tuesday between 5PM - 6 PM in the median strip on the south corner of the intersection at 63rd & Ward Parkway, Kansas City, Mo. For more information email '63rd Street Patriots' at schwartzkatz at sbcglobal.net<mailto:schwartzkatz at sbcglobal.net>
News and Alerts
Published on Friday, November 11, 2011 by Rolling Stone<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110>
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become.
by Matt Taibbi<http://www.commondreams.org/matt-taibbi>
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves - their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
More> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/11-7
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Published on Thursday, November 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org<http://www.commondreams.org>
Iran: Here We Go Again?
by Gwynne Dyer<http://www.commondreams.org/gwynne-dyer>
"We will not build two (nuclear) bombs in the face of (America's) 20,000," said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency report this week that accuses Iran of doing just that. He called Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, a US puppet, saying: "This person does not publish a report about America and its allies' nuclear arsenals."
Well, that's true, actually. Amano will never publish a report about America's nuclear weapons (only 5,133 of them now, actually). He hasn't said anything about Israel's, Britain's and France's weapons of mass destruction either. And his report is largely based on information fed to him by Western intelligence agencies.
But apart from that, Amano is as impartial and free from US influence as you would expect a career Japanese diplomat to be. Only cynical people will see any resemblance to Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations in 2003, when the US defense secretary held up a test tube and assured us all that Iraq really was working on germ warfare.
Iraq was allegedly working on nuclear weapons, too: former President George Bush's famous "smoking gun," which also subsequently went missing. And on the basis of this "intelligence" about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," the United States and its more gullible allies invaded the country. Hundreds of thousands died, no weapons were found, and nothing was learned. Here we go again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The same intelligence agencies are producing the same sort of reports about Iran that we heard eight years ago about Iraq's nuclear ambitions, and interpreting the information in the same highly prejudiced way.
Many people in the West realize that they are being hustled into yet another attack on a Middle Eastern country, but they don't really worry about it too much. After all, it will only be air strikes, and we all know that an air-only war is practically casualty-free for the side with air superiority. Look at Libya, for example.
More> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/10-0
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Video / Audio:
Beyond The Battlefield Webcast: David Wood And Bobby Henline Answer Your Questions On Wounded Veterans
The above webcast, recorded live on Oct. 21, features veteran Bobby Henline and reporter David Wood discussing "Beyond The Battlefield<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/beyond-the-battlefield.>, Wood's 10-part series focusing on U.S. troops catastrophically wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Henline, one of Wood's key subjects in the series, is a living testament to the past decade's advances in battlefield medicine, as the two detail in their talk. Questions submitted by viewers both before and during the webcast were posed by the webcast's moderator, Huffington Post Deputy National Editor Jeff Muskus.
David Wood<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-wood> is the senior military correspondent for The Huffington Post. He has been a journalist since 1970, a staff correspondent successively for Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service and the Baltimore Sun. A birthright Quaker and former conscientious objector, he covers military issues, foreign affairs and combat operations, and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting.
Click > http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/18/live-beyond-the-battlefie_n_1017837.html
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We need your support to keep our life affirming peacemaking work alive.
Contribute. Volunteer. Spread the word!
Contact us and mail your tax deductible contribution to:
American Friends Service Committee
4405 Gillham Rd., KCMO 64110
(816) 931-5256
The information and events described in AFSC Peace and Justice Alerts are intended to educate and assist members of our community in becoming active in working for a more just and peaceful world. Inclusion of a listing does not necessarily imply that AFSC KC agrees with all points of view that will be represented at the event.
The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that includes people of various faiths who are committed to social justice, peace, and humanitarian service.
Its work is based on the Quaker belief in the worth of every person and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice
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Ira Harritt
KC Program Coordinator
American Friends Service Committee
816 931-5256
iharritt at afsc.org<mailto:iharritt at afsc.org>
Ira Harritt
KC Program Coordinator
American Friends Service Committee
816 931-5256
iharritt at afsc.org<mailto:iharritt at afsc.org>
http://afsc.org/office/kansas-city-mo
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