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anti war
They’re Arresting the Wrong People Inside of Congress
While they are arresting peace activists for exercising First Amendment rights, they are making plans to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a war criminal with an actual arrest warrant request.
Jun 12, 2024
I was arrested again inside of Congress for speaking out against U.S.-backed genocide. Myself and others were brutally tackled and carried out of the room by Capitol Police. I was charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding” for speaking out and holding a sign as the secretary of state and the secretary of defense testified in Congress for more money for the endless U.S. war machine.
While they are arresting peace activists for exercising First Amendment rights, they are making plans to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a war criminal with an actual arrest warrant request from the International Criminal Court.
The real criminals are the ones we are protesting against—the ones literally sitting directly in front of us inside the hearing room—and they should be the ones arrested, charged, and found guilty.
For decades, people following CODEPINK’s lead have been protesting inside the halls of Congress. The year before October 7, there were a handful of us protesting the bloated military budgets and the U.S. warmongering. I was arrested several times on my own, but since October, dozens of us have been arrested in Congress, hundreds in D.C., and thousands across the U.S. and the world for Palestine.
The sustained energy and activism are the result of the nearly 40,000 of Palestinians murdered; millions being starved and displaced, their land, water, and air poisoned; and neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps demolished.
The real criminals are the ones we are protesting against—the ones literally sitting directly in front of us inside the hearing room—and they should be the ones arrested, charged, and found guilty for the war criminals they are funding and supporting and the war crimes they are committing.
Any of us speaking and acting out on the side of justice know we are taking risks. We see it as our duty as people in the U.S. in solidarity with and inspired by the Palestinian people facing and resisting this horror.
As I await my court date, I think of the people I spent the night with at the D.C. detention facility. Just this year, there have been five deaths inside the D.C. jail. The dozen or so women in there reminded me that poverty is a policy choice and our carceral, systemically racist state perpetuates harm and cycles of violence.
According to the U.S. Center for Palestinian Rights in Washington D.C., for this year alone (before our additional billions of aid were sent), the $3.8 billion allocated for Israel’s weapons could instead fund 451,735 households with public housing, free or low-cost healthcare for 1,322,199 children, 41,490 elementary school teachers, solar electricity for a year for 10,818,505 households, and debt cancellation for 100,563 students.
The fight against U.S. militarism is one that the climate, feminist, Indigenous, economic, and racial justice movements are all uniting around right now. And as it deepens and strengthens, we must become more organized as we escalate while we continue to make those in power uncomfortable.
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Can Biden Learn From 1968 Before It’s Too Late?
In order to get the necessary turnout among young people, minorities, and progressives to prevent a Republican victory in November, the Biden administration needs to change its policies, and soon.
Jun 09, 2024
The year 1968 may be repeating itself. The United States is again experiencing an incumbent Democratic administration supporting an unpopular war, disruptive protests on college campuses, police repression against nonviolent demonstrators, a Republican challenger promising to restore law and order and, to top it off, a Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It is axiomatic in politics not to alienate your base in an election year. Yet, this is what U.S. President Joe Biden and congressional Democratic leaders are doing. While polls show that 83% of Democrats support a permanent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the Biden administration and the Democratic leadership continue to oppose it. Only a minority of Democratic voters agree with Biden’s continuous unconditional military assistance to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. And, despite Biden’s angry denials, a full 56% of Democrats say that Israel is committing genocide with only 22% believing otherwise.
A poll published in March shows that nearly three times as many Democrats believe that “Israel has gone too far and its military actions are not justified” as those who believe that “Israel is defending its interests and its military actions are justified.” While that number has almost certainly grown in light of subsequent Israeli atrocities and condemnations by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, the Democratic administration and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress continue to say just the opposite.
Whenever there is such a huge gap between public opinion and government policy, the legitimacy of the entire political system is called into question, prompting disruptive protests.
Despite 62% of registered Democratic voters supporting a suspension of military aid to Israel, the Biden administration, along with all but three Democratic Senators and 173 out of 213 House Democrats, approved nearly $18 billion in additional unconditional military aid to Israel in recent weeks. Even though Biden suspended one shipment of particularly lethal ordnance in April, he has continued to approve additional arms transfers despite ongoing Israeli violations of U.S. and international law. This could have a real political impact, as a more recent poll shows that a majority of Democrats would prefer a presidential nominee who does not support military aid to Israel.
More significant to the outcome of the presidential race, a recent poll shows that 20% of voters in five swing states are less likely to vote for Biden because of his support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
Biden’s policies are particularly damaging with core constituencies, such as Arab Americans, who compose a large enough percentage of the voting population to affect the outcomes in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Virginia. Close to 60% of Arab Americans supported Biden in 2020 while only around one-third supported Donald Trump. This year, a recent poll of Arab American voters in those swing states shows that, as a result of the war in Gaza, Biden’s support has dropped to only 20%.
Other minorities in the Democratic coalition are becoming alienated as well, with growing evidence that support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza by Biden and congressional Democrats could negatively impact electoral support among Black and Latinx supporters.
Perhaps the most dramatic shift is among the country’s diverse base of 2.5 million Muslim voters, 86% of whom supported Biden in 2020. That support has now dropped to 36%.
But it is with young voters that support for Israel’s war could have the biggest impact for Biden and congressional Democrats. Recent elections have shown that when youth turnout is high, Democrats win. When it is low, Democrats lose. All indications suggest that the Gaza war will depress the youth turnout and lessen the enthusiasm necessary to recruit the army of young volunteers to canvas and get out the vote. Nearly three-quarters of voters under the age of 30 oppose Biden’s policy in Gaza, a higher percentage than opposed George W. Bush on Iraq, Ronald Reagan on Central America, or even Richard Nixon on Vietnam.
Whenever there is such a huge gap between public opinion and government policy, the legitimacy of the entire political system is called into question, prompting disruptive protests. There have been more than 8,000 anti-war and pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the United States since October, attracting more than 1,000,000 people, with particularly high numbers of younger Americans taking part. Even College Democrats of America, the official student organization of the Democratic Party, has not only called on the President to support a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, but has endorsed the protests as well.
Despite 97% of campus protests being completely nonviolent, the crackdown against student demonstrators have been far more repressive than comparable pro-divestment protests targeting South Africa during the 1980s, with more than 3,600 arrests and hundreds of injuries from police assaults, and hundreds of student suspensions. Notably, the colleges and universities with the most arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters have been in cities led by Democratic mayors and located in states led by Democratic governors.
Such repression, along with ongoing atrocities in Gaza by U.S.-backed Israeli forces, is leading to greater anger and more militant protests, with massive demonstrations planned this August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The New York Times and others have noted how this can play into the Republican narrative, as it did in 1968, enabling them to give the impression that, under Democratic leadership, the country is falling apart and things are getting out of control, thus requiring a strong Republican leader to restore order.
Using Nixon’s playbook, Biden has tried to depict the anti-war movement by its most extreme elements. In his nationwide address on May 2, Biden reiterated the right to peaceful protest, but implied that the majority of protesters were engaged in such practices as “threatening people, intimidating people, [and] instilling fear in people” as well as “vandalism, trespassing, [and] breaking windows”—in spite of the fact that such incidents have been extremely rare among the more than 130 encampments that sprung up in colleges and universities across the country. Biden even blamed demonstrators for “forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations” even though these were decisions made by school administrators and were not being advocated for by the protesters.
A recent poll shows that only 41% of registered Democrats approved of Biden’s response to the protests.
The Biden administration has falsely claimed that a popular slogan calling for a democratic secular state in historic Palestine and the use of an Arabic word traditionally connoting civil resistance are antisemitic hate speech. Congressional Democrats have joined Republicans in an effort to codify a definition of antisemitism so broad as to make it possible to suppress pro-Palestinian activism under civil rights statutes.
Democratic politicians have also joined Republicans in attacking anti-war and pro-divestment protesters as “pro-Hamas,” “pro-terrorist,” and “antisemitic,” citing incidents involving a tiny minority of extremists within the ranks of these protesters as somehow being representative of the entire movement and even portraying peaceful demonstrators as violent mobs who have threatened the physical safety of other students. Some Democratic officials, using language reminiscent of the 1960s, have also insisted, without evidence, that protesters were outside agitators paid by foreign authoritarian interests.
All of this will only fuel the resentment and cynicism of Democratic-leaning young voters angry at being slandered by Democratic politicians, having their anti-war organizations banned, and seeing Democrat-led city governments bring in cops to beat and pepper spray them.
As a result, for many young Americans, this election has gone well beyond Israel and Palestine. They see it as a question of democracy—showing that Democrats are not only willing to ignore the vast majority of their constituents in pursuing what they see as a fundamentally immoral policy of aiding and abetting a far-right government engaging in war crimes on a massive scale, but also attacking international legal institutions and human rights organizations seeking accountability, supporting corporate interests profiting from an illegal war and occupation, and actively suppressing dissent.
In order to get the necessary turnout among young people, minorities, and progressives to prevent a Republican victory in November, pointing out how Trump would pursue even worse policies in regard to Israel and Palestine—and how his election would threaten American democracy itself—is not enough. The Biden administration needs to change its policies, and soon.
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This Mother’s Day, Take a Stand Against War in Gaza and Everywhere
As a creative force, mothers must speak out now to counter the destructive force of war and violence.
May 12, 2024
This Mother’s Day, children around the country are celebrating their mothers with cards, flowers, and brunch. But few likely remember that Mother’s Day originally started as a day for mothers to call for peace.
In 1870, in the aftermath of the bloody American Civil War, Julia Ward Howe, a prominent American abolitionist, feminist, poet, and author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” gathered mothers to issue the Mother’s Day Proclamation, appealing to moms across national boundaries to take action toward achieving world peace.
On this Mother’s Day, as students across the country protest U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where two-thirds of all Palestinians killed and injured are women and children, women must revive the anti-war origins of Mother’s Day and take a stand against more war and violence.
One thing American mothers can do now is to call on President Joe Biden and Congress to urge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept terms for a cease-fire, and withhold any more military aid to Israel until the fighting ends.
As a creative force, mothers must speak out now to counter the destructive force of war and violence. Mothers teach their children to be courageous, to speak up when there is injustice, to care for one another, and to resolve interpersonal conflicts with their words, not their fists. We insist now, as then, that our children were not born to fight and die in wars.
According to a May 6 United Nations report by the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, of the nearly 35,000 Palestinians killed since the war on Gaza began, 14,500 have been children and 9,500 women. Three out of four of the 77,000 injured are women, 17,000 Palestinian children have been orphaned, and each day since the start of the war, an estimated 37 Palestinian mothers have been killed. As feminists, we must say enough is enough.
One thing American mothers can do now is to call on President Joe Biden and Congress to urge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept terms for a cease-fire, and withhold any more military aid to Israel until the fighting ends. Every F-16 fighter jet, every Apache helicopter, every bomb that is dropped on Palestinian civilians is American-made and financed with U.S. taxpayer dollars. As Biden speaks of a “red line” around an Israeli invasion of Rafah—an invasion that, in fact, has already begun—American women must unite across race, class, and religion to insist an end to this carnage against Palestinians.
Women have long played a vital role in peace movements. During the height of the Cold War, Women Strike for Peace mobilized 50,000 women to march in 60 cities across the United States to protest nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. Led by feminist firebrands Bella Abzug and Dagmar Wilson, they pressured the Kennedy administration to sign a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union. In 2015, on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s division by Cold War powers, I marched hand in hand with Nobel Peace laureates Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee, renowned feminist Gloria Steinem, and 10,000 Korean women on both sides of the demilitarized zone to call for a peace agreement to end the Korean War.
For many mothers today, their children are college students protesting the assault on Palestinians much like youth did during the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa. Today, thousands of university students have formed over 120 encampments on college campuses across the country to call on their universities to divest from Israel and weapons manufacturers. Students today are risking suspension, expulsion, and arrest to awaken us to the atrocities that our government is backing by continuing to send military aid and weapons to Israel.
At these encampments—racially and religiously diverse gatherings—students provide mutual aid, conflict resolution, and share stories from all over the world about liberation and democracy. What they have learned in the classroom has called them to take action. They are protesting the hypocrisy of their academic institutions preaching human rights while remaining silent on the war, and directly investing in companies that are enabling Israel to kill Palestinian children.
“This is not about Columbia,” Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Professor of modern Arab history, reminded us, after students were forcefully detained by police. “This is the conscience of a nation speaking through your kids.” When Columbia University students occupied Hamilton Hall, as they did during the Vietnam War and South African apartheid, they renamed it Hind’s Hall in honor of six-year-old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian girl whose entire family was killed in a car by Israeli tanks, and who Israel willfully killed despite international cries for her protection.
As Israeli planes drop seemingly endless American-made bombs on Palestinian civilians, we should all be haunted by the words of seven-year-old Kareem, a Palestinian boy in Rafah who, when asked in an Instagram video why he wrote his name on his arm, replied: “So that when we are bombed, they will know who I am.”
At a time when the U.S. can send $95 billion more to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan for more militarization and war but can’t seem to come up with $85 billion for the Child Tax Credit Act, which lifted half of our nation’s mothers and their children out of poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, what message are we sending about whose lives are worth making more secure? Our young people are deeply wise as they scream for Palestinian freedom. They have learned the lessons of the civil rights and anti-war movements, and now it is our turn to listen.
Just as 154 years ago women anti-war activists gathered in churches, social halls, and each other’s homes to call for a Mother’s Peace Day, today we must return to the 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation with the clarion call: “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
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