Palestinian Water Justice -- talk tomorrow

Susan Koppelman will be speaking about the work she has been doing in Palestine for the past 3 years at Bristol Community College in Fall River this Wednesday evening 10/14 at 7 pm.    From Elsbree St go to Parking lot 5,4 or 3. Lecture will be in the Business Technolgy Building (K)-third building on the street. Go to second floor, Rm. 201. Class begins at 7:00 pm. If we are able to get a larger room for the presentation, we will post signs on the doors with the new location.   Description follows: Palestinian Water Justice Film Screening and Talk with Susan Koppelman Palestinians are facing a water crisis due to Israeli policies. What are the UN and international NGOs doing to uphold Palestinians’ human right to water? What can we do?  Why is the boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel a good non-violent strategy to force Israel to respect Palestinians’ human rights and follow international law? Susan Koppelman is an active member of LifeSource, a Palestinian-led collective organizing to build a popular movement for Palestinian water justice. She is based in Ramallah where she has been living for more than 3 years and she is joining us as part of an annual tour organizing for Palestinian water justice in North America. Gaza is Floating, a new short film from LifeSource about how the Israeli siege is leading to a sanitation disaster in Gaza, causing environmental catastrophe and human tragedy. For more information on Palestinian water justice and the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel please visit www.lifesource.ps --  Susan Koppelman LifeSource project organizer www.lifesource.ps +972 (0) 598318346 +972 (0) 525493215 LIFESOURCE is a Palestinian-led collective of people who recognize it is crucial to address the current and unfolding regional water crisis immediately – on the humanitarian level, the environmental level, and the political level. We are launching a campaign of popular research, popular education and popular action, with the goal of motivating communities to engage in their own analysis of information and direct their own courses of learning and action.   --  check out my web sites: http://www.tallitotbymichelesaunderskoppelman.com http://www.michelesaunderskoppelman.com

8th anniversary of our War in Afghanistan

When the United States began its bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan on the night of October 7, 2001, there was no active organized peace movement in Fall River, and there was not a lot of vocal opposition. The Taliban was closely intertwined with Al Quaida, and Al Quaida had attacked us three weeks earlier, on September 11th. Ostensibly we were going after Osama bin Laden, who was indeed our enemy. Moreover the Taliban was a very repressive, intolerant and brutal group; overthrowing them seemed all in all a good idea. They banned women from leaving their homes, even for work or education, they banned most entertainment and sports, they punished theft by amputating hands, they stoned adulterers to death, they lashed people caught with liquor. They massacred ethnic and religious minorities. They flooded the western marketplace with opium. Removing them from power seemed a rather good idea. However, it was a country that had just been through 30 years of war, both civil and from outside in the form of the Soviet invasion. It did not have structures in place for running a country. A vast proportion of the educated classes had fled abroad during the 10 years of Soviet war and the five or six years under the Taliban. And after rapidly overthrowing the Taliban (while in fact failing at our main objective, which was to defeat Al Quaida and capture bin Laden, who had slipped over the border and regrouped in Pakistan), we lost interest, or rather shifted our interest, and our immense expenditure of capital, to Iraq. After World War II international forces placed 89 soldiers per a thousand inhabitants in Germany to secure the peace; in Bosnia in 1996 17.5 soldiers per thousand inhabitants were brought in. But in 2002 US and other international forces placed fewer than 2 soldiers per thousand Afghans. There was no international police force. Money for rebuilding a country we had just saturation bombed was promised but was not delivered. There was no assistance for alternative crops in the former poppy fields. And an insurgency developed which overwhelmed both the weak government and the small American presence. Beginning in December of 2002, the peace movement in Fall River reconstituted itself in opposition to the Iraq War. That war seemed unjustified and vastly expensive, both in lives and in resources, which could so much better have been spent on education or on health care, or on the many other domestic needs we had. Or on giving the Afghans a decent chance to build themselves back into a functioning nation. Every event we had we made a poster of THE NUMBERS, giving the numbers of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq (4667 killed, 31,494 wounded), the likely numbers of Iraqis who died in the conflict (around a hundred thousand confirmed to date), the cost of the War to this country ($917 billion to date) and the amount of that which could otherwise have been spent in Fall River ($215 million). But we lost sight of the other war, in which 869 soldiers have been killed so far, 4,000 wounded. The UN says 1,160 civilians were killed last year, 1078 by insurgents, 828 by US and NATO troops. The numbers will be higher this year. There are 3.5 million refugees. And over the last eight years we have barely noticed them The country is at a crossroads now, where the military is urging 40,000 new troops be sent to Afghanistan. These are our people. They take a vow to do their best, giving their lives if necessary, to whatever quagmire we send them to. We need to be more careful in committing them. We need to examine our goals, and understand how achievable our strategies are first. We need to understand the place we are sending them to. We put a "Join the Greater Fall River Committee for Peace and Justice" flyer together a few years ago, and added some quotations from famous people. Here are three of them that seem relevant: Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter Martin Luther King Jr. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. Mohandas K. Gandhi I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. Dwight D. Eisenhower