The situation in Gaza: A “truce” is not enough. Palestine must be free!

In the last two weeks, yet another unconscionable attack has been perpetrated against the Palestinians of Gaza and against the entire nation of Palestine. Hundreds have been killed or injured, many of them children and most of them civilians, in the wake of indiscriminate Israeli rocket attacks.

While the Israelis have called the brutal offensive “Operation Pillar of Defense,” the reality is that this escalation in hostilities is the latest in a decades-long campaign of repression and death resulting from the occupation of rightfully Palestinian lands.

The attack on Gaza serves several purposes for Israel, among them reinforcing it's position as an occupier, but also in gearing up for a confrontation with Iran, the preeminent nation in the region standing in the way of total U.S. and Israeli dominance.

A “truce” has been agreed upon by both sides, but regardless of any temporary ceasefire in a particular campaign, there is no end in sight for the occupation of Palestine as a whole, nor is there an end for the economic warfare, political repression and military operations that are critical parts of Israel's strategy. The “truce” is a farce. The occupation is itself a war on the people of Palestine and it will continue unabated.

The October 7th Committee stands in solidarity with the people of Gaza and with the Palestinian nation as a whole. We condemn Israel's violence and U.S. complicity in it and support of it.

Palestine has every right to defend itself as it sees fit under the leadership of whatever group it elects.

The Committee will continue to organize Utah's opposition to Israeli- or U.S.- backed wars in the Middle East. We call on all Utahns to support the people of Palestine and demonstrate unswerving opposition to all imperialist wars.

Free the Holy Land Five!

More information on the Holy Land Five can be found at FreedomToGive.com

Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh
are being imprisoned for running what was once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. Their
organization, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, contributed money and organized
donations to ease human suffering in various places and times, including after the conflicts in Bosnia
and Kosovo and after natural disasters in the United States.

One of their main activities was organizing donations to traditional and time-honored charitable
organizations called zakat committees in occupied Palestine, in order to aid refugees there. These
committees build hospitals and schools, give food to the poor, and generally care for those in need.
Muslims throughout the world donate to committees like those supported by the HLF, and they are an
effective and recognized means of distributing aid to the West Bank and Gaza.

In the post-9/11 hysteria of late 2001, the Bush administration shut down the HLF and accused it of
supporting terrorism by supporting Hamas. After finding no connection to Hamas, the U.S. decided that
donating to the zakat committees was supporting terrorism. As a matter of fact, the U.S. was itself
donating to some of the very same zakat committees through USAID until 2006.

This kind of absurd contradiction and double standard is found at every stage of the prosecution –
indeed persecution – of the Holy Land Five. They have never been accused or indicted of giving money
to an organization listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. Instead, prosecutors have used the widely
criticized Patriot Act to claim that giving to charitable zakat committees is the same as supporting
terrorists.

The Holy Land Five have been tried twice. In 2007, there was a mistrial. They were convicted in a
retrial in 2008. In both trials, the U.S. allowed an Israeli intelligence officer to testify using a
pseudonym, a totally unprecedented occurrence. They also showed “shock” videos of suicide bombers,
children wearing mock military garb and people burning an American flag in order to bias the jury.
These videos had absolutely nothing to do with the charges or the Holy Land Five.

The October 7th Committee condemns the conviction of these charitable workers. We support national
day of action to demand justice. Specifically, a rally will be held by the Salt Lake Community College
Revolutionary Students Union at the Salt Lake Federal Building from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. We invite
everyone to attend and demand the freedom to give to charities without repression.

Charity is not a crime!

America: The Purveyor of Silent Genocide

The following is a speech given by UVU Professor Christopher Davey on Oct. 7th in Salt Lake City
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George Maciunas, in his graphic artwork USA Surpasses all the Genocide Records, frames this country’s atrocity record as “surpassing” the totalitarian genocidal regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Maciunas’ piece assigns the destruction of 75 percent of Native Americans to the US, which is a sizable part of what historians have claimed as being the most sustained and devastating attack on human life, with victims reaching 100 million mark.[1]  Death, disenfranchisement and destruction of societies came as a result of imperial expansion, or “manifest destiny”.  When this pursuit of conquest reached the Pacific and led to the annexing of Hawaii and other locations, it continued under the auspices of evolving nexus between military strategy and technology.  The navy became the harbinger of US power, with boots on the ground, that sought to secure economic dominance and influence, guaranteeing the permanence of markets in Central and South America, and in the Far East.  With the rise of US hegemony throughout the twentieth century, the singularity of neo-liberal capitalism has dominated the economic and political landscape.  Since the end of the Cold War the US has led coalitions and military alliances into misadventures in both Iraq and Afghanistan, accompanied by continuous global military operations.  Such has been accomplished by purveying silent genocides that destroy socially, economically, and physically those who oppose or are perceived to stand in the way of US hegemony. 

What makes Maciunas’ placing the US legacy of atrocity with that of Nazism and Stalinism frighteningly accurate is Washington’s historic oscillation between “sending in the Marines” (think Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again), and sponsoring pro-US factions or military governments (think Nicaragua, Guatemala, Angola, Zaire, etc...).  In these places the US has been implicated in supporting genocidal warfare that has resulted in destruction of social groups and existing ways of life.   

US involvement in Guatemala and Nicaragua is notorious for its ideological sponsorship, military training and funding of genocidal warfare.  Both cases saw the arming of militia and militaries that inflicted direct harm on civilians that were designated as “other”.  In the case of US backed rebels in Angola, taxpayers purchased the brutal deaths of 500,000 people, a measure of destruction far worse than what had Taliban inflicted on Afghan population prior to US invasion.[2] 

The similarities between these international crimes and the war on terror are not lost due to the more direct involvement of US and NATO armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In all cases we have seen a rise in risk-free warfare, massive so-called “collateral damage”, and destruction of groups’ social, economic and at times physical existence. 

Some comments about Afghanistan in this context would be appropriate today.  The general public that implicitly supports the President’s current modus operandi of “execution by drone” as “counter-terrorism” have forgotten some of the early instances of the war that amounted to genocidal acts by themselves.  In northeast Afghanistan, after a prisoner uprising, Western Special Forces and Northern Alliance troops rounded up Taliban captives locked them into containers, leaving them to suffer a death comparable to initial Nazi experiments in gas vans during the height of World War II.  Those dying as a result of being locked in containers are the closest informal investigators have come to accounting for some 5,000 missing prisoners.  Additionally, accounts place US soldiers at the scene executing and brutally torturing these prisoners.  One witness claimed the following, “I saw the [US soldiers] stab their legs, cut their tongues, cut their hair and cut their beards (...).  they would take a prisoner outside, beat him up and return him to the jail.  But sometimes they were never returned and they disappeared, the prisoner disappeared.”[3] 

Another genocidal element of the early phases of the war included the destructive bombing of infrastructure.  The latter also went hand-in-hand with mobilization of the international aid machine.  However, achieving the goals of distributing food, medicine and other materials was frustrated by continued US bombing, such that Oxfam and the International Rescue Committee were unable to reach those on the brink of starvation, who were simultaneously trapped by bombing and starved by bombing.  Starvation very quick changed from risk to reality.  This is what Noam Chomsky aptly described as silent genocide.[4]  The worst of these bombs, known as “daisy cutters” shattered both nerves and flesh, destroying the will to carry-on, homes and bodies.  What then is the difference between such relentless civilian bombing and Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Japan, Dresden, Coventry, and even the World Trade Center?

The silence and gravity of these attacks and US strategy continues with the use of unmanned aircraft or drones.  Such are silent to their victims, operators and taxpayers.[5]  This detachment and distancing of agency from immoral action only makes for a future where wars are fought by robots in some horrifying Wellsian holocaust.  The US and its allies have been moving towards so-called risk-free conflict since the emergence of NATO bombing in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo in the 1990s.  Risk-free warfare displaces the bodies of US soldiers being dragged through Mogadishu with those of non-combatant civilians in far off places like Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.  Indeed, “risk-free warfare presumes that our lives matter more than those we are intervening to save”.[6]  And where the US intends only to shatter lives with impunity as part of the War on Terror, the consequences of risk-free and silent genocidal war are only more devastating. 

As further part of the continued silent genocide against those who are perceived to be opposing US power and the pursuit of risk-free warfare, is the notorious practice of “double-tapping” by drones and their CIA operators.  Militants and the unfortunate civilians surrounding them are blown apart by drone missiles initially, and then attacked a second time to prevent the removal of bodies and the observation by monitoring organizations or news media.  Such attacks are more acute and frequent in the war-torn regions of Pakistan; however, they are clearly part of the historical purveyance of silent genocide, and the counter-terrorism supported by the Obama administration.[7]    

The toll of war in Afghanistan could be as much as 20,000 civilian deaths, with refugees numbering in the millions and internally displaced persons nearly half a million.[8]  Drones have killed a far smaller number of civilians, about 1,300, considering the overall number of civilian deaths in the War on Terror is around 164,000 civilians.  However, for those with consciences to think and feel, it is the emerging and devastating trend of risk-free drone attacks that removes Western publics and unmanned aircraft operators from the cost of war and makes such a trajectory a slippery slope.  Such also conjures the open-ended warfare that Reagan and Bush-era neo-conservatives hoped for.  Sadly, it is not just the political actors of the West that bear the burden of the 186 missiles and 66 laser-guided bombs that pounded Afghan lives and homelands in 2010 alone, we all must shoulder this destruction.[9]  

Considering these additions of Maciunas’ flag, we certainly cannot pass over the moral demands of responsibility, reconciliation and alleviating suffering.  Clearly, the strategic bombing of civilians, covert military assassinations of terrorists, or reliance on drones do not solve these issues, but create an atmosphere of impunity and states as terrorists.  Any criminal should be brought to justice, whether bin Laden or Donald Rumsfeld.  The challenge we have is to build a community and constituency of moral agents who respond creatively to conflict and sue for positive peace, regardless of who the victims or perpetrators are.  We must not only end the war, bring home the troops and close the web of foreign bases, but fashion of future of compassion and peacemaking. 

---

[1] David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 

[2] Chris Hedges, War is a Force that gives us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books), 24.

[3] Adam Jones, Genocide, War Crimes and The West: History and Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004), 390-391. 

[4] Jones, 386. 

[5] This thought is attributed to colleague and friend Michael Minch of Director of Utah Valley University's Peace and Justice Studies program.  

[6] Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 162.

[7] Glenn Greenwald, “US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan - the west stays silent,” The Guardian, 20th August 2012, accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drones-strikes-target-rescuers-pakistan 

[8] Cost of War, 2011, access at http://costsofwar.org/, BBC, “US Military Death Toll in Afghanistan reaches 2,000,” BBC, 30th Sept. 2012, accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19776402

[9] Christopher Drew, “Drones are playing a growing role in Afghanistan,” New York Times, 19th Feb. 2010,  accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/asia/20drones.html

Oct. 7th anti-war speech by Revolutionary Students Union member Joshua West

It was almost a month ago when the news hit. The whole Muslim world was on fire. Riots in Egypt, Tunisia, India, and Pakistan to name but a few. Violent attacks in Afghanistan and Libya where the US embassy was attacked and the ambassador killed.

The media reaction was swift, informing us that the riots were in response to an American made film which criticizes the Muslim faith. People on the left and right all began talking about the irrational and violent nature of Islam, that its followers would be so enraged over a silly movie.

The Washington Post ran an article called “Why is the Arab World so Easily Offended?” The Onion published an illustration depicting the various deities of the world’s religions, excluding Mohammed, all sodomizing one another with the headline: “No One Murdered Because of the Image.”

What seems to be forgotten amongst all of this popular demonization of Islam is history. And not just the history of a hundred or two hundred years ago. But how about the history of last year? People seem to have forgotten that the very country in which the US embassy was stormed was in 2011 the victim of a massive bombing campaign. Libyan civilians were killed by the hundreds when NATO launched air strikes and fired 110 tomahawk missiles into Libyan cities. The people murdered by NATO were guilty of nothing more than gathering for prayer, going to work, or sleeping in their own homes.

Let’s look at another country shaken by protests. Pakistan. In Pakistan the US has been dropping bombs from Drone airplanes, once again killing hundreds of Civilians, many of them children. I wonder what devious terrorist plot these children could have possibly been devising before the US saw fit to end their tragically short lives.

And this is to say nothing of the thousands upon thousands killed in Afghanistan or the million killed in Iraq as a result of the US occupation of these countries.

These are only a few of the most recent examples from a region that has been the victim of a brutal imperial aggression that stretches back through history for hundreds of years. And yet we are told that these people are upset because of a video on youtube?

It should be obvious that this video is not the real injury that has enraged the Muslim world. This video is merely the insult added to a much more horrendous injury. An injury that refuses to heal because the empire has been bleeding it for centuries.

The people over there are protesting for the same reasons that were are protesting here. Tell me, are you protesting because of a movie?

And yet the voices from the empire persist. They tell us that Muslims are brutal savages, easily manipulated, prone to outbursts of violence. We are told that their religion is primitive and barbaric.

Ah! Now this. This is a familiar story. We’ve all heard this one before. They said it about American Indians when they joined the Ghost Dance religion in the hopes that they might dance the empire away from their homeland. They said it about Nat Turner, the preacher and slave who organized a rebellion because he could stand slavery no longer. They have said it every time there have been people who have stood their ground against the empire. Every time their murderous incursions are met with resistance.

But the empire has to tell us this story because they cannot admit to the world, they cannot admit even to themselves, that the people they have murdered and robbed are human. They must convince us that these are not people, they are violent, irrational savages.

But the truth is that the only savages in this world fire tomahawk missiles and command drone airplanes. These savages march across the globe sewing violence and destruction with no other purpose besides their own enrichment.

And if these savages want to see what humanity really looks like all they need to do is look at the faces behind the picket signs and  behind the barricades that greet them in every corner of the world and there they will see humanity!

 And this is why we living here in the heart of the empire must stand with the oppressed people of the earth.

This is why we must stand with those who are resisting the empire.

This is why we must also resist.

Because though we may lose our place in the empire what we gain is our place in humanity. 

Community activist and writer Heather Hirschi's speech on Oct. 7th in SLC

Connecting the Dots for Peace

The following is a transcript of SLCC Professor Josh Gold's speech at the antiwar rally held on Oct. 7th in Salt Lake City.
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Connecting the Dots for Peace

I dedicate this speech to my brother, John, whose 62nd birthday is today.  I call this speech “connecting the Dots for Peace.”

First, I want to thank Michael, Zach, Jessica, and Wilden for organizing today’s anti-war rally.  They all desired and, in turn, made this anti-war rally materialize.  And that’s the central point of my speech: all of us need to start getting politically organized, in order to work every day against war.  So, to you guys, for taking the political and public initiative to make this rally a reality, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And, it is in the spirit of political organizing that I am here today: to try my best to inspire you and encourage you all to become anti-war activists for the rest of your lives.  Right now, and unfortunately, this must be for the rest of your lives. It is necessary for each of you to become anti-war activists for life, ‘cause the economic and political elites – oh, we might call them the 1% -- continue to have a self-interest in making war on us as working people here at home—we might call us the 99%. And the 1% also have vested self-interests in making war on people all around the world. As the War Resisters League puts it, “Wall Street equals War Street”!

Again, my purpose here is to inspire you, but that can’t happen without me making you very angry first.  So I’m going to present some of the most basic political and economic indicators of this war-making society, as a central means of demonstrating to you how legitimate your anger is, and in turn, how justified your presence here today is.  In other words, I’ve come with an analysis to support my purpose, of trying to inspire you to become life-long anti-war activists.  ‘Cause if we don’t, the madness of war and systematic violence will not come to an end.

First political indicator or set of facts: the US has made and continues to make more wars across the planet than all other nation-states combined, and that’s been true since the Cold War began.  To do this the US has had to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars since the end of WWII to make all those wars abroad – both covert and overt.  But there’s much more: many more trillions of taxpayer dollars also had to be spent in order to build the infrastructure of war-making here at home and virtually everywhere else too.  This is how today the US maintains permanent military bases in over 140 countries worldwide, and this amounts to over 750 of them; building the global infrastructure of US military dominance everywhere on the planet is also how there are currently US special military forces operating in more than 1000 locations outside the US; this is also how and why in virtually every single Congressional district here at home there are millions of federal military dollars being spent and millions of civilian and military jobs made necessary to carry out the war-making aims of US political elites.  

Second set of facts or indicators: the military-industrial complex that operates primarily through Congress, its members and their districts across the country, and the millions of federal dollars going to almost every one of them is what economists call a ‘monopsony.’  That is, there is only one buyer or customer of what the private military corporations produce, and of course, that buyer is the US federal government. So it lavishes annual billion dollar contracts on a relatively small number of military production and service corporations, and this in turn is how they (private military contracting corporations) are able to gain no-bid, cost-plus contracts; this is also how they are always paid, no matter how much of the military equipment and services the US federal government buys from them is faulty. And their hardware of death and the services bought to support them virtually always cost billions more than contracted; and this is also how the military services bought not infrequently include things like tainted water, which got 1000s of US military personnel in Iraq and elsewhere quite ill with giardia (thanks, Haliburton!).  These are also the same corps. that are regularly busted by government watchdogs and civil society watchdog groups (OMB Watch, Pentagon Watch, etc.) for deliberate white collar crime, negligence, extortion, etc. – aka, intentional ripping off the taxpayers. However, the federal government has few to no other choices when it comes to military procurement, so it always turns back to the same corporate merchants of death.  

This second set of indicators demonstrating that Wall St. = War Street, can be seen another way, too.  The US private military corporations sold $66.3 billion worth of all the military hardware exported from any country in the world in 2011.  That’s 77.7% of all the military hardware sold on international arms markets; in other words the US is the principal merchant of death worldwide.  And let us not forget that many of the nation-states importing US military hardware are long-standing dictatorial allies of the US, regularly committing human rights abuses on their people. 

Third point: as the military-industrial complex of the US operates as a monopsony, so does the two-party political system of the US operate as an oligopoly in economic terms or as a plutocracy in political terms.  Obama’s federal budget for fiscal year 2013 specifies that 35+% of all federal expenditures (including Social Security) will be spent on past, present and future military outlays, totaling $1.355 billion.  Now, the top 3 private military corporations Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing received federal contracts in 2010 worth $24 billion, and in that same year spent $44 million lobbying the federal government; in the same year companies like BP, Pepsico., FedEx, Dell, and Kraft were also part of the flood of corporate military welfare amounting to $7.29 billion in fed. Military contracts and their lobbying expenditures that year only amounted to $45 million.  Simply put, spending millions of dollars on lobbying the political elites of the two major political parties to guarantee returns in the billions of dollars is not only serving the self-interests of US corporations, it also serves the self-interests of the political elites of both parties. Each set of elite actors serves the others’ self-interests whilst simultaneously serving their own. 

To put this simply (and this is my fourth point), war for the richest 1% of the people in this society is enormously profitable, and the richest people in the U.S. don’t intend to stop having wars manufactured by political elites to serve their economic and material self-interests.  

Forbes business magazine reported last week that the 400 richest Americans are now worth $1.85+ trillion, a combined sum of wealth roughly equal to the two bailouts as officially reported to the American people by the mass, commercial media corporations.  That combined sum of wealth possessed by the richest 400 Americans is also roughly equal to 1/8th the entire US economy in any given year.  Their combined wealth surpasses the combined wealth of the poorest 92+% of Americans, and that’s over 150 million working people in the US.  

Fifth point: you’d think that with all this wealth being spent now for over 60 years on making wars regularly and maintaining and promoting the infrastructure of war here at home and virtually everywhere else on the planet, this society would take good care of those who are regularly trained to fight, kill, and die and/or return to the US maimed, severely wounded, with PTSD, as a consequence of US wars.  This too, however, is not and has not been the case factually since the US became the world’s dominant military force many decades ago.  You see, the US military never de-mobilized after WWII, but instead the government of the US has kept this society on a war-time basis ever since.  That has meant that the US always has to search for and find new global enemies.  For a long time it was the Soviet Union.  Now the global enemy is amorphous and slippery, always hiding in the shadows (a bit like the British Redcoats complaints about the American revolutionaries back-in-the-day).  However, today the global enemies of the US seem always to be Islamic Jihadists who are terrorists that the US and its allies (NATO) must continuously track down and kill, because they are evil personified.    And isn’t that exactly what the prior US president kept telling us since 9-11-01?  The US Global War on Terror is necessary to destroy evil.

In addition, VA hospitals across the US constantly face budget cuts, lay-offs and retrenchment; I know ‘cause my older sister runs a Veterans Administration department in Miami, and she faces constant cuts from the management of the VA due to the political elites’ inattention and lack of concern for those whom they send to wage US wars abroad.  Furthermore, if you want to read first-rate descriptions of exactly how the US gov’t doesn’t take much care of its returning veterans from its multiple wars, check out numerous articles by Joshua Kors, especially in The Nation.

Perhaps most significantly on this 5th point is this: who does the killing and dying in each of this country’s wars?  It’s always the sons/daughters of working people, who often find it extremely difficult to be employed here at home; certainly it ain’t the sons/daughter of economic and political elites who regularly volunteer to supposedly serve their country, and kill and die and/or get severely injured in our wars. Nope, it’s the children of society’s 99% who regularly sacrifice themselves; they are trained and commanded to kill others they know little/nothing about, and to do so in other people’s countries. Unfortunately this then often leads the sons and daughters of the US working class to assume the rationality of completely de-humanizing the foreign peoples they are sent to kill.  Then the videos of the de-humanization of other peoples by US soldiers show up on Youtube; we see America’s sons and daughters dragging Iraqis in Baghdad prisons Saddam Hussein used to torture his enemies in, and these US prisoners are being dragged on leashes, pissed upon, thrown into concrete walls repeatedly for hours, etc.  And we wonder why others abroad hate us?  

However, I’m here today to tell you that the only hope we have of stopping the US wars abroad, and the only hope we have of restructuring the infrastructure of war at home is for each of us to work daily on forging alliances, coalitions, and solidarity groups with working people both at home and abroad. It’s in the self-interests of all working people worldwide to never have to work for poverty wages. But it’s always in the interests of those who own nearly the entire US and global economies to pay their workers as little as the market will bear, and as a result, workers wages everywhere are in a competitive race to the bottom.

So, none of us ought to be satisfied with business as usual each and every day. Each one of us must every day devote energy to stopping these wars that the political and economic 1% routinely wage, both here at home and abroad.  We must never forget that war is extremely profitable for very few people in this society, but it is very costly and painful for the 99% of us who have to work daily for a wage.  

I am here to say that we all need to wake up each morning with an active desire to stop the wars and the violence; we need to be motivated each day to take some kind of action – and better still, actions - committed to intentionally promoting peace.  Now, that ain’t easy. But fortunate for us is the undeniable fact that waging war is much costlier than any possible alternative, non-violent actions humans could ever take in order to confront, and hopefully resolve, conflict.  That is something we – who are here today - have going for us, and it’s reason enough for each of us to speak to all others we know – our friends, our family members - every day, always using language that demonstrates how avoiding violence and war is far less costly, and is instead and in fact, incredibly beneficial for each one of us, every day.  
Unfortunately, the political elites of the US were long ago doing the bidding of the economic elites of the US – i.e., the 1% (really the 0.1%).  You see, we need to know that the self-interests of the political and economic elites at home are working to support the self-interests of political and economic elites abroad and that’s true in both the other rich developed countries like ours, and all of the countries of the third world.   

This is why every one of us here today must make friends with the folks staffing the tables around the quad area here, handing out the literature that they are.  
I think you are all here today for at least the reason that inside, viscerally, you understand that war and the violence that’s necessary to support war is built into the structures of politics and economics in this society. And there seems to be little any of us can do to change the complex realities, facts and truth of that statement.  

However, I am here today to say that such a notion of powerlessness is wrong.  The people at the tables are political activists and organizers, and that’s what we 99% need to begin doing, right here in this community.  These folks are amongst the finest citizens SLC has.  They have more knowledge than I can possibly speak about here today.  But, we need to get organized where we live, and the people already working actively every day to change the structures of our polity and our economy are right down around you, and they’re amongst the finest citizens and political organizers and activists I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of working with the last 11 years here.  

Getting active and organized is what it’s going to take for this society to rebuild itself in ways that will promote the public welfare, rather than wars, violence, death and destruction.  It’s all connected, and we need to start learning how this is so.  These people around and in front of you at the tables are best prepared to help you begin your daily journey in saying no to war.

Also, for those who aren’t interested in stopping by the tables, but if you’re taking notes, here are some websites to check out: democracynow.org; publiccitizen.org; warresisters.org; afsc.org. Also, Occupy Wall Street Lives on in cities across the US.  They’re still active in places like Portland and Eugene, OR, and you can find their activities and such online.

My purpose today was to inspire, to stir you up! Thanks for listening.

October 7th Antiwar Rally a Success!

Yesterday, The October 7th Committee had a very successful rally at Washington Square in Salt Lake City. Over 100 people were in attendance with participation from Veterans For Peace (Utah), the Revolutionary Students Union, Wasatch Coalition for Peace and Justice, Workers International League, Wasatch Socialist Party, the Utah Anti-war Coalition, Gandhi Alliance for Peace, the Pacific Unity Association, and United for Social Justice.

Powerful speeches were given at the rally by various community members, university professors, and activists including Victor Puertas, Joshua West, Heather Hirschi, Josh Gold, and Christopher Davey. Between speakers, rally attendees enjoyed musical acts by John-Ross Boyce and hip-hop group Bonnevilla.

Transcripts of some of the speeches given yesterday will be uploaded to this website sometime in the next few days.

Anti-war groups in the area will be planning future actions and events in the near future, and interested individuals are encouraged to check this website for information on these events as they become available. If you would like to actively organize with The October 7th Committee please shoot us an email at UtahAgainstWar@gmail.com.