Stop the Next War Now (18 page)

As I said to Nuha, and now I say to you, my imaginary American friend: We should be enemies. Your country bombed us and killed innocent people with sanctions, but I know it was not you who did it. I know because it happened to me, too. My country also bombed and killed innocent people, and it was not me doing it. It is easy to be against the “other,” to oppose the obvious enemy. Yet it is not only wrong but also dangerous to fail to see the real enemies, which are in our homes and sometimes inside ourselves: militarism and nationalism. They are lethal, killers without faces or names or races
.

At the 2003 international conference in Italy of Women in Black, I declared: “World beware, Women in Black are everywhere. They don’t have to be women; they don’t even have to wear black. We are all Women in Black.”

We who say, “Not in our names, not with our money,” we who are labeled traitors, we who are antipatriots, we who are spreading the politics of women’s solidarity, we who accept the mark of social shame, we who transform the sense of guilt into acts of responsibility, we who support the conscientious objectors, we
who transgress ethnic barriers, we who condemn every war, we who support the victims of war, we who demand accountability for war and war crimes: we are all Women in Black. And we are building an alternative world that is not only possible but already here
.

When I think of the United States, I don’t think of Bush, of frenetic militarism, of global warming, of racism. I think of my editor and coauthor, Steph. I think of my young friend Violeta, half Serbian and half Albanian, who married an American and has an American child. I think of Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, bell hooks. I think of rock music, of the Internet, of dreams of freedom and multiculturalism, dreams for which so many Americans have died. I think of a new continent available to all of us eager to leave behind the trenches of national history. I think of all those American friends (and there were many) who sent me packages, letters, and books during our dark times of Milošević
.

And I want to tell them now, because I found it out myself, written in scars all over my body: Nobody can save you, lead you, or destroy you but yourselves. We are never alone but only lonely
.

MAKING AMERICA

A HATE-FREE ZONE

PRAMILA JAYAPAL

Over her life, Pramila Jayapal has gone from investment banker to meditative writer and pilgrim to community activist. Since 9/11, with the escalation of abuses against Arab and South Asian communities, Jayapal has been at the forefront of community organizing against racism; she founded Hate-Free Zone Washington to build solidarity at the local level.The following piece was adapted from an interview with Anne Lappe.

September 11, 2001, was on a Tuesday. By Saturday, I had already received a number of calls from people living in immigrant communities I was close to: South Asians, East Asians, East Africans. Many were being attacked, physically and verbally. They were afraid to leave their homes. Teacher friends called to say kids were missing. Parents were afraid to send their children to school. It was one of those times when you cry, and then you wipe your tears and ask, What can I do?

CODEPINK cofounder Gael Murphy with Palestinian women protesting the Israeli wall.

Photo by Medea Benjamin

By Monday I had met with U.S. representative Jim McDermott of Seattle and presented a plan for a statewide campaign that included political advocacy, direct community support, education and training, and public awareness and media relations. By Tuesday, Representative Jim McDermott, myself, and others held a press conference with the governor, the mayor of Seattle, the county council, the chief of police, and the chief of schools, and we launched the Hate-Free Zone Campaign of Washington.

We started out thinking we’d focus on hate crimes by individuals against individuals, but we soon discovered an enormous need to oppose government actions targeting immigrant communities of color. Immigrant communities are—in some deep, dark way—becoming an endangered species.

Since 9/11, we have seen the federal government arrest or detain massive numbers of immigrants from the Middle East, often holding detainees without declaring any charges whatsoever. Once in custody, immigrants find themselves vulnerable to deportation on the grounds of minor visa infractions (such as not reporting a change of address within ten days of moving), not to mention being subject to the humiliation that comes from their captors’ misunderstanding of their religion or culture. One day, as I was leaving a detention center, I saw a Sikh man with a towel wrapped around his head as a turban. He was trying to communicate with a guard who was demanding he remove it. I explained to the officer that taking off this towel went against the man’s religion. In Sikhism, I explained, you must always keep your hair covered. I then talked to the director of the detention center and explained the situation. He eventually agreed to let the man keep his turban. For a Sikh man, having your turban taken off is not unlike having your pants removed and being forced to expose your penis. That’s what the officials had tried to do to him.

It is very difficult to know the scope of the post-9/11 detentions, raids, and arrests because the U.S. government has consistently maintained that revealing such information is a threat to national security. Now all federal agencies can claim blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and refuse to provide information.

The lack of information about exactly what these agencies are doing makes it difficult to police the authorities—and to know the difference between legitimate law-enforcement activities and unscrupulous abuses of power. At one community meeting, a Somali man said he’d been getting calls from a man who claimed to be from the FBI and who asked prying questions about his family members. In another case, a man also claiming to be from the FBI arrived at someone’s home and asked to listen to the answering machine. I myself received a call from someone who said he was with the Department of Defense, but when I called the Department of Defense, no one had heard of him.

And it’s not only the federal government we have to worry about—the increased authority of local cops is also a cause for concern. Immigration offenses are classified as civil violations (conveniently so for our government, because people charged with immigration violations do not need to be provided with public defenders!). Local cops enforce criminal violations. This distinction has been critical for the safety of immigrant communities; because of it, immigrants have felt safe reporting crimes without worrying that their immigration status will be challenged. Now that’s on the verge of changing. The state of Florida, working with the U.S. attorney general’s office, signed an order deputizing all local law-enforcement officers as INS officials.

We can’t always control what the federal government does, but we can mobilize locally. Hate-Free Zone worked with the Seattle mayor and the Seattle Police Department to establish a policy that police officers will not ask people about their immigration status. (The police were all too happy to comply, since they often don’t have the resources to handle immigration issues and they don’t want to be involved with such disputes.)

Meanwhile, though, the government is still effectively deputizing ordinary citizens, encouraging every American to report “suspicious activity.” But what is that? If you are an Arab-looking man taking pictures of public buildings, are you suspicious? If you are a Muslim woman in
hajib
walking in a neighborhood you don’t know, are you suspicious? With no clear criteria to define suspicious activity, many people make judgments based on what a person looks like.

And what is all this doing to control terrorism? Does it make you feel safer to know that more than two thousand people have been detained, yielding no concrete information about potential terrorist attacks (according to the Justice Department’s own report)? Does it make you feel safer that Operation Tarmac’s raid on airport workers led to 375 workers (primarily Latino and Filipino) being deported? Does it make you feel safer to know that the government is prohibiting people from working because of their countries of origin? Does it make you feel safer to know that the USDA pulled all foreign graduate research students out of their labs, citing fears of bioterrorism?

For most of us, any improvements in our day-to-day security are vague or intangible at best, while some of us have become remarkably less safe—these are the newest Americans, those with no money, no status, no voice. What they do possess, which would do much to boost our nation right now, is an impressive resilience, a faith in their own inner strength and the strength of their communities, rather than an overwhelming fear of others.

“It’s time for greatness, not greed. Idealism, not ideology. It’s a time not

just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.”

—Marian Wright Edelman

WHAT WE EXPECT

FROM AMERICA

MARY ROBINSON

Mary Robinson is the former president of Ireland and the former UN high Commissioner for human rights.This essay appeared in a slightly different form in
The American Prospect
.

U.S. leadership was critical in building the global human-rights agenda from the ground up, beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More than half a century later, that agenda and the movement it inspired urgently need renewed U.S. leadership at every level, from grassroots activism to government policy and actions, nationally and globally.

The reluctance of the United States to embrace fully the international human-rights system it did so much to establish has weakened efforts to promote democracy and social justice in the United States and abroad. Witness what has happened following the terrorist attacks of 9/11: since then, the U.S. government has decided to hold detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without Geneva Convention hearings; to monitor, detain, and deport immigrants against whom no charges have been made; and to restrict visitors and immigrants alike from many parts of the world.

In lowering its own standards, the United States has, often inadvertently, given other governments an opening to ignore international rights commitments. I saw this firsthand as the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights. A number of countries have introduced repressive laws and detention practices, all broadly justified by U.S. actions and the international war on terrorism. I will never forget how one ambassador put it to me bluntly: “Don’t you see, High Commissioner? The standards have changed.”

We must challenge this view and do everything possible to maintain the integrity of international human rights and humanitarian-law norms in light of heightened security tensions. Yet we must do more. We must also win the war of ideas and make the case that true security is possible only when the full range of human rights—civil and political as well as economic, social, and cultural—is guaranteed for all people.

This thinking isn’t new. In fact, it draws on the best traditions of U.S. leadership, epitomized by president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s celebrated 1944 State of the Union address. But succeeding U.S. administrations have rejected the idea that education, health care, adequate housing, and food are rights citizens are entitled to, sometimes contending that these are aspirations, not justifiable rights. Some of our leaders have voiced fears that U.S. sovereignty and states’ rights would be put at risk by ratifying international human-rights agreements. These philosophical and legal issues have long been debated. But we’ve spent far less time considering the advantages of committing ourselves to human rights around the world: namely, that the vision, legal framework, methods, and strategies of the human-rights movement could support and strengthen U.S. efforts to promote democracy and social justice today.

I am encouraged by the emergence of a U.S. movement that advocates the rights of people across the globe. For example, a growing number of academics at U.S. medical schools and groups such as Physicians for Human Rights are defending everyone’s right to the highest attainable standard of health—and demonstrating the impact this shift would have on the way decisions are made about health spending and access to health services, especially for the most vulnerable. At human-rights conventions, U.S. development and humanitarian organizations increasingly empower grassroots civil-society groups to press their governments to take appropriate actions. The U.S. labor movement (through new initiatives such as American Rights at Work) and networks of women’s-and children’s-advocacy organizations are recognizing the potential power of the international human-rights agenda.

Reclaiming American traditions that contributed so much to the creation of the international human-rights movement will be an uphill journey. We must begin close to home, while being mindful that each step will have a profound impact on the realization of human rights around the world.

“Warfare is only an invention—not a biological necessity.”

—Margaret Mead

PART II:

A

CHALLENGE

TO THE

SUPPORT

STRUCTURE

OF WAR AND

VIOLENCE

CHAPTER 6.

UNSPIN

THE MEDIA

THE GUARDS ARE

SLEEPING: AN INTERVIEW

WITH HELEN THOMAS

GAEL MURPHY

Helen Thomas, known as “the first lady” of the press, was a White House correspondent for four decades, sitting in the front row during presidential press conferences, asking the tough questions. She was the first woman to hold posts in the White House Correspondents’ Association and the National Press Club. She now writes a syndicated column twice a week for the Hearst newspapers. She was one of the only “mainstream” journalists who vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq and challenged the Bush administration on the fabrications and distortions that led the United States to war.The following is a conversation between Helen Thomas and CODEPINK cofounder Gael Murphy.