Send a photo to Iraq to help support the Week of Nonviolence

FOR & CRC Support LAONFI spoke yesterday with Terry Rockefeller, who is one of the founders and ongoing volunteer coordinators of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Over the past couple months, FOR has partnered with Peaceful Tomorrows (an organization that FOR fiscally sponsored, when it began in late 2001) in a campaign to support a growing community of groups in Iraq that are making a deep commitment to nonviolent resistance.

Starting next Friday, October 10th, this coalition – called “LaOnf” (or “no to violence” in Arabic) – will hold its third annual Iraqi Week of Nonviolence.  (The “week” will actually be 10 days long this year, from Oct. 10-20.) Jesuit priest and nonviolence activist John Dear (a former executive director of FOR) wrote a beautiful article about Peaceful Tomorrows, Terry Rockefeller, LaOnf, and this unique campaign last month in the National Catholic Reporter, which is well worth reading.

There are a couple key ways that groups like FOR (and United for Peace & Justice, the Nonviolent Peaceforce, and other partners) have been asked to support LaOnf and Peaceful Tomorrows in this effort. One that we’ve been promoting for several weeks is to organize local screenings of a documentary film on LaOnf. (In mid-September, one of the Peaceful Tomorrows members visited our Nyack headquarter during our fourth annual Festival of Peace, and showed the film a couple times in our library. We hope to organize a larger screening this fall.)

But the other primary request from Peaceful Tomorrows actually builds off of a successful FOR project from several years ago. In 2003-04, FOR asked local communities of U.S. peace activists – FOR groups and others – to take photos of their members holding signs (in both English and Arabic) that expressed their solidarity with the people of Iraq. The Iraqi Photo Project ultimately received hundreds of submissions of images, many of which were sent along to Iraq to share our commitment to ending the war and occupation.

Yesterday afternoon, our Nyack staff of FOR and CRC (Creative Response to Conflict) took a photo, with us holding an FOR sign and a sign saying “We Support and Stand With LAONF.” We invite you to join us by taking a photo of yourself and family/friends/colleagues in the coming days. If you can e-mail us such a photo (do so by clicking here) in the next week or so, we will collect and forward your images as a form of solidarity to our sisters & brothers in Iraq over the next couple weeks (and posting to our photo sharing site on our Flickr.com photo sharing web site).