protest

On Monday I mentioned the Lag4Peace protest going on in Second Life
tomorrow. The theme of the event is "Don't Iraq Iran." I have been putting some info Second Life about our Iran Program (see photo below) and I also have more details about tomrrow's protest.

There are a number of events going on tomorrow, for those who only want to spend an hour or two in Second Life, I recommend attending the keynote address from Sequoia Pinion of Spiritual Peacemakers at 11:45am EST on Commonwealth Island, immediately followed by kick-off rally at noon, and then a protest at SL Capitol Hill at 1pm.

A detailed schedule of events follows after the jump.

I'll post more information about this later this week, but I want to let you readers know about something really exciting going on this week. On Saturday there will be a day-long series of protests called Lag4Peace in the online virtual world of Second Life with the goal of raising awareness about preventing an attack on Iran.

Here's is a picture of my avatar looking at a poster about the event.

Sunday morning is appropriately more sober and reverential. An estimated 20,00 – 25,000 individuals carry small white crosses in a procession that spreads from the gate into Ft. Benning back to the public access road and forward again, five persons wide to accommodate hundreds of banners representing various groups here in large numbers.

As I enter from the public road, the police are confiscating crosses which don't strictly meet the 18" maximum for the vertical strut. These are later collected and displayed at the head of the road, just as thousands and thousands are inserted in the chain link fence at the gate to the Fort.

Each cross bears the name of a victim of violence in Latin America, derivative or directly related to training presented at the School of Americas (or 35 other U.S. bases where Latin American military leaders are trained). As the procession circulates in front of the main program platform, the names of the dead are intoned and the entire procession responds "Presente". Particularly powerful is the recitation, "unknown child, Choco" repeated perhaps a hundred times to represent a massacre of more than 130 persons.

This weekend is the annual protest and vigil in Fort Benning, Georgia against the School of Americas (recently renamed to "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"). Many of our colleagues from FOR will be there, and I hope to get them to post some updates here on the blog during the event.

Meanwhile, ¡Presente! magazine has a fascinating collection of videos like the one above, and lots of informative articles, including this one about the impact of the SOA in Colombia:

Following is the text of my speech delivered on October 27, 2007 at the national anti-war mobilization in New York City organized by United for Peace and Justice.

I am an Iranian-American who loves both Iran and America.

I am Iranian enough to be worried for my people, their cultural heritage, their history, and above all the path towards democracy that they have taken for the past 100 years. I see that today they are closer than ever to reaching this dream: the Iranian women, students, workers, and other groups have worked hard to get here and are willing to even work harder to achieve this dream.

What I feel my fellow Iranians are saying now, and they hope that everyone hears them, is that they are intelligent enough to make their own decisions. I hear their cry, loud and clear, when they say, “Please do not destroy our dream that we have worked so hard for.” I hear them say, loud and clear, “Please let us determine our own future by ourselves.”

We're back from New York, and yes it was soggy! (Somehow the sun managed to come out just as we started to head back to Nyack. ) However there was still a large, high-spirited crowd. Click here to see pictures I took, and here to see pictures of today's protests all across the country.

The forecast call for thunderstorms (oh, how I wish they were in drought-stricken North Carolina instead of New York right now!) but we will be marching on. FOR's posse of about two dozen staff and board members will be heading into the Big Apple today to add our voices to the loud chorus calling for an end to the war in Iraq.

In fact, our colleague Leila Zand of FOR's Iran Program will be speaking at the rally! Come on out wherever you are and Fall Out for Peace!

You probably won't hear about it in your local paper, but United for Peace and Justice is organizing major demonstrations in 11 cities across the US this Saturday, October 27th. The cities are: Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough, TN, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

UFP has been posting some fun videos online to promote the events. Here's the latest:

If you haven't yet, please sign this petition from AVAAZ to Stand with the Burmese Protesters. On Thursday, we will participate in the International Bloggers' Day for Burma. And on Saturday, the worldwide vigils will continue. Find one near you at the Budddhist Peace Fellowship web site.

The Buddhist Channel has eyewitness reports of ongoing atrocities as monks are being jailed, tortured, and killed!

The past several days have witnessed an extraordinary series of marches and vigils in Burma (Myanmar), led most recently by Buddhist monks, who are esteemed within the deeply religious country. The monks have organized to protest a series of recent economic changes being implemented by the powerful and authoritarian military government, but their efforts have much broader and provocative political ramifications.