by Chris Garaffa, ANSWER CT

Nearly 100 people from Connecticut traveled to DC for the March 20th National March on Washington. Organizers across the state spent the past months mobilizing – having meetings, leafleting, doing outreach on the street and at local events, phone banking and more. Students at the University of Connecticut and Central Connecticut State University held events and raised funds to get students to the march.

They joined 10,000 others who had traveled from as far away as Maine, Florida and Illinois. Rallies of 5,000 each were also held in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The two buses organized by ANSWER CT made pickups in New London, New Haven and at UConn’s Storrs Campus and at CCSU in New Britain. People traveled from across the state to get on the buses.

Many of the passengers were students new to the anti-war movement. Their anger at budget cuts and tuition increases that are happening while the war costs $1.2 billion every 2 days inspired them to come to D.C. One UConn student for whom March 20th was his first demonstration said, “My tuition is about to go up again but there’s all this money for the war. We have to do something to stop this.”

Workers and other long-time activists also traveled to D.C. with the students. As the buses returned to Connecticut, it was clear that there is continued and growing momentum to build an anti-war movement at campuses, workplaces and in our communities.
ANSWER Coalition CT (203) 606-0319, ct@answercoalition.org

By Stan Heller, Middle East Crisis Committee

For several years now activists have declared the start of March “Israel Apartheid Week.” In CT there will be the “Israel Apartheid Week Film Festival.” March 1, “The Iron Wall” will be shown 7 p.m. at Central Connecticut State University, Marcus White Living Room, 1615 Stanley Street, New Britain.  Stanley Heller and Aram Ayalon will present background information.

Friday, March 5, “Arna’s Children” will be shown 7 p.m., at La Paloma Coffee House, 405 Capitol Ave., Hartford.
In between there will be showings of “Breaking the Silence” (Israeli army soldiers talk about the abuses they committed in Hebron.) “Art and Apathy” and “Separated Families”, but the locations have not been set. Another event is tentative for Yale on March 3, Bill Doares talking about Gaza.  For up-to-date info, check www.artandstruggle.org and www.TheStruggle.org or call (203) 934-2761.

Palestinian activist Mazin Qumsiyeh will be speaking for the first time in Connecticut this year on March 4. His talk entitled “Peace is Possible: A Perspective on Israel & Palestine” will be given at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford, 7 p.m., 20 Forest St., Stamford.

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh (formerly of Yale and Duke universities) teaches at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine and chairs the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People. He is author of a number of books, including “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle” and the forthcoming “Hope and Empowerment: Popular Resistance in Palestine.”

He will share his first-hand experience of living in a troubled land and discuss strategies for a peaceful resolution of the present conflict in the region.

At 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 23, in the Greenwich Library Auditorium, people who went on the Gaza Freedom March will talk about their experiences and on the miserable life in Gaza.  The library is at 101 West Putnam Ave., Greenwich.

And for theater buffs, Najla Said, the daughter of Edward Said, will be doing a one-woman performance in March at the Fourth Street Theatre, 83 E. Fourth St., NYC.  Her show is called “Palestine”.   Tickets are just $20. There was good review of her play in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/theater/09said.html

She does a talk back after every Tuesday show (7:30 p.m.).  For details, go to http://www.twilighttheatrecompany.org/Twilight_Theatre_Company/Tickets.html

You can see Najla Said as she did a reading from her play below (she begins after Vanessa Redgrave’s statement)

and (Najla Said continues)

By the CT Answer Coalition

Help Anti-War Veterans Spread the Word: Send this Amazing Video Everywhere.

http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2/1451683244?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=9355

Join March Forward! and other veterans, active duty service members and military families on March 20 in DC, LA and SF as we say “No War for Empire!”

In March of 2003, I was sent to invade Iraq amidst the largest anti-war demonstrations in history, with an equally senseless war already being waged in Afghanistan. Myself, and countless other veterans, went believing the lies spewed by Washington, but saw first hand the criminal and imperial nature of that war, and every war waged by the U.S. Our experiences compelled us to stand up and fight back.  –– Mark Prysner, Iraq War Vet and founder of MarchForward.org.

For bus information from New Haven to the DC Demo:
(203) 606-0319, ct@answer.org.

By Stanley Heller, Middle East Crisis Committee

On Dec. 27, a number of peace groups held a meeting in Hartford’s Charter Oak Community Center and a brief protest march in solidarity with the Gaza Freedom March. Unfortunately, the Egyptian dictatorship, trying its best to brown-nose with Obama and Netanyahu, stopped the Gaza Freedom march and at the same time harassed and stole from another humanitarian project, George Galloway’s truck convoy Viva Palestina. The Egyptian dictator, Mubarak, is also planting a high tech steel wall between Rafah, Egypt and Rafah on the Gaza Strip to try to stop the Survival Tunnels.

Banned from leaving Cairo, the Gaza Freedom March brought Gaza to Egypt, holding demonstrations in front of government buildings and foreign embassies. The standoff received major coverage all over the world (but not in the U.S.) and even in Egypt itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Joan Cavanagh, CT Peace Coalition/New Haven

After all the U.S. wars that members of the Connecticut Peace Coalition/New Haven have protested, perhaps we’ve heard every throwaway line ever coined by passersby who objected to our message. But the cry of the young African American man who, on a recent Sunday, drove by our vigil and shouted, “You all should have done this when Bush was in office!” was different.

He obviously isn’t a frequent traveler through New Haven, or he would have known that we’ve been at that particular location every Sunday since the Clinton administration. Did he think that we were picking on the nation’s first African American President, who had merely inherited his predecessors’ policies?

The man didn’t stop to talk. We could have then perhaps had a conversation, beginning with the fact that the President doesn’t make U.S. foreign policy. He (thus far) merely puts the particular face on it that is needed by the war-makers and war profiteers at a given point and for a given war.

President Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan is no surprise. As a candidate, he said that was what he would do. Many seasoned activists held a tiny flicker of hope that he was just saying it to be elected and would display the stunning moral courage to refuse to do it when the time came. The disappointment that followed—for us—was as small as the hope had been.

But what of the young people, African American and of all ethnicities—born or raised in the Bush era— who believed wholeheartedly in this candidate, who took from him a sincere message of hope against all-pervasive violence and dreamed that he would act on the ideals he articulated?

Instead of a Quixotic attempt to end the long entrenched current wars, what these young folks got was Obama’s appalling Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in which they were told, among other things, that war would never be eradicated in their lifetimes.  The defeatism and the cynicism of such a statement from an articulate leader, the nation’s first African American President, are not lost on these young people, who live with the audacity—and scarcity—of hope.

Please join our ongoing vigil for peace and justice at Broadway, Park and Elm Streets, in New Haven, 12-1 p.m., every Sunday. We need you! More importantly, so do they.