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Conference Encourages Linking Palestinian Movement To Global Peace Struggle
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The need to join the Palestinian movement with other global agendas was espoused at the conference.
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By Ayesha Ahmad, IOL Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON, April 20 (IslamOnline) - As anti-war and anti-racism protestors gather in Washington, it is only by joining together with other anti-oppression movements around the world that the Palestinian cause can be effectively championed, according to speakers at a "Global Intifada" conference here Friday.
Sponsored by student groups at American University (AU) in Washington, where the conference was held, and the University of California at Berkeley, the conference aimed at bringing activists from other peace movements in Colombia, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Iraq, and movements against globalization and the School of the Americas, into the pro-Palestinian movement.
"What we're seeing today in the Middle East is [the effect of] the left and progressives in this country failing to take up this issue," said Rami Elamine, an organizer with the Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which helped organize the conference - subtitled "Globalization, U.S. Militarism, and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine" - in preparation for its Palestinian solidarity march on Saturday.
He emphasized the need to "make connections stronger going into this weekend of protests," calling it part of a "groundswell that's beginning to happen around the world."
Speakers at the conference's opening plenary session included an activist, who just returned from the West Bank a week ago, representatives from the Washington-based Al-Awda Palestine Right to Return coalition and a Colombian trade unionist who spoke to the audience through a translator.
Panelist Steve Rosenthal, a Jewish member of al-Awda, gave the audience a history of the "capitalist system," explaining that the Middle East crisis rose out of the convergence of its oil resources and the American rise to "superpower."
"The Palestinian people have been at ground zero of this imperialist assault," he said. "The solution to this problem involves not only standing in solidarity with the people in Palestine but also with oppressed peoples all over the world."
Rania Masri, a coordinator with the Iraq Action Coalition, condemned the American media for using selective coverage to try to erase injustices from the memory of the people. "It is a conspiracy of the powerful against those who are less powerful," she said.
Masri attended the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which coincided with the World Economic Forum in New York earlier this year, and she told the audience that the gathering of strangers from 71 different countries in common cause was "our globalization."
"We have to be thinking about how our specific struggle… is linked to the global struggle," she told activists from different movements.
"No tyrant has lived forever," she concluded. "They have all fallen, every single one of them, and it's up to us to continue to make that true."
Josina Manu, an American Jew and a member of the International Solidarity Movement - whose members have used their bodies to block Israeli tanks in the West Bank - told the audience she had left her home in Philadelphia to spend the Passover holiday helping Palestinians, and returned just a week ago.
She was one of 19 observers who decided to stay when the offensive ordered by hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began; they felt that their presence in a refugee camp in Bethlehem would lessen the harm done to Palestinian civilians.
"These people have done nothing, yet they live in constant fear," she said. "What Israel is doing has nothing to do with self-defense."
Manu stressed the distinction between the Zionist cause and the Jewish faith - "Zionism is not Judaism, it is an imperialist agenda" - and encouraged people to write their representatives and even the International Red Cross, because they ask permission from the Israeli army before going in to help Palestinian civilians.
"This is not a message of hope, it is a call to action," she said.
Other speakers included Herlinda Hernandez, who encouraged people to protest U.S. support for Colombian armed forces who attack any form of unionization or activism - she herself was a victim of a paramilitary attack on her home for her union activities - the Reverend Graylan Hagler of Washington's Plymouth Congregational Church, and Rafeef Ziadah, a survivor of the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres, who criticized the recent mission of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"I'm glad he decided to take his vacation in the Middle East this time around," she said sarcastically. "Why did he not visit Jenin?"
"I don't understand why he went so far only to come back and say the same thing - 'Arafat, stop the terrorism,'… is this the big joke they're trying to sell us?" she said, in reference to Washington's insistence that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat is responsible for stopping the violence.
Ziadah said that Jenin reminded her of Sabra and Shatilla all over again, but she had a message of undying hope.
"Out of the rubble of Jenin a new generation is rising - a generation that is seeking justice," she said. "And their Intifada will continue until they become a free people."
After the plenary session, the conference broke up into workshops in different buildings on the AU campus; many were so packed that activists coming late could not even find standing room.
At a workshop on cutting U.S. aid to Israel, Georgetown professor and SUSTAIN activist Mark Lance encouraged the boycotting of corporations that aided Israel - for example, the Caterpillar company that makes the bulldozers used to tear down Palestinian homes - and talked with workshop attendees about what they could do.
In the "Palestinians Speak Out" workshop, activist Emad Fraitekh from Nablus read out loud a letter he had written to a friend of his who was murdered by Israeli troops.
Other workshops included action training and historical briefings on different areas of the global peace movement; the conference also provided screenings of films such as "The Accused" - a BBC documentary on Sharon's role in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres - and "Gaza Strip."
The student groups, which sponsored the conference, were AU's International Students for Solidarity in Palestine and Berkeley's Students for Justice in Palestine, among others.
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