http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/confquote0613.php
June 13, 2002
VOICES OF RESISTANCE
JENNIFER WAGER IFCO/Pastors for Peace
“When I look around this room and see all of you, I can feel the energy and the spirit that’s been building and building against the Bush war drive. We’re here to continue building this movement.”
CHUCK KAUFMAN Nicaragua Network
“Why weren’t we paralyzed like so many others in the peace movement? Because the groups that formed ANSWER have a clear understanding of the U.S. imperialist objectives, a clear understanding of the nature of corporate globalization, a clear understanding of what the right of self-determination means to the oppressed peoples of the world.”
LARRY HOLMES International Action Center
“We need to build a movement that is based on solidarity with the people of the world who are struggling against national oppression and imperialism, both outside the borders of the U.S. and inside. We don’t want a self-absorbed, timid, modest, conservative and meek movement. We want a radical movement. We want a movement that reaches out to the oppressed, the poor and the working people.”
ELIAS RASHMAWI Free Palestine Alliance
“There is a Palestine that has nothing to do with the imperial designs of anything. It has to do with hopes and fears; with the olive trees and the sky and the sea. It has to do with how we plant our vegetables and then eat them. It has to do with how we die and get buried. It is that Palestine. It is that South Africa. It is that El Salvador. It is that U.S. It is our inner cities. It is your family. It is mine. That is what we call Palestine.”
RICHARD BECKER International Action Center
“The Palestinian people have shown through their heroic and determined struggle over more than half a century that they will not be defeated. At the same time, the Palestinians by themselves cannot triumph over the combined power of the U.S. and Israeli states. Their struggle needs the solidarity of people from all over the world, and most importantly from here inside the U.S. That is what makes the Commission of Inquiry on U.S.-backed Israeli Crimes of Occupation such an important initiative.”
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD Partnership for Civil Justice
“We’ve fought the FBI in the past and won. The reason they are unsuccessful is because of our ability to mobilize.”
YOOMI JEONG Korea Truth Commission
“In Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech, North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq were accused of supporting terrorism and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Such a statement comes from the president of a country that is the largest manufacturer and exporter of weapons of mass destruction, and one that supported the terrorist regime of the Taliban for years with millions of dollars.”
TERESA GUTIERREZ Committee to Stop U.S. War in Colombia
“You don’t have to be a guerrilla in the jungles of Colombia to earn the ire of Washington. You can be a democratically elected president in Venezuela or an activist for peace in Chicago.”
LARRY ADAMS New York City Labor Against the War
“NYCLAW asserts the view that here in the belly of the beast–where we’re the so-called victims of terrorism–there is opposition to the immediate reaction of our ruling class; that, like you, we see 9/11 as a pretext to unfold an overall global agenda of pillage and plunder of the world that’s particularly aimed at destroying the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples and to promote an agenda of reaction at home.”
RANDA JAMAL Al-Awda NY-NJ and the Free Palestine Alliance
“The situation in Palestine is very critical and everybody needs to take part in it. It’s a universal issue.”
CARL MESSINEO Partnership for Civil Justice
“While we know that it’s Israeli fingers that are pulling the triggers, what they’re aiming [at Palestinians] are U.S.-made and U.S.-paid-for weapons and, under international human rights law, that places an equal amount of culpability on the steps of the U.S. just as well as that of the Israeli government.”
DR. HILLEL COHEN epidemiologist
“What became apparent is that, while the crisis of immediate epidemic in Palestine under Israeli reoccupation was ostensibly averted, there is another, much deeper crisis. And perhaps crisis is not the best word because it’s a continuous degradation. A continuous attack on the health standards of the people.”
SARA FLOUNDERS International Action Center
“The one thing that first impresses you about the strength and the capacity of the Palestinian movement is that you can really see and feel the ability of a political mobilization of the entire people. And a political consciousness that truly is a more powerful weapon than the overwhelming force of the Israeli military machine.”
BRENDA STOKELY AFSCME District Council 1707
“I live in a community where there’s a lot of Arab brothers and sisters and I was concerned after 9/11 about finding that some of those people had been dragged off in the dead of night and then jailed without any due process. I was concerned that Latino, Asian and African American and other brothers and sisters were going to be whipped off to go and fight someplace else. When I went to our board, which is made up of all people of color, the majority women, I thought I was going to have to struggle to convince them. I didn’t have to raise any struggle. They immediately said, my brother, my husband, my uncle, my cousin is not going over to fight that war as long as there is racism and exploitation here in this country.”
ARTURO GARCIA Bayan International-USA
“When the United States invaded the Philippines in 1898 and occupied Manila and initiated a war against the Filipino people, they said the war will be over in one week. But the war lasted for 16 years. The U.S. sent 126,000 troops and killed more than a million Filipinos. But our struggle went on. And now they are repeating history once again.”
GLORIA LA RIVA Committee to Free the Five Cuban Political Prisoners Held in the U.S.
“Nothing exposes the hypocrisy of Bush’s so-called war against terrorism so much as what the U.S. government has done, especially in recent years, against Cuba with its special groups of terrorists in Miami, which the CIA and FBI have fed, nurtured, trained and armed for 43 years.”
WILLIAMS CAMACARO Centro Civico Venezuela
“The U.S. State Department could not hide its joy to the coup of April 11. In the first coup, the countries that participated were the United States, Colombia, Spain and the Israeli secret services. And all the same elements are still operating and co-operating against the democracy in Venezuela.”
LESLIE FEINBERG author and lesbian/gay/bi/trans activist
“Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are an integral part of every human society. So the left wing of our movement understands the truth that the union movement was built on, that an injury to one is an injury to all. … As a gay, secular Jewish revolutionary, I greet my Muslim sisters and brothers here today as an ally. I fight shoulder to shoulder with you against the state terrorism that is emanating from the White House, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department. Don’t let the Zionists fool you when they say they speak for all Jewish people. I fight for Palestinian freedom.”
MAHMOUD AHMAD Free Palestine Alliance
“My parents and I have yet to meet the rest our family in Palestine, like so many other millions of Palestinians around the world. Like so many other millions of Palestinians around the world we continue to live our lives as Palestinians, living in the Diaspora, waiting to execute our inalienable, un-negotiable right to return to live in a democratic, secular Palestine.”
NYCLAW: NYC Labor Against the War 