Category Archives: War and Militarism

FVC4PNJ webinar, May 19th: US Complicity in Palesinian Deaths

Our Two Speakers for this Webinar:

Kathy Kelly   

Kathy Kelly has traveled to war zones and lived alongside ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Bosnia, Haiti and Nicaragua.  She and her companions in various peace team delegations believe the U.S. should end all U.S. military and economic warfare and pay reparations for suffering already caused by U.S. wars. In 2009, she lived with a family in Gaza during the final week of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” aerial attacks. In 2013, she arrived in Gaza just after a cease fire was declared following Israel’s “Operation Pillar of Defense.” In 2003, she entered the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, while it was under attack. Kathy wrote eyewitness reports about the suffering and destruction she and her companions witnessed.  read more

Earl Silbar speaks about “How We Can Rebuild the Anti-War Movement”

On November, 18th, Earl Silbar gave a talk at Open University of the Left, entitled ” How we Can Rebuild the Anti-War Movement in the Age of Trump and Bannon.  Earl is a member of Fox Valley Citizens for Peace & Justice.  In this talk, he speaks for himself, not necessarily for our organization.    You can hear his talk by clicking on the screen below.

Kathy Kelly, Renowned Peace Activist to speak in Elgin, Sept., 18th

Kathy Kelly color photo

Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly, coordinator of Voices for Creative Non-Violence and world renowned peace activist, will speak

on Sunday,

September 18th

at 2:00 PM

 

at Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren,

783 W. Highland Avenue,

Elgin, IL 60123. 

 

Kathy has been nominated three times for a Nobel Peace Prize.  She and her colleagues have travelled into active war zones to live among civilians in the line of fire, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Gaza.  She has brought back to Americans compassionate stories of the lives of those civilians.  More recently, she has travelled to Russia.

 

Her topic for this talk will be Confronting State Violence. 

 

The event is sponsored by Fox Valley Citizens for Peace & Justice, the Witness Committee of Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren, First Congregational  United Church of Christ in Elgin, and by The Social Justice Team of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva.

 

Admission is free and all are welcome.

 

Light Refreshments will be served.

 

More Background about Kathy Kelly

 

 

 

Kathy Kelly, co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org) a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare.

During each of several recent trips to Afghanistan, Kathy Kelly, as an invited guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence believe that “where you stand determines what you see.”

They are resolved not to let war sever the bonds of friendship between them and Afghan people whom they’ve grown to know through successive delegations. Kelly and her companions insist that the U.S. is not waging a “humanitarian war” in Afghanistan.

Kelly has also joined with activists in various regions of the country to protest drone warfare by holding demonstrations outside of U.S. military bases in Nevada, upstate New York, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

During late June and early July of 2011, Kelly was a passenger on the “Audacity to Hope” as part of the US Boat to Gaza project. She also attempted to reach Gaza by flying from Athens to Tel Aviv, as part of the Welcome to Palestine effort, but the Israeli government deported her back to Greece.

In 2009, she lived in Gaza during the final days of the Operation Cast Lead bombing; later that year, Voices formed another small delegation to visit Pakistan, aiming to learn more about the effects of U.S. drone warfare on the civilian population and to better understand consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan. She returned again to Gaza in November 2012 to meet with the survivors of Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense and to hear their stories.

From 1996 – 2003, Voices activists formed 70 delegations that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicines to children and families in Iraq. Kathy and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing.

She was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites (1988-89) and spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980.

She and her companions at the Voices home/office in Chicago believe that non-violence necessarily involves simplicity, service, sharing of resources and non-violent direct action in resistance to war and oppression.

 

 

Stop Military Strikes on Libya!

Below is the text of a flyer we will distribute at Occupy Elgin on Saturday, August 13th, 2016 from 1 PM till 2 PM.

 

There is no military response to terrorism. “ President Obama has said that several times himself. And yet he has recently launched military strikes in Libya in an effort to crush ISIS there.

ISIS is indeed an evil force, terrorizing and abusing the people in the territories it controls in the Middle East. More recently it has organized or inspired evil acts of terrorism within the US and Europe. But some of our allies, especially Saudi Arabia do equally barbaric things. For example, they behead people regularly. Yet we support them wholeheartedly. Our policy is hypocritical. Our own drone wars have killed at least two thousand people including hundreds of innocent civilians and many children over the past ten years.

ISIS grew directly out of our ill-conceived War in Iraq. Al-Qaida in Iraq developed as resistance to US occupation. It then gradually morphed into ISIS as a result of the Sunni /Shia divide, which the US had exploited during that occupation and which the new Iraqi government continued to exacerbate.

Before we bombed Libya in 2011, ISIS did not exist in Libya. Our military interventions, by killing civilians and causing massive destruction to their homes and villages, make us new enemies who are strongly motivated to attack the US and our allies throughout the world.

Our War on Terrorism has not worked. With every drone strike or bomb dropped, we create new terrorists faster than we can kill the existing ones.

The NY Times labeled plans for the new bombing campaign “deeply troubling,” explaining: “A new military intervention in Libya would represent a significant progression of a war that could easily spread to other countries on the continent.”

Our War on Terrorism now takes the form of our war against ISIS, and it serves the purpose of keeping our massive Defense Industries quite profitable. We taxpayers keep paying for that.

It does not make the United States, or anyplace else on earth safer.

Politicians use our fear of terrorism to manipulate us, strut their “toughness,” and distract us from the economic exploitation and insecurities that we face in our daily lives.

Meanwhile, the justification for Obama’s new air strikes is based on the outdated and overused Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed a few days after 9/11.

Both the Bush administrations and the Obama administration have perpetrated military actions in six or more countries without any Congressional authorization. Our Congress has failed to fulfill its responsibility, under the War Powers Act, to decide when and whether the US should make war. President Obama was the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he continues to perpetrate unnecessary and counter-productive wars.

Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Call Senator Durbin at 202-224-2152 and
Senator Kirk at 202-224-2854

Tell them to stop this endless war on terrorism and use the taxpayers’ money for peaceful and constructive purposes.

Distributed by Occupy Elgin
& Fox Valley Citizens for Peace & Justice

Further background here.

 

Occupy Elgin for Sept 5th, 1PM. Support Iran Nuclear Deal

Occupy Elgin will meet on Saturday, September 5th,  from 1PM till 2PM at the corner of Kimball Street and Grove Avenue in Elgin.  We will focus on support for the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Support Iran Nuclear Deal!

A war with Iran would be even more disastrous to our troops, our society, and our position in the world than our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same persons who led us into those wars intend to provoke a war with Iran. In those cases, they told us that the war would be quick and easy and could be won mostly from the air. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. They are the major opponents of the Iran Nuclear Deal. read more