Eman El-Hawi, a smart and perky 24-year-old business student from Gaza got teary when she told our delegation about what she witnessed during the eight days that Israel pounded Gaza. “I saw the babies being brought into the hospital, some dead, some wounded. I couldn’t believe Israel was doing this again, just like four years ago. But at least this time,” she said with pride, “we struck back.”

The fight was totally disproportionate. Israeli F-16s, drones and Apache helicopters unleashed their fury over this tiny strip of land, leaving 174 dead, over one thousand wounded, as well as homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and government buildings damaged and destroyed. On the Palestinian side, crude Qassam rockets left six Israelis dead and caused little damage. But for many Palestinians, it was a perverse kind of victory.

If the Israeli government was trying to teach the Palestinians a lesson with this latest pummeling, the unfortunate lesson many learned was that the only way to deal with Israel is through ...

Ramah Casers is an Egyptian mother and graphic designer who lives in Cairo. On Tuesday, November 27 she was standing at the entrance to Tahrir Square holding a simple, hand-written sign that read, “I am an Egyptian citizen and I will not let my country become a dictatorship once again.” She had come to the plaza with her young daughter, who was proudly helping to hold the sign. “I was in this same Tahrir Square during the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak but I haven’t been back since then,” Ramah told me. “I didn’t think any of the mobilizations called during the last two years were that critical. But for this one, I had to be here. This is about the life or death of our revolution.”

Ramah was one of the hundreds of thousands of people filling Tahrir Square to protest the decree issued five days earlier by President Morsi giving himself power to make decisions that could not be challenged by the judiciary.

The decree came just one day after the November 22 Gaza ceasefire agreement between the Israeli government and Hamas, an agreement brokered by Morsi that sent his international prestige skyrocketing. Perhaps the president deemed this a good time to make a move. After all, the ...

Foreign policy played a minor role in a presidential election that focused on jobs, jobs, jobs. But like it or not, the United States is part of a global community in turmoil, and U.S. policies often help fuel that turmoil. The peace movement, decimated during the first Obama term because so many people were unwilling to be critical of President Obama, has a challenge today to re-activate itself, and to increase its effectiveness by forming coalitions with other sectors of the progressive movement.  Over the next four years, this movement must grapple with key issues such as the Afghan war, killer drone attacks, maintaining peace with Iran, US policy vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine, and the bloated Pentagon budget. 

Despite President Obama’s talk about getting out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the U.S. military still has some 68,000 troops and almost 100,000 private contractors there, at a cost of $2 billion a week. And Obama is talking about a presence of U.S. troops, training missions, special forces operations, and bases for another decade. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Americans think this war is not worth fighting, a sentiment echoed in a recent New York Times editorial “Time to Pack Up.” It is, indeed, time to pack up. The peace movement must push for withdrawal starting now—and definitely no long-term presence! Veteran’s Day should be a time to take a hard look at the impact of war on soldiers, particularly the epidemic of soldier suicide.  We must also look at the devastating impact of war on Afghan women and children, particularly as winter sets in. Despite the billions of dollars our government has poured into development projects, Afghan children are literally freezing to death. 

American drone attacks are out of control, killing thousands in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, many of them civilians. ...

Having recently returned from Pakistan meeting with drone victims, on November 4 my partner Tighe Barry and I were having a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast. The discussion turned to John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism chief and the key person making decisions about drone strikes. We wondered if Brennan ever had a chance to meet innocent drone victims, as we did, and feel their pain.

“Maybe we should go to his house and talk to him,” quipped Tighe. We laughed at the absurdity of the idea but decided to do a little bit of research. Fifteen minutes later, we were out the door, driving to a Virginia suburb an hour south of Washington DC. I had no idea if it was really John’s address, but it was a lovely day for a drive—and Tighe was willing to indulge me.  

Exiting the freeway, we came to an area of rolling hills, green grass and private horse farms. As we approached what we thought might be John Brennan’s street, we were sure it was a mistake. How could this be? It was a nondescript upper middle class neighborhood, with children playing in the yards—no security, no government vehicles. The house was in a cul-de-sac sandwiched between two other houses, without so much as a fence surrounding it.

I decided to go knock on the door to make sure we were wrong.  A middle-aged, white-haired guy in a casual sweater and jeans opened the door, accompanied by someone who l assumed was his wife.

Could this really be John Brennan? The same man who championed "enhanced interrogation techniques” under President Bush? The same man who now decides, on "terror Tuesdays", who will be on the CIA kill list? The guy who developed the Orwellian "disposition matrix"—a blueprint for disposing of terrorist suspects for at least another decade?

I hesitated. He looked much younger and thinner than I ...

“You’re not really going to Pakistan, are you?” “You’ve seen the State Department travel warning?” “Don’t they hate us over there?”

There are questions our friends and relatives are asking as we embark on a delegation to Pakistan to protest the drone attacks that have killed so many innocent Pakistanis over the past 8 years.

But the Pakistanis have been asking us very different questions. “Why do the American people support these barbaric and cowardly drone attacks?” “How would you like it if foreigners flew death machines into your airspace, murdering innocent men, women and children?” “Don’t you know that these attacks are counterproductive, driving locals into the hands of extremist groups out of a desire for revenge?”

When it comes to drones, Americans and Pakistanis see the world through different lenses. Americans are looking through the eyes of remote-control pilots safely ensconced in bases in the United States, while Pakistanis are at the receiving end of the bull’s eye. Polls show to the two peoples as polar opposites: 83% of Americans support the use of drones against “terrorist suspects overseas”; in Pakistan, among those who say they know something about drones, virtually all—97%—oppose them.

Many Pakistanis who raged against the “Innocence of Muslims” film were venting long-held resentments towards the United States stemming from drone attacks (along with other policies such as the US mishandling of the war in Afghanistan, the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, and the US pro-Israel ...

When Mitt Romney walked down the aisle toward the stage Thursday night, among the people whose hands he shook was the conservative billionaire and major political donor David Koch. But it was a moment missed by the tens of millions of viewers at home. While Democracy Now! was there on the floor and captured the handshake on video, the networks cut away just before the handshake to show footage of two enthusiastic young women supporters and then an overhead shot of the convention center. Then, the shot came back to Romney shaking hands further down the aisle as he ascended the stage. Groups in the network of David Koch, and his brother Charles, intend to spend nearly $400 million ahead of the 2012 election.

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to that moment when Mitt Romney made his entrance on Thursday night. He walked down the aisle of the Republican convention, and as he was passing the New York delegation, he shook the hand of the state Republican Party chair, Ed Cox, and then he shook hands with David Koch, actually put his hand on his shoulder, pointed at him, and then shook his hand. While Democracy Now! was there on the floor, we captured the handshake on video. The ...

One of the breathtaking features of the last 50 years has been the vast outpouring of nonviolent people power. While there is no denying the endless parade of horrors over the intervening decades, powerful movements have invariably sprung up to challenge them one by one. Struggles for equality, freedom, democracy, peace and sustainability in innumerable contexts — unleashing dizzying displays of creativity and relentless persistence — have not allowed this violence to go unchecked. Many of these efforts have changed the political or social landscape by putting a dent in the long-entrenched architecture of oppression and vowing to come back for more.

How did this unique tidal wave of social change get rolling? What sustained it? How did one movement inspire another? Why did they appear when they did? Were they part of a trans-historical shift? When a historian sits down to write the definitive history of the 20th century in a hundred years or so, she will likely grapple with these questions more clearly than we can. From that trans-generational vantage point, she may be better equipped — by distance, hindsight and algorithms we can’t yet imagine — to discern the significance of the immense web of connections between innumerable struggles for emancipation across the globe that took off beginning in the middle of the last century.

For us, though, we mostly look through a glass darkly. We get suggestive clues from books like Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, where he tracks a sprawling though still largely unnoticed mega-movement for change percolating across the planet, and the Global Nonviolent Action Database. Nevertheless, since we’re still firmly in the midst of the hurtling fluorescence of the Big Bang unleashed by Rosa Parks all those years ago, it’s still ...

It is not every day that the voices for justice triumph over the actions of the rich and powerful, especially when it comes to the Israel-Palestine debate. That’s why it is so important to acknowledge and celebrate the settlement just negotiated by CODEPINK activist Rae Abileah and her lawyers after suing American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) volunteer lobbyist Stanley Shulster.

It all started on May 24, 2011, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington, DC speaking before a joint session of Congress. Abileah, a 29-year-old Jewish woman who has traveled to the West Bank, Israel and Gaza, was in the audience. She became more and more appalled as she listened to Netanyahu’s speech and watched our congresspeople giving him a stream of standing ovations. “I couldn't watch this hero's welcome for a man who supports the continued building of illegal settlements, won't lift the siege of Gaza, and refuses to negotiate with the Palestinian unity government,” said Abileah. 

So Abileah did what most people would never have the courage to do. She got up and shouted: "No More Occupation! Stop Israeli War Crimes! Equal Rights for Palestinians!" And she unfurled a banner that read: “Occupying Land is Indefensible!”

She was immediately grabbed, violently pulled toward the floor, and gagged—not by the Capitol Police but by a member of the audience, Stanley Shulster, a retired attorney from Ashland, Oregon, who had traveled to Washington DC to attend the yearly conference of the Israel lobby group AIPAC.  An online bio for Shulster revealed that he was an unpaid lobbyist, a volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces, and a Navy veteran.  In his bio Shulster bragged that he “grabbed the woman who heckled ...

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?

Why should the public believe what the Obama administration says about the people being assassinated by drones? Especially since, as we learn in the New York Times, the administration came up with a semantic solution to keep the civilian death toll to a minimum: simply count all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants. The rationale, reminiscent of George Zimmerman’s justification for shooting Trayvon Martin, is that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” Talk about profiling! At least when George Bush threw suspected militants into Guantanamo their ...