After a nice rest in a hotel in Philly, and a cheese steak for dinner we were on the road again to an event the LEPOCO Peace center organized for us.
We invited the Wheels of Justice tour to speak with us. Dahlia Wasfi spoke on Iraq and Dan Pearson spoke about his time in Palestine.
Dahlia spoke powerfully about her family in Iraq and what the wars have meant for them. She showed pictures of her uncle who before the most recent war looked young and handsome and now looks aged and thin. These dramatic images and personal stories moved me. Dahlia who has spent most of her time in the US being born in NY to an Iraqi and Jewish family shared what it feels like to her and her family for the government to be occupying and destroying her father’s country. She also read a testimony she presented at the United Nations, you can find a video of her testimony here.
Dan spoke about the houses in Palestine that are being destroyed by the Israeli Defense Force as quickly as they are built in some cases. He showed images of children right after their homes were bulldozed, showing the confusion on their little faces as to why they now are homeless. Dan asked us the hard questions: Why is this happening? Why does it seem like the destruction of homes is happening in vacuum with no one in the US preventing it? He reminded us of Rachel Corrie a US citizen who was killed in Palestine while trying to stop a Caterpillar bulldozer from destroying a family’s home.
Middle East Crisis Response sponsored our next event in Saugerties, NY
As we pulled up we were glad to meet Cheryl and David and many other members of the coalition that took root in Upstate NY on both sides of the Hudson River after Israel began bombing Lebanon this summer. I was so happy when they contacted us about hosting the tour as I had read about them in a local paper in July. They brought out some amazing activists including a female veteran of WWII.
Raed had taken the bus up from NYC with a member of the coalition whom I found out I had organized with in the late ’90s in NYC. She is now writing a book about Iraq and her time there as a human shield.
Rostam started off and talked about how there is so much Americans are not learning about Iran in the media. One fact he gave was that there are 2 million college students in Iran and 60% are women. Iran’s education system is state owned free education. English language schools have been opened in every town and village in Iran. There are also women in executive offices within the government. The US government says Iran is a national security threat yet Iran has not invaded another country in 250 years. Except for one instance in the 1970’s when Iran, under the Shah bombed a soviet backed rebel movement in Oman, Jordan on behalf of the United States.
Raed talked about depleted uranium in Iraq, as there were groups in the audience who worked on nuclear issues and one women who came saw Raed in the film Battle Ground on PBS that night where he was in a tank junk yard measuring uranium levels!
Depleted uranium was used in Iraq in 1991 and it caused a rise in the cancer rate in Southern Iraq. DU was used in bullets and warheads “it can be used to destroy a tank cheaply because it pierces the metal like a pen in a plastic bottle.”
Uranium in Iraq’s water contaminated it for billions of years. In the film Raed was taking journalists to tank junk yards to measure geiger levels of DU. The tanks were being melted down by local people who worked in the yard to make spoons in Iraq for people to eat with.
Raed explained that the use line regardng Iraq, even with in the anti-war movement is a line of “But maybe…”
But maybe if US troops pull out of Iraq another dictator will take over..But maybe if we pull out Iraq will be controlled by terrorists; there will be an unending civil war and people will kill each other…
The but maybe excuses never end. Raed argues until Americans realize that Iraq can take care of itself, they have for 4 to 5,000 years. Iraq has never had a civil war, and if it does now it will be as a result of the foreign occupation not despite it. 
