WILPF NEWS FEB 2018

WILPF NEWS

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

East Bay and San Francisco Branches

February 2018

Get involved! Become better informed! Resist!

Work to Advance Peace, Justice and Human Rights

Join the planning team March 10th 10-12 at

San Francisco Main Library 3^rd floor Paley room

Anti-Recruitment Work in High Schools:

WILPF GETS ACTIVE!

Our local branch of WILPF needs your help to get involved in an anti-recruitment project. Many public high schools in the Bay Area are required to allow military recruiters on to their campus. Grandmothers Against the War developed a program to go into various East Bay public high school classrooms with military veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War.

We will show a DVD put together by the American Friends Service Committee entitled “Before You Enlist” and then a veteran talks to the kids from personal experience, talks about what war is really like, answers their questions, and gives them information about alternatives to joining the military. Informational literature and a card that has questions to ask the recruiter is provided. To see “Before you Enlist” link to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81O_1QAr4Oo

We are going to have a planning meeting on Thursday, February 22nd, 1-4pm.

Anyone wanting to learn more about the project is welcome. To RSVP and get the details, just respond to this email, or call Sandy at 510-967-9622. This is a great hands-on way of fighting the vast power of the military establishment. We can use your help!

WILPF JOINS THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN

This will involve a series of 40 days of actions organized by the Pour People‘s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, beginning on Mother’s day and ending with the Summer Solstice, June 21. WILPF-US has formed a committee on the Poor People’s Campaign, chaired by Mary Bricker-Jenkins of Tennessee. See excellent youtube conversation: https://youtu.be/87egB-D2fh4 from Feb. 2017.

The four pillars of the campaign are : Poverty, Systemic Racism, Ecological Devastation and the War Economy. Voter suppression is another focus. See www.poorpeoplescampaign.org There is a focus of activity in 5 cities, including San Francisco/Oakland, but many more are involved. It is still in the early stages of organizing . We voted to participate in San Francisco plans when we know them. WILPF can be a leader on anti-military issues (one of the three evils MLK spoke about)

JOIN ONE WILPF CALL ON THURSDAY, MARCH 8TH 4PM

HEADS-UP: MARCH CALL Thursday March 8^th – PUBLIC CALL

LEGAL REMEDIES TO FIX VOTER SUPPRESSION IN YOUR COMMUNITY

Guest Speaker Jan BenDor of the Michigan Election Reform Alliance

To enroll for the calls, you can email Marybeth Gardam at mbgardam@gmail.com If you have not yet joined our ONE WILPF calls, add them to your calendar, The second Thursday of each month, at 4 pm. If you would like to participate and you don’t use a computer, call Annie at 510 501-6439.

End both Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power under the Slogan “End the Whole Nuclear Era”

We are committed to a world without nuclear weapons. WILPF is active in the endorsement of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted by 122 countries in July.

ACTION: Add your name and get your friends to sign the WILPF petition supporting the Nuclear Weapons Ban and send it to your friends and contacts: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/support-the-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty

ACTION: Join the Twitter Campaign

To join us on Wednesdays (4:00 pm Pacific), register here prior to the first call you wish to join. The registration screen is self-explanatory. If for some reason you have difficulty, please feel free to email Michael at michael@teamgood.org for assistance.

The newest version of the bill, HR 3853, addresses both industries we are focusing on in our “END THE WHOLE NUCLEAR ERA” campaign. With the risk of nuclear war at its highest, HR 3853 is the ONLY legislation in Congress that calls for complete, global abolition of nuclear weapons. It suggests how this can be accomplished – earmarking the money currently used for nuclear weapons to re-tool the weapons industries and retraining the workers to do something useful for society, like developing carbon-free and nuclear-free energy, environmental restoration, health care, education, and other human needs.

ACTION: Use the handy Roots Action letter that has been set up to make it easy to contact your Representative. We need to contact everyone in positions of power about this new bill, HR 3853!

YEMEN

by Odile Hugonot Haber, co-chair of the WILPF Middle East Committee

“This place is hell on Earth” says 25-year-old Lutf Alsanani, a Sana’a resident.

15,489 air raids have been recorded from the period between March 25, 2015 and December 15, 2017. They struck farms, schools, hospitals, market places, historical buildings, and mosques. The strikes are carried out by the Saudi-led military coalition.

The Saudi-led coalition includes the US, the United Kingdom, France, and the United Arab Emirates; all sell weapons to the Saudis. The US in particular also helps to refuel planes.

The War in Yemen, a country of 28 million, is an ongoing conflict that began in 2015 between two Yemeni factions. The former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was allied to the Houthi tribal religious forces, controlling Sana’a, the capital, and this group clashed with forces loyal to the government of Abdrabbush Mansur Hadi, based in Hadden.

Then the Saudis got involved, taking sides with the Hadi faction and claiming that the Houthis were given arms by Iran. The conflict became a proxy war of sorts, between Iran and the Saudis. Iran has repeatedly denied being involved and their intervention has not been proven, but Iran’s alleged involvement allows the Saudis and their coalition to claim that their intervention is justified.

The result is that there are an estimated 18,000 people killed, and 3-4 million left homeless. Thousands are refugees.

Famine threatens the lives of millions of survivors, as long as the blockade continues in Northern ports. Diseases are threatening them, with cholera developing on a large scale and already killing many people.

ACTION: call your Congress representative and tell them “No MORE arms for the Saudis.”

Obama ‘s administration had offered a $110 billion weapons deal to Saudi Arabia, and now Trump claims he made another $110 billion deal with Saudi Arabia.

In June 2017 the Senate rejected an effort to block a $500 million portion of this weapons deal to Saudi Arabia; the effort failed 47-53.

Call your representatives and protest these arm deals, ask that the war in Yemen be stopped, to open the blockade to let in food and medications.

Sources for this article include:

Faisal Edroos & Ahmad Algohbary, 1,000 days of war in Yemen, ‘land of blood and bombs’, aljazeera.com, December 20, 2017

How-and Why-to End the War in Yemen, The Economist, November 30, 2017

A Special invitation for WILPF Members

Thursday, Feb 22, 2018, 6pm

Ann Wright will speak on the Gaza Flotilla, BDS & Banned from Israel

The Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize!
Room 210, Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
Contact Martha Hubert

Barbara Lee and Elihu Harris Free Leadership Speaking Series

March 10, 7pm Anita Hill at the Oakland Marriot Hotel

April 21, 7pm Rev. William Barber, Allen Temple Baptist Church, Oakland

RSVP call 510 434-3988

See http://www.mlkfreedomcenter.org/civic-engagement/lecture-series/

ADDITIONAL ACTIONS

Anti-war Leafleting: Join us on Wednesdays from 11:30 to noon at the Grove St. entrance to SF. Main Library. Call Betty to confirm, (415-931-1126)

“ATOMIC HOMEFRONT” ON HBO FEBRUARY 12TH, 5PM

“Atomic Homefront” premieres on HBO Feb. 12th, as EPA orders inadequate cleanup at leaking nuclear weapons waste dump (free access online viewing available from Feb. 13 till early March, compliments of HBO!).

The powerful documentary film “Atomic Homefront” is about the oldest nuclear weapons wastes of the Atomic Age, from the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s, and the St. Louis, Missouri community’s response to living amidst such risks. The Belgian Congo uranium ore radioactive wastes were illegally dumped at West Lake Landfill in the early 1970s (and Cold Water Creek, and other locations in the St. Louis area, decades earlier than that). Located in the Missouri River floodplain, radioactive contaminants have leaked out of West Lake Landfill for decades, flowing with wind and water into surrounding neighborhoods ( as documented by Beyond Nuclear board member Lucas Hixson et al. in a scientific journal), putting residents’ health at very dire risk. An underground fire, smoldering for years in an immediately adjacent municipal garbage dump, is now burning within hundreds of feet of the radioactive wastes, and has dramatically exacerbated concerns.

On Feb. 1st, culminating a very contentious 27-year long decision making process, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that only a partial cleanup of the radioactive wastes at West Lake Landfill will be undertaken. However, many local residents are pushing back, yet again — from the tireless Just Moms, to Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and Beyond Nuclear board president Kay Drey (a decades-long watchdog on this issue) — demanding a full cleanup, to protect St. Louis metro drinking water supply intakes, located just downstream. Perhaps with help from allies across the country, activated by seeing “Atomic Homefront,” these long-suffering local residents living in the shadows of these nuclear weapons wastes will win the comprehensive cleanup for which they have fought so long and hard.

Explore WILPF

Local branch web page: www.WILPFEastBay.org or www.WILPFSF.org