PeaceVoice

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“With President Barack Obama and other world leaders now talking about building a nuclear-free world, it is time to consider whether that would be a good idea.
Six reasons for supporting nuclear abolition are particularly cogent.
The first is that nuclear weapons are morally abhorrent. After all, they are instruments of widespread, indiscriminate slaughter. They destroy entire cities and entire regions, massacring civilian and soldier, friend and foe, the innocent and the guilty, including large numbers of children. The only crime committed by the vast majority of victims of a nuclear attack is that they happened to live on the wrong side of a national boundary….”

Author: Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History at State University of New York/Albany
Published in: Truthout (home page: http://www.truthout.org/) and in Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia
Date: June 26 and 27, 2009

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“In early June, 2009, I was in the Shah Mansoor displaced persons camp in Pakistan, listening to one resident detail the carnage which had spurred his and his family’s flight there a mere 15 days earlier. Their city, Mingora, had come under massive aerial bombardment. He recalled harried efforts to bury corpses found on the roadside even as he and his neighbors tried to organize their families to flee the area….”

Author: Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Published in: Anderson Free Press (home page: http://www.AndersonFreePress.net) in Indiana; Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia
Date: June 25 and 26, 2009

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“Shortly after arriving in Pakistan, one week ago, we met a weaver and his extended family, numbering 76 in all, who had been forcibly displaced from their homes in Fathepur, a small village in the Swat Valley.
Fighting between the Pakistani military and the Taliban had intensified. Terrified by aerial bombing and anxious to leave before a curfew would make flight impossible, the family packed all the belongings they could carry and fled on foot….”

Author: Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Published in: Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia
Date: June 3, 2009

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“President Obama plans to address the Arab world when he visits Cairo early next month, and I hope he will talk about torture. You might say it’s a matter of unfinished business.

My personal concern about this issue goes back to 2004, when I spent a semester in Egypt as a Fulbright Scholar, lecturing on US foreign policy at Cairo University. My arrival in Cairo coincided with the announcement of a controversial US program known as the Greater Middle East Initiative. Billed as an effort to promote democracy, the initiative was deeply resented….”

Author: Susan Waltz, professor at Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Published in: Truthout (home page: http://www.truthout.org/) and in Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia
Date: May 20, 2009

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“Is there something more painful than hearing that illegal CIA methods caused the deaths of dozens of detainees, inflicted pain on hundreds of others, and that this sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers? Yes — finding it was done to validate one of the leading lies that sent us to war. First British Intelligence’s Downing Street Memo to Tony Blair revealed, ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush] policy.’…”

Author: William Loren Katz, author of 40 U.S. history books and affiliated with New York University since 1973
Published in: Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia and Oregon PeaceWorks (home page: http://www.oregonpeaceworks.org/)
Date: May 2, 2009 and June, 2009

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“During his presidential campaign, President Obama pledged to make violence against women a priority. He promised to help expand programs and services for victims of domestic violence in the U.S. and abroad and to strengthen criminal laws.
Although he is still in the early days of his presidency and is dealing with many serious issues, it is imperative that the public hold Obama accountable for these campaign promises. Indeed, while rates of domestic violence were high enough during the campaign season (estimates are one in four women suffer from domestic violence), there is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that the economic recession has worsened the situation for many women in the U.S….”

Author: Laura Finley, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida
Published in: Magic City Morning Star in the Katahdin area of Maine, Anderson Free Press for Anderson and Madison County, Indiana at http://www.andersonfreepress.net/node/15967, at Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia, and at Harlanonline.net at http://harlanonline.net/ for Harlan, Kentucky
Date: April 22, 23 and 26, 2009

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“Not since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, decades ago, talked of abolishing nuclear weapons has an American president pledged to work toward that goal. Yet, speaking in Prague on April 5, 2009, President Barack Obama proclaimed ‘clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons….’”

Author: Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner
Published in: Truthout.org - home page: http://www.truthout.org/, in the Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia, in the Anderson, Indiana Free Press - http://www.andersonfreepress.net/node/15906, and in Oregon PeaceWorks (home page: http://www.oregonpeaceworks.org/)
Date: April 21, 2009 and June, 2009

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“Last month, 57 people have lost their lives in eight mass shootings across America. ‘The killing grounds,’ Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times last week, ‘include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child’s bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center.’ It is hard to argue when he calls this epidemic ‘the cancer at the core of our democracy.’
It’s not that hard to understand why we’re experiencing an upsurge in ’senseless violence.’ More to the point, it isn’t all that hard to see what we can do about it….”

Author: Michael N. Nagler, Professor emeritus at UC, Berkeley - founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and founder-President of The Metta Center for Nonviolence Education
Published in: Truthout at http://www.truthout.org/opinion and in Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia
Date: April 13, 2009

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“Last week, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was revealed that the Obama administration is planning on sending an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan with no clear benchmarks for progress or “success” yet in place.

The lack of serious scrutiny of the President’s Afghanistan policy is nothing short of stupefying, especially given our recent misadventures in Iraq. Where is the critical debate?…”

Author: Anne Miller, Director of Concord-based New Hampshire Peace Action and New Hampshire Peace Action Education Fund
Published in: Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia, and in the Joplin Independent in Joplin, Missouri
Date: April 11, 2009

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“Where do we begin as every day people living in extraordinary times?

For those of us who found hope and solace in the election of President Obama and a senate majority, we are suddenly standing on our own, recalling history and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, we were naïve to think that change would come easily, if at all, though I prefer to call us idealistic, optimistic and hopeful….”

Author: Kerry Bassett, graduate student in Conflict Resolution program at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon
Published in: Huntington News Network (home page: http://www.huntingtonnews.net/) in West Virginia, and in Oregon PeaceWorks - home page: http://www.oregonpeaceworks.org/
Date: April 6, 2009, and May issue of PeaceWorks

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