Wheels of Justice

Paul Melling, 27, is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. September of 2002 he enlisted in the army and started training as a field artillery cannon crew member. From February 2003 to January 2004 he was deployed to a small forward operating base near Kirkuk, Iraq. After returning from Iraq he finished up his time in the army and was honorably discharged in June of 2006; he has been an Iraq Veteran Against the War ever since. He was a participant of Witness Against War 2008, a 500 mile walk from Chicago to St. Paul to challenge and nonviolently resist our country’s continuing war in and occupation of Iraq http://vcnv.org/witness-against-war

Joshua Brollier, 25, recently participated in Witness Against War- a 450 mile walk from Chicago to St. Paul that was organized by Voices for Creative Non-Violence to challenge and nonviolently resist our country’s continuing war and occupation of Iraq. He was one of the thirteen members of the campaign to engage in non-violent civil resistance at Ft. McCoy. Joshua took direct action against war funding in 2007 by participating in an affinity group action during the Occupation Project at senator Dick Durbin’s office in Chicago. In 2005-06, Josh tutored refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia while living in Binghamton, Memphis. He also spent three months in Zimbabwe during 2004- working with youth orphaned from AIDS at Masiye Camp. He graduated with a BA in history from the University of Memphis and has since held several positions working with at-risk youth.

Henry Norr is a 62-year-old semi-retired freelance writer and activist. He used to be a technology columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, until they fired him in March 2003, ostensibly for getting arrested in an anti-war demonstration the day Bush attacked Iraq, but also because of his involvement in Palestine solidarity work. Henry has spent a total of six months in Palestine since 2002: two weeks in Gaza under the auspices of the ISM in May, 2002; 5 weeks, mainly in Jayyous, with ISM in 2003; two months in the Holy Land Trust’s 2005 Palestine Summer Encounter program, mainly in Beit Sahour and Bethlehem, volunteering with the International Middle East Media Center imemc.org; and May-July 2006 with ISM and the Tel Rumeida Project www.telrumeidaproject.org in Hebron/Al-Khalil. His current political projects include membership in the core group of a Bay Area group Act Against Torture www.actagainsttorture.org and on the Local Station Board and Program Council of radio station KPFA. Henry is also active in support work for the immigrant workers fired by the Woodfin Suites hotel in Emeryville, CA www.woodfinwatch.org.

Full-time peace and justice activist Ellen Barfield is a Board member of national Veterans for Peace and national War Resisters League, serves on the Legislative Working Group of School of the Americas Watch, and is a member of the national Disarmament Committee of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She also heads the local chapter of Veterans for Peace in her home of Baltimore, MD, and works with several other Baltimore peace and social justice organizations, as well as her church, First Unitarian Church of Baltimore. She has traveled as a peace delegate to Iraq 4 times beginning in 1991, most recently in December, 2002 and January, 2003 with the Voices in the Wilderness Iraq Peace Team, and to Palestine 5 times, first in 1991, last in 2006 to attend the first pubic event of Combatants for Peace, the Palestinian and Israeli former fighters who have renounced violence. In her earlier life, Ellen served in the US Army from 1977 to 1981, being stationed in Kitzingen, Germany, Ft Hood, TX, PyongTaek, South Korea, and Ft Riley, KS. She earned a degree in Animal Science from West Texas State University, and briefly attended veterinary school at Texas A&M University.

Mooney, 34, former co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness and co-founder of the Wheels of Justice Tour, has traveled to Iraq twice in violation of U.S.-led economic sanctions. In Jan and Dec 2001, Mooney brought token amounts of relief aid to ordinary Iraqi civilians; he lived among ordinary Iraqis and visited hospitals, water and sewage treatment facilities and power plants to witness first-hand the effects of the first Gulf War and ongoing U.S.-led economic sanctions. Mooney spent his spare time meeting with top UN agency officials to corroborate his eyewitness experiences. Mooney continued his Iraq solidarity work in the United States through the traditional methods of protest, nonviolent resistance, witness and advocacy.

In 2003 Mooney relocated to Chicago to work full-time with Voices in the Wilderness; with an imminent threat of escalated war against Iraq, Mooney and other Chicago-area war resisters undertook nonviolent direct actions, repeatedly, during the early months of 2003, focusing on Boeing World Headquarters, home of the world’s largest exporter of war weapons.

Ceylon Mooney will soon make his fourth trip to Palestine to support Palestinian nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation; Mooney has traveled throughout the United States and Europe speaking out against war, occupation and sanctions as a lecturer and member of Pezz, Akasha, and Bury the Living, bands tied to human rights campaigns. Mooney just finished his BA in mathematics and now he can really get into trouble!

Haithem El-Zabri is a Palestinian-American activist who attended Birzeit University’s summer program during the First Intifada. At that time, a Palestinian student appealed to him “when you go back to the U.S., tell the American people what you saw here; tell them what the Israelis are doing to us; show them what their government is supporting.” Since then, he has been a dedicated activist and has volunteered with various student groups, and a wide range of local, national, and international solidarity groups. He has organized numerous events, including Seattle’s first Palestine Film Festival, produced the Nakba 2008 calendar, and co-written the booklet “Nakba: The Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” He has lived in Ramallah in 2006-7, where he worked with the U.N., Birzeit University, and helped start a grassroots movement to express opposition to some of the Palestinian Authority’s decisions and policies. Haithem also runs the Palestine Online Store, a project that he founded to make informational materials about the Palestinian issue more widely available and easily accessible.

Cecilia Lucas, 31, has spent most of her life doing popular theater and popular education work. She is currently a graduate student in education at UC Berkeley, studying how people come to learn a sense of their own and others’ “proper places” in the world. Prior to graduate school, Cecilia worked for five years with Albany Park Theater Project, creating plays based on true stories of Chicago’s immigrant Albany Park neighborhood with an ensemble of teen and adult artists. She has also done Theater of the Oppressed workshops and taught creative writing and current events in a Boston prison.

Cecilia grew up in Germany as a result of her father working for the U.S. military. It was there that she was first exposed to critiques of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and participated in her first demonstration: against the 1991 Gulf war. Cecilia’s awareness of Palestine and the U.S. role in Palestinians’ oppression grew in more recent years. Since 2006, she has been an active member of the San Francisco based group Break the Siege, and in May/June she had the opportunity to visit Palestine and Israel with AFSC and IFPB (American Friends Service Committee and Interfaith Peace-Builders) to get a glimpse of the situation on the ground and talk with Palestinian and Israeli activists about the occupation and right of return campaigns.

Bert Sacks, a native of the Boston area, resides in Seattle. Though raised in the Jewish faith, Bert has a strong interest in Buddhism; he is a committed pacifist whose peacemaking efforts have taken him to Iraq at least 9 times in the last decade in violation of US/UN economic sanctions. For breaking US law in traveling to Iraq and bringing relief aid to Iraqi families, Bert was fined $10,000 by the US Treasury Department. In response, he raised an additional $10,000 to deliver medical relief to Iraq; Bert refuses to pay the fine.

Bert Sacks lived in Israel for five years and has visited the occupied territories of Palestine twice; his peacemaking has taken him across many borders, and through his practice of “compassionate listening” he expertly carries the human stories of war, nonviolence and reconciliation to thousands across the United States.

Bekah Wolf - Palestine Speaker Bekah Wolf is an American-Israeli graduate of New York University with a Masters Degree in Education from Long Island University. She has been doing solidarity work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2003 where she shared in the incredibly successful campaign in the small village of Budrus against the Apartheid Wall. She co-founded the Palestine Solidarity Project in, a Palestinian organization that incorporates international volunteers in proactive non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation and economic self-sufficiency projects in the southern West Bank, in 2006. She lives in Beit Ommar, a Palestinian village in the Hebron District where PSP is based.

Kathy Kelly, 52, is Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV). Kathy’s work focuses upon ending the war in Iraq, in both its military and economic forms. Long active in peace team efforts, Kathy participated in the Gulf Peace Team (1991); Bosnia (1992-93); and Haiti (1994). In 1996, she co-founded Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign of civil disobedience to challenge U.S.-U.N. economic sanctions imposed against Iraq. Kathy traveled over 20 times to Iraq to build personal relationships and to challenge U.S. policies (over 70 VITW delegations traveled to Iraq from 1996 to 2003). In the summer of 2005, VITW was fined $20,000 for bringing medicine to Iraq without permission of the U.S. government (a fine which VITW refused to pay). Kathy was present in Iraq, living in solidarity with Iraqi citizens, during shock-and-awe at the start of the 2003 U.S. invasion and was present in Baghdad when the first U.S. soldiers reached the center of the city. Kathy in a long time tax resister and served federal prison sentences for nonviolently resisting U.S. nuclear warfare policies in the 1980’s and the School of the America’s in 2004. Kathy is the author of Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison. In 2005 and 2006 Kathy spent time in Amman Jordan meeting Iraqi refugees living there. In June 2006 Kathy traveled to northern Iraq to meet with the NGO, Emerency. In August 2006 Kathy joined other internationals in an effort to bring humanitarian aid to civilians in southern Lebanon.

Lara Rozzell is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and just returned from Winter Soldier - Iraq and Afghanistan. She feels deeply the responsibility to carry forward the Winter Soldier stories and the conviction that we can leave Iraq and pay reparations, without abdicating a “responsibility” for further occupation. She was inspired to peace work after training with Quaker House, which has been helping conscientious objectors leave the military since 1969. Lara’s military background establishes common ground with GI’s, veterans, and military families who fear it is disloyal to question our foreign policy. Lara lives in Idaho, where she works to make a difference in our global oil dependence by mentoring sustainable farming and alternative transportation choices.