Wheels of Justice

Paul Taggart is a photojournalist living in Beirut, Lebanon, covering the Middle East and Africa. Paul worked in Iraq in 2004, not living in the Green Zone or embedded, but renting an apartment in Baghdad. He spent the month of August 2004 in Najaf covering the siege of the Imam Ali shrine, where the Mahdi militia and the coalition forces battled it out for nearly a month. A handful of Western journalists reported alongside the Mahdi from inside the besieged mosque. Paul did one very short two-day embed in Fallujah, the rest of his time was spent working with the Iraqi people. Since working in Iraq he has also done stories on the refugee situation, in particular a story on a group of Kurds that until recently were stuck in between the borders of Iraq and Jordan. Paul’s work has appeared in Newsweek, TIME Magazine, US News and World Report, and The New York Times.

Marcy Newman is a scholar, teacher, and activist invested in human rights. Over the years, Dr. Newman has broadened her students, readers, and audiences awareness on a range of issues from Harlem Renaissance artists to breast cancer victims and survivors, and more recently, on the Middle East and its humanitarian crises. She has taught courses in literature, as well as in American and Middle East Studies, not just at Boise State University, but at Universities in Ghana, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. Having lived amidst the devastating violence in Lebanon, and Palestine, she works tirelessly for the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees under UN Resolution 194. She currently serves as the legislative coordinator, District 2, for the US Campaign to End the Occupation and is a Fellow at the Initiative for Middle East Policy Dialogue. Dr. Newman is a co-founder of the Nahr El Bared Relief Campaign to assist Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. She has spoken at venues worldwide on the human tragedy of war and occupation in Palestine and Lebanon.

Aisha Mershani was born in Las Vegas, Nevada to a Jewish American mother and a Muslim Moroccan father. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Redlands in California, and a Master’s degree from the UNESCO program in Peace, Development Studies, and Conflict Transformation at the Universitat Jaume I in Spain. Since 2003, Mershani has photographed military checkpoints, demonstrations, house demolitions, destroyed villages, and the daily lives of Palestinian living under occupation. Mershani’s approach to this conflict is a humanistic one. She does this work not as an Arab, nor a Jew, yet as a human being concerned of another experiencing injustice. Mershani is currently writing her Ph.D dissertation on nonviolence and continues to participate in events that support all struggles for peace, justice and freedom. Her website is www.amershani.com

Nora Barrows-Friedman, 29, is the Senior Producer and co-host of Flashpoints, a daily investigative newsmagazine on Pacifica Radio. Since 2004, she has been reporting regularly from the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and from inside historic Palestine (Israel) for Flashpoints and as a correspondent for Inter Press Service, a news agency based in Europe. While in Palestine, Nora is based in the Dheisheh refugee camp where she volunteers with the media committee at the Ibdaa Cultural Center, working with refugee youth in journalism and digital media arts. She is also a contributor to Left Turn Magazine and ElectronicIntifada.net. Nora is also a mother, a photographer and a musician. Her website is www.norabf.com, and can be heard on www.flashpoints.net .

Abbie Coburn, 24, has spent her short life traveling and studying throughout dozens of countries. She has been witness to the various extremes and injustices in this world since living in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe as a 4 year-old all the way through her undergraduate years at the international school Friends World Program.

Abbie only recently became involved in Palestinian justice after a recent trip to the West Bank in January 2007 with Birthright Unplugged. Now she finds herself working constantly to get the word out among the public in the U.S. through groups such as Sabeel, Break the Seige, and Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation.

When not abroad, Abbie tries to sustain herself in San Francisco as a leader at a small Episcopal church and as a caretaker to a handful of children in the Bay Area. Teaching the next generation about global justice and preparing them for the resistance.

Gene Stoltzfus - Iraq speaker

Until 2004, was the Director of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a program of Brethren, Mennonite and Friends churches and other affiliated organizations that places teams in high conflict zones like Haiti, Hebron (West Bank), Iraq, Colombia, and Mexico In addition CPT violence reduction projects have been developed in urban North America, with Native people on the highly conflicted border between Mexico and the United States. CPT includes 40 trained full time peacemaker corps members twelve staff people and nearly 150 reservists (persons trained to work in CPT settings for up to three months each year) who emphasize human rights protection, nonviolent action, peacemaking campaigns and documentation.

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.

Mark Turner is a human rights activist and the founder of the Research Journalism Initiative, an educational media exchange designed to foster better understanding of international conflict issues. Mark recently returned from a nine month stay in the West Bank, Palestine, where he has been engaged in non-violent direct action against violations of international human rights law since 2002. Mark is the director of Ripples Cross, a full length documentary about the experiences of foreign activists in Palestine. His own video footage of Israeli military incursions into the West Bank city of Nablus and its refugee camps has been published by media outlets across the world including the BBC, al Jazeera, Reuters and the Associated Press. The Research Journalism Initiative is the continuation of Mark’s work to support non-violent conflict resolution and reconciliation through education, and to build alternatives to the established corporate media in the United States.

Ed Kinane, 62, has long been committed to nonviolence and social justice. Ed is a retired educator. He used to teach math and biology in a one-room Quaker school in rural Kenya and anthropology in a community college near Seattle. He is also a writer of letters to the editor, op-eds, articles and reviews. Off and on since the seventies he has been an editor of the Syracuse Peace Council’s Peace Newsletter.

During the late eighties and early nineties Ed worked with Peace Brigades International providing protective accompaniment to local activists in Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti and Sri Lanka threatened by death squads (some financed by U.S. military aid). Ed was chair of PBI’s Sri Lanka Project and a member of the PBI national coordinating committee.

During the mid- and late-nineties Ed worked closely with School of the Americas Watch, a grassroots organization seeking to expose and close the U.S. Army’s notorious anti-insurgency training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. For his protests against the SOA Ed has twice served time in federal prisons. Upon his release, he served on the SOA Watch national board.

In February 2003 Ed joined the Voices’ Iraq Peace Team, remaining in Baghdad throughout “shock and awe” until the invasion’s end. In August 2003 he returned to Baghdad with Voices for ten weeks to help monitor the occupation. Back in the States Ed has worked against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and has spoken to many classes, congregations and communities about his Iraq experience. He has done two tours already with the Wheels of Justice throughout the U.S.

Ed lives in Syracuse, New York with his partner of over twenty years, Ann Tiffany, also a fulltime activist and former SOA prisoner of conscience. Contact him at edkinane@verizon.net.

Salam Talib is a journalist and computer engineer from Iraq who is currently attending graduate school in San Francisco. Independently and in collaboration with other freelance journalists, he has filed hundreds of stories with Free Speech Radio about the situation on the ground in Iraq. His writings have been featured in The Nation, Common Dreams, and Antiwar.com. Since the most recent invasion of Iraq began, Salam has also been active designing databases for numerous NGOs which work with disabled Iraqis, and he recently worked to build a wheelchair factory in Iraq, with an NGO cooperating with Whirlwind Wheelchair of San Francisco State University to help disabled Iraqis.

Hannah Mermelstein is a co-founder of Birthright Unplugged www.birthrightunplugged.org, which brings mostly North American Jews to Palestine to expose them to realities of life under occupation and encourage them to become part of the solution; and brings Palestinian youth who live in refugee camps to Jerusalem, the sea, and their ancestral villages.

Hannah Mermelstein worked with the International Women’s Peace Service (www.iwps.info) in the West Bank for 8 months between 2003-2005, joining Palestinians in nonviolent resistance against occupation and documenting and intervening to interrupt human rights abuses. In 2005 she co-founded a program called Birthright Unplugged (www.birthrightunplugged.org). Hannah feels called to work to stop the injustices that are happening in her name as a Jew and with her money as an American. While in the US, Hannah is involved in local organizing and activism, and has spoken about her experiences at universities, high schools, churches, synagogues, and homes.

Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD was born to a Palestinian Christian family in the Shepherds’ Field and splits his time between the USA and Palestine. He served on the faculty of both Duke and Yale Universities (six and five years respectively). He served on the Steering/Executive Committees of a number of groups including Peace Action, the US Camaign to End the Occupation, the Palestinian American Congress, Association for One Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, AcademicsForJustice.org, and BoycottIsraeliGoods.org. He advised many other groups including Sommerville Divestment Project, Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project, Palestine Freedom Project, Sabeel North America, and National Council of Churches of Christ USA. He is a member of a number of human rights groups (Amnesty, Peace action, Human Rights Watch, ACLU etc.). His third and latest book is titled “Sharing the Land of Canaan: human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle”. He also has an activism book published electronically on his web site http://qumsiyeh.org. His main interest is media activism and public education. He published over 200 letters to the editor and 100 op-ed pieces and interviewed in TV and radio extensively (local, national and international). He won the Jallow activism award from the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1998. Appearances in national media included the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, CNBC, C-Span, and ABC, among others. He also regularly lectures on issues of human rights and international law.

Mazin

Mike Miles is a 54 year old, catholic worker who founded Anathoth Community Farm, a center for the study of nonviolence, community, and sustainable living located in Luck, Wisconsin. His involvement in the peace movement started twenty-eight years ago when he and his partner Barb Kass moved into Jonah House during the trial of the Plowshares Eight. Three decades of practicing active nonviolence has netted him scores of arrests and more than a year served in various jails and prisons. Mike now hovers around the Middle East, working with both Voices in the Wilderness and the Middle East Children’s Alliance. He has been to Iraq three times since 1997 and recently returned from Palestine/Israel. He has ben working with the Wheels of Justice for eight years— a mobile peace center that has traveled 100,000 miles making over 1000 stops at campuses, peace groups, and faith communities all over the US promoting non violent solutions to war and occupation. Mike is also a media junkie having learned how to get mainstream press to cover peace news. He has been seen on World News Tonight being stuffed into the back of a squad car and on Good Morning America scattering ashes in front of Bill Richardson. He has gotten peace events featured in many major dailies— USA Today, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, to name a few. His writing has been featured widely including Common Dreams, The Jordan Times, and Sojourners. Most recently, Mike started the Northwoods Peace Initiative— an online organizing tool which brought hundreds of people to protests in Washington, DC, as well as to the highways and town squares of rural Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice named him Peacemaker of the Year in 2002. He ran for US Congress in 2004 and 2006 with the Green Party and was one of the most successful third party candidates running for federal office in the entire US. Mike has a masters degree from North Park Seminary in Chicago and knows how to stir up crowds banging on a guitar. Mike and Barb have three adult children who love them in spite of the chaos they have endured over the years.

At Fort Lewis College, in Durango, Colorado, Michael co-founded Green Chemistry, a student and faculty group that works to make the Chemistry Department, school, and greater community more environmentally responsible. He also served as the president of two student organizations, Uniting Students through Wellness and Chemistry Club. Upon graduating, Michael accepted a research position at Stanford University Hospital, however, he left this position due to qualms with experimental design and animal testing procedures. Following this, he spent a year in South Korea teaching English to children. In early 2007, Michael traveled to West Asia with birthright israel – an organization funded by wealthy Jewish philanthropists and the Israeli government – which pays for Jewish youth to travel to Israel, provided they take part in a two week tour sponsored by the organization. Before arriving in Israel, he also registered for a six day Birthright Unplugged tour, the goal of which “is to expose people to Palestinian society and its political realities by traveling to Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps.” He came to the region wanting to find “a balanced and nuanced perspective on the ‘conflict.’” The reality he found, however, was an Israel littered with racism, vitriol, and willful ignorance, and a Palestine in shackles; nevertheless warm and welcoming. After both tours, Michael took part in ISM training in Ramallah, after which he worked mainly out of East Jerusalem, coordinating fund raising for the reconstruction of recently demolished Palestinian homes. He also worked in the Tel Rumeda neighborhood of Hebron, monitoring checkpoints and escorting Palestinian children to school.

Anna Baltzer is a 28 -year-old Jewish American Columbia graduate, Fulbright scholar, and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. She is a three-time volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service, where she documented human rights abuses in the West Bank and supported the nonviolent movement against the Occupation. She has spent most of the past few years in Palestine or on tour with her book, Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories.