Wheels of Justice

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.

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.