The official site of U.S. Citizens for Peace and Justice is www.peaceandjustice.it.   The present web page is
only a storage page for the photos from the July 26th sit-in while the official page for the event is being made.



July 26, 2006: Sit-in in front of the US Embassy

to demand an immediate and unconditional cease-fire in Lebanon and a stop to the delaying tactics of Condoleeza Rice and the Bush Administration



“Old times” -- our first demonstration in front of the embassy a year ago...
“Stop the war in Iraq”, “Bring the troops home now,” “No blood for oil!”





Times change (or do they?)... Kathy's banner says what we're there for now:
Stop the war in Lebanon, No $AID$ for war crimes.





About 25 USC4P&J members (counting family and friends) and 25 Italian peace activists (in particular, Un ponte per) turned out.   Upon 2 days' notice!







Condoleeza Rice showed up, too,
only to set fire to a peace flag and trample on it...






We had prepared a letter for her but she rushed off.   So, after a lengthy discussion with the six (that's right, 6) DIGOS agents, we got a man from the Embassy to come over and take the envelope.   See the letter here.







Jean Rohe, a jazz singer returning to the States from the Montreux Festival (she was the valedictorian who told Sen. Mc Cain off at her graduation ceremony last May), sang “We're living on a living planet, circling a living star”.





Patrick addressing the USC4P&J participants, 20% of whom were the Vasquez family!
That's because Maria brought her son (off camera), daughter, niece, friend of niece...
what if all started doing the same? Next time, instead of 25 we'd be 125!







The real absentee: the Press. TG3 came after our protest (click here), shot an hour of video and did several interviews, but used nothing – not even for its regional edition.   CBS News declared they'd come but didn't.   Etc. etc.  







As for the printed media, Il Manifesto printed the squib above.   Corriere had the item on its web site but the item didn't make it to print.   None of the other papers said a word.

The peace movement is used to being ignored by the media, controlled as it is by the financial groups sponsoring Bush and, in Italy, Berlusconi.   But almost complete silence for a particularly newsworthy event – Rice's visit was in every headline, so protesting her visit constitutes news – is surprising.   Perhaps this fact can be explained, in addition to the usual censorship, by the Italian government's attempt to broker peace and thus keep a non-partisan profile.   Another explanation could be the additional pressure exerted by the Israeli lobby, as the British Stop the War Coalition, in their Newsletter No. 2006/27 ("Israel and the BBC”) believes is the case in Great Britain:

“The Israeli government has been crowing about its success in the propaganda war, claiming that its spokespeople have had four times as much coverage in the western media as commentators criticising Israel. .... The Israeli spin machine must see the BBC as the jewel in its crown, most of its reporting being little more that reading out press releases from the Israeli government, the White House and Downing Street."

 
As for the situation in Italy, see this Message sent by Paolo Barnard, ex journalist at RAI 3.

 
20 luglio 2006 


Caro Patrick,

sono Paolo Barnard, l’ex giornalista di Report (RAI3) cui tu scrivesti nel Settembre 2003 in occasione della mia inchiesta “L’Altro Terrorismo”, dove accusavo gli Stati Uniti, la Gran Bretagna e la Russia di essere i veri grandi terroristi, prove documentali alla mano.

Oggi ho pubblicato un libro sullo stesso tema, dal titolo “Perché ci Odiano”, di Paolo Barnard, edito da Rizzoli BUR, collana Futuro Passato.. Rispetto al pezzo televisivo esso è molto più documentato e soprattutto contiene una critica a Israele forse senza precedenti nell’editoria italiana importante, poiché Israele viene annoverato fra gli Stati terroristi e accusato da fonti ebraiche autorevoli di aver imposto “54 anni di ‘nazismo’ in Palestina”.

Te lo segnalo per alcuni importanti motivi:

E’ il libro oggi più censurato nella saggistica italiana. Nessun media, né televisivo né cartaceo, ha voluto recensirlo, né RAI né Mediaset o La7, o alcuna radio pubblica o privata, neppure Unità o Repubblica (che ha letteralmente tolto una recensione dalle pagine sia del quotidiano che del Venerdì). Sappiamo che la censura è politica e viene dall’alto, e credo che la critica a Israele ne sia alla base.

La documentazione che contiene è talmente inattaccabile, e scioccante, da costituire lo strumento definitivo per demolire la Guerra al Terrorismo di Bush/Blair/Putin/Olmert senza possibilità di smentite. E’ dunque uno strumento essenziale per controbattere efficacemente alle destre, o semplicemente per ogni cittadino che vuole capire la realtà di questa immane crisi internazionale.

Mi affido direttamente a te affinché tu ne prenda visione e, se lo condividi, lo divulghi, perché non mi è concessa altra voce. Vengo zittito dalle censure poiché né la verità, né la libertà di pensiero sono tollerate. Mai.

Grazie.

Paolo Barnard (oggi a Rai Educational)
 

If Barnard's hypothesis is true, we have to prepare any future initiative very carefully to make sure our message gets out, since we are dealing with a very sensitive subject.

(An additional confirmation: the day after our sit-in, the ultra-Left staged a march through Rome to protest the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.   Thousands of people participated.   Only Il Manifesto reported the event: no other newspaper and none of the TV news programs, according to the organizers.)







A concluding personal comment by Patrick

We knew that if we criticized the Nazi-like slaughter in Lebanon, we risked being isolated as anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic.   Just as, every time we criticize the Nazi-like slaughter that Bush conducts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we risk being accused of anti-Americanism.   Well, after talking with several people, I think I can say that we successfully avoided the trap.   This, in my opinion, is the real success of our demonstration.   We have come up with a line that works.

We denounced the Israeli attack of Lebanon as a way of dragging Syria, then Iran, into the war (because of their various alliances), to permit Bush to attack and occupy these countries, too (because of our de facto military alliance with Israel: see here).   So what we were denouncing was not just a single country but the whole neo-Con agenda of “imperialism” (their word!): domination of other peoples to get at their natural resources.
See the wording of our press release here.

Nick's letter to Condoleeza Rice is written as a criticism of Bush that applies word for word to what Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza.  So we are not being anti-Semitic (which, as Nick points out, would be ridiculous anyway), but simply anti-war and anti-imperialism.   Kathy produced a description of the historical background to the conflict (which we didn't hand out this time, since there were so many other leaflets) along the same lines.
See the wording of our Letter to Secretary Rice here.

There was no burning of Israeli flags at our demonstration (which most of us would have been against anyway), but rather an ironic burning of the peace flag by “Condoleeza Rice” – wearing an Israeli flag as a shawl to show how the current US and Israeli governments “si spalleggiano” (work back to back) to extend their influence in the Middle East.

Finally, our flyer pointed out the existence of Israeli peace movements that say exactly the same things we do, for example Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens against war and occupation.
See our hand out here.   See the letters to be read out here.

So maybe we should consider the absolute silence of the press as a compliment: they couldn't find anything to condemn, so they just ignored us.

Well, as we say in the letter to Secretary Rice, we're used to being ignored.   That won't stop us..