Peace Movement

Re "Their antiwar cries are no longer in the wilderness," March 15 Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) didn't just once call for a Department of Peace, she's calling for it now -- as are Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and 58 others members of Congress. All are cosponsors of a bill to create a Department of Peace, which was reintroduced in February. The Department of Peace would augment our problem-solving options by providing an institutional platform for the nation's growing wealth of expertise in nonviolent conflict resolution and the burgeoning science of peace building.

More than six months after mass protests began spreading through the streets of Syria, activists say they remain committed to a peaceful rebellion against the government of President Bashar Assad, despite a rising death toll, a wave of assassinations and the reported emergence of soldiers switching sides and battling security forces. "Our revolution remains a nonviolent one," Omar Edelbi, spokesman for a grass-roots opposition network, the Local Coordination Committees, said in an interview Saturday in Beirut.

Israeli author and human rights activist Yael Dayan, daughter of military hero Moshe Dayan, will speak in Tarzana on Friday on the state of the peace movement in her country after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The talk--titled "After Rabin--Finally, Peace Now?"--will begin at 8:15 p.m. at Temple Judea at 5429 Lindley Ave. Dayan, born in 1939 in Nahalal, a village in Palestine, studied science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and biology at Open University in Tel Aviv.

The deadly artillery barrages and sprawling street battles that have engulfed Yemen in recent days are rooted in a strategic power struggle among a renegade general, a billionaire tribal leader and the family of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The animosities among these three factions are eclipsing a largely peaceful protest movement that for the last eight months has been unable to force Saleh from office. The intense fighting in the capital, Sana, is rumbling closer to civil war as the president's main rivals attempt to exploit the chaos and maneuver for control of the nation.

LARRY AGRAN, 41 As mayor of Irvine, Agran is one of but a few elected officials in county also a vocal proponent of peace and nuclear disarmament. Active in Alliance for Survival, he walked precincts for Carol Ann Bradford's 1984 congressional campaign and founded Local Elected Officials Project, organizing mayors and city council members nationwide against the arms race. "You're not going to transform the electorate in two years. It's going to take 10 or 20," he said.

The Nobel Peace Committee has been criticized for its award of this year's prize to the Soviet co-chairman of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Yevgeny Chazov, who is sharing the award with his American counterpart, Bernard Lown, is a deputy minister of health in the Soviet Union.

George W. Bush seems fixed on going to war against Baghdad no matter what. No matter if Iraq does or does not represent an actual threat. No matter whether Saddam Hussein allows weapons inspectors in. No matter what our allies think or what the regional fallout from such an intervention might mean. No matter what the staggering cost of an invasion would do to the U.S. economy. No matter how war with Iraq might distract from the unfinished war against Al Qaeda.

I came home the other day in about as foul a mood as I have ever been due to the depressing nature of the news, and the dog greeted me at the door smiling. I couldn't tell what kind of a smile it was, but I think I detected a certain smugness about it, the way feminists used to smile when they began flexing their muscles. It is a combination of eyes and mouth working together to suggest a secret knowledge. "Why is the dog smiling?" I said loudly to no one in particular.

In the mind of peace advocate Michiko Pumpian, the crane is mightier than the sword -- and, for that matter, more persuasive than protest marches. The tall, graceful bird is a symbol of peace in her native Japan, and the 48-year-old Pumpian has exported the idea across the globe. For the last decade, she has led the World Peace Project for Children, which promotes peace through the creation of origami cranes.

THE question is being asked around town in print, on the air and in certain Westside bars where the cognoscenti gather to sip mango martinis: Whatever became of the peace movement? Everywhere activists of a different persuasion are marching, singing, shouting or waving signs for their cause, while the antiwar people are nowhere to be seen.

Syrians opposed to the regime of President Bashar Assad on Monday found inspiration in Libyan rebels' advance into their nation's capital as they battle Moammar Kadafi's forces. The developments in Libya, where fierce clashes continued in some areas, have made many Syrian activists more intent than ever on removing Assad from power. In the minds of protesters in Syria, the fate of their movement is very much influenced by events in Libya, as Arab countries that have been distant for decades have become united in their uprisings.

The antiwar movement isn't what it was in 2003. Then, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across America to protest the lead-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Today in Washington -- in what's billed as the largest peace protest since President Obama announced that he would send more soldiers to Afghanistan -- organizers are planning for a crowd of 1,500. "People are burned out," explained the rally's organizer, Laurie Dobson. As she and other antiwar activists struggle to remake their movement, they also acknowledge there are obstacles.

Bombings. Butyric acid attacks. Sniper shootings. Letters filled with fake anthrax. These are some of the tactics used over the years by antiabortion extremists. The slaying of Dr. George Tiller in his Kansas church Sunday was part of a decades-long history of domestic terrorism aimed at abortion providers, carried out by a small minority of the much broader and generally peaceful movement that opposes abortion.

Re "All aboard the peace racket," Opinion, Sept. 2 Bruce Bawer seems outraged that after a bloody century of war leading to war, someone might call for an alternative approach to conflict resolution. The field of peace studies offers a comprehensive theory of peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace building. But working for peace, Bawer insists without proof, is "wishful thinking," evidence of weakness, promotion of "defenselessness" and appeasement of tyranny.

Dig down below the 3 feet of topsoil that was dumped atop the ruins of central Hiroshima to make a memorial Peace Park and you'll still turn up bones, remains of Japanese civilians incinerated when an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic fireball over this spot one August morning in 1945. The Peace Park is a graveyard, the most visible scar of Japan's disastrous imperial war and ground zero of its postwar, anti-nuclear conscience.

Re "Their antiwar cries are no longer in the wilderness," March 15 Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) didn't just once call for a Department of Peace, she's calling for it now -- as are Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and 58 others members of Congress. All are cosponsors of a bill to create a Department of Peace, which was reintroduced in February. The Department of Peace would augment our problem-solving options by providing an institutional platform for the nation's growing wealth of expertise in nonviolent conflict resolution and the burgeoning science of peace building.

Paul Loeb has written a book on the American peace movement called "Hope in Hard Times." Hard times, indeed. But hope? Consider this for example: On the day that the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament left New York on the final leg of its walk across the continent from Los Angeles to Washington, 2.2 million people turned out in the streets of New York. Not to cheer them, but the Mets, the home team that had just won the World Series.

Despite any hoopla that would surround the Middle East peace conference Secretary of State James A. Baker is attempting to engineer, most peace activists believe Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir when he assures Israeli right-wingers that the whole enterprise is merely a show to appease international public opinion and will never result in an exchange of land for peace.

PERHAPS you have noticed that when it comes to excess and empty noise, I am not the most tolerant person in the world. Take the subject of peace, for instance. On almost any given day, including Sundays, I receive e-mails from near and far that inform me of various peace seminars, peace retreats, peace picnics, peace dances, peace calendars and peace speeches.

A month into the war in Lebanon, Israel's long-quiescent peace movement is suddenly issuing a ringing call to arms. Isolated and beset by infighting in the first weeks of the conflict, the still-small peace camp was spurred into action by the Israeli government's authorization this week of a broader ground invasion in Lebanon.