The only noise you hear is the water rippling over rocks, as the Lehigh River cuts through a steep valley near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Bikers ride along a paved path that gently slopes at a 2 percent downward grade. The lush carpet of trees on the mountains eventually gives way to a small picturesque town that looks like a place you’d see in the Swiss Alps.

This little town of 4,800 supports two bike stores that shuttle riders to the beginning of the Lehigh Gorge Trail, as well as quaint stores, B&Bs, and several restaurants. The weekends buzz with activity.

Jim Thorpe has come a long way from its days as a depressed mining town to the biking center it is today.

The first time we came through Jim Thorpe, it was to raft. But since then we’ve been back three times to mountain bike, stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, and shop on Main Street.

We spent plenty of money there, so I was surprised to hear about the anti-bike sentiment. Bike tourism seems to have lifted this town from its depression. Why would a town bite the hand that feeds it?

“It’s animosity between the locals and the visitors,” said Tom Loughery, corresponding secretary of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “Existing residents had no idea that the town had something special to offer. They complain that it now takes 10 minutes to get across town, and the restaurants are crowded.”

They don’t seem to link the visitors to the newly-renovated homes and buildings and the full tax coffers.

No irony was lost when this town changed its name from Mauch Chunk to Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was a versatile athlete of American Indian descent who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics, but these were rescinded when it was learned he’d earned a minimal amount of money during college playing basketball. Although he played professional football and baseball, his later life was marked by poverty and alcoholism.

Mauch Chunk had been a thriving coal and railroad town. In an attempt to replace those dying industries with tourism, town leaders agreed to let the widow of the disgraced athlete bury his body there in 1953 and changed the name in his honor. The tourists never came, until the 1990s. But it wasn’t to see Thorpe’s grave. It was to go biking.

Copious studies support the idea that biking can boost an economy. Mountain biking has been the fourth most popular adventure activity among U.S. adventure travelers, according to a 1997 study by the Travel Industry Association of America. Sixty million adult Americans bicycle each year. Bicyclists spend money on this recreation, which creates jobs and brings revenue to communities. The Outdoor Industry Foundation reports that bicycling contributes $133 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

Declining towns can capitalize on their natural gifts. Not every mountain biking center needs spectacular rolling rock trails like Moab, Utah, or the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains that Durango, Colorado, offers. Woodlands and flatlands can be developed into biking arenas. Plus, the trails can be cleared with volunteer efforts and a few inexpensive tools. In Jim Thorpe, timber roads and coal mining roads had already been cut through the woods.

Looking for new sources of income, West Virginia aggressively pursued bike dollars in the early 1980s. It sponsored races and reaped the benefits by establishing itself as a biking mecca. The Hatfield-McCoy trails that were opened in 2000 have proven very successful. After a decade of work to build community support and of agreements with 20 different landowners, the shared-use trails have added $51 million to the economy, drawn 303,000 visitors, and created 1,572 new jobs.

Yet some still oppose biking there.

“The Nature Nazis think they are saving the world from mountain bikes,” complained Matt Marcus, owner of Blackwater Bikes and the president of the West Virginia Mountain Bike Association, describing his experience with officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Anti-bike groups claim that bikes cause erosion and trail widening,” said Drew Vankat, policy adviser for the International Mountain Biking Association, “when in fact research has shown bikes cause no more impact than horses.”

Vankat has been at the forefront of a battle with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. The Forest Service director in Denver proposed eliminating bikes on the Monarch Crest Trail — based on research done before mountain bikes were even invented.

“They don’t want to lose pristine nature and feel if you allow bikes, it will open up the floodgates,” Vankat said.

The town of Jim Thorpe felt the backlash too.

“The state of Pennsylvania outlawed biking on state game lands, and while only four trails were affected, the perception was that there was no more biking in Pennsylvania. That was in 2004, and it really hurt the economy,” said Loughery of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “We’re working hard to gain them back.”

To be fair, not every cyclist is courteous. Some refuse to ride single-file or around a puddle while off road, widening the trail. But the benefits far outweigh a few examples of bad behavior.

The Forest Service argues that allowing bikes into the woods would open the door to allowing in four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). So the agency takes the position of “no wheels at all.” That’s easier: The Forest Service is under siege from powerful companies like Kawasaki Motors. Bike manufacturers lack the deep pockets to fight for inclusion. Although ATVs are noisy and pollute with their fossil-fueled engines, equating pedal-powered bikes with ATVs makes no sense.

Depressed regions have an opportunity to recreate their image and character. While not as powerful as coal or steel barons, bike riders can help towns overcome flagging economic fortunes, if they can overcome the naysayers.

Additional Reading:

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
Lehigh Gorge Trail

Joanne Ignacio

Even in an economy broadsided by the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history, not everyone is losing money. Advertising Age reported in September that Campbell Soup’s sales rose 13 percent in the second quarter.

Maybe cash-strapped consumers are embracing condensed soup as a meal alternative both inexpensive and nourishing. Kudos to the integrated marketing communications media for pulling off a cunning ploy based on the information processing model of advertising effectiveness, a theory developed by William McGuire in Behavioral and Management Science in Marketing.

What do we see besides violence and fear in the news media? Armed with modern technology, savvy corporate professionals shower their audiences with an array of terrifying images and narratives. Every bomb blast is “BREAKING NEWS!” and every weather disturbance the “STORM OF THE DECADE!” This constant propagation of danger has addicted our culture to panic and destruction.

Since the advent of advertising agencies, conglomerates have been seeking their help to promote their brands. For news media, that brand is fear. Based on McGuire’s model, the news media first catch our attention by inundating us with coverage of economic woes. This sparks panic and a shift in consumer behavior, which translates into money redirected and profits collected. In this way, shrewd corporate media planning is the lifeblood of the 24-hour news cycle.

But according to statistics on worldwide deaths caused by organized violence, the world is getting less dangerous. Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker even states that we are probably living “in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence.” So why does it not feel that way?

Fareed Zakaria, in a May 2008 Newsweek article called “The Rise of the Rest,” explains, “We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia are all threats in some way or another.”

Coverage of worldwide danger is what’s truly increasing. “The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most importantly, images from around the world all the time,” says Zakaria. That’s most visible in technology. Video games and movies bring our enemies closer: into our living rooms.

What we see on television determines what we know. The news program is a mechanical presentation of events, and carefully scripted and sequenced. It is not the media’s fault that these events have occurred. However, selection, length of time allotted, and intensity of coverage are very much corporate decisions.

There always has been, and always will be, something to fear. Remember the Y2K crisis of 2000? In the months leading up to the New Year, it was impossible to avoid news coverage of this apparently inevitable disaster. Would every computer crash because of clock overload? An article in the December 30, 1999 edition of USA Today stated: “Here at the predicted end of cybertime, the future looks bright but a little brittle.”

As a student at one of the nation’s preeminent media studies departments, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, my “innocence” in this media society is now more than three years past. Still, I am suddenly panicking, inundated with coverage of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the $700 billion dollar “bailout.” By tuning into mainstream media, we have all been conditioned to fear and uncertainty, and desensitized to violence. We have consequently relinquished our own ability to understand what is real, as our reality is spoon-fed to us.

Campbell Soup knows this. Why else would a canned foods company dedicate so much money to media planning to effectively deliver the advertisers’ message to the market? In 2006, Campbell Soup consolidated its $300 million international media planning account with Mediaedge:cia, a media planning agency with around $17.9 billion in billings. These professionals know canned foods are inexpensive products that decrease in demand when consumer income rises.

Does the crisis reporting have some link with the weakening dollar? President Grover Cleveland (the face on the $1,000 banknote) is probably rolling in his grave at this fiscal atrocity. But you can still see many attractive foreign women leaving Bergdorf Goodman with bags full of full-priced luxury “bargains.”

Jeffery J Guillermo

David Ngaruri Kenney, a farmer in Kenya, was imprisoned in a water-filled cell for organizing a protest. He applied for asylum in the United States and Philip Schrag, director of the Georgetown Center for Applied Legal Studies, worked on his case. They jointly wrote the recently published Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America, which recounts Kenney’s improbable trajectory from Kenyan farmer to U.S. college basketball player, and now, American lawyer.

Interviewer: Scott Kuhagen

Interviewee: Philip Schrag

What is the objective of the book and how did you get involved in Mr. Kenney’s case?

David Kenney was a political activist in his native Kenya in the early 1990s. He didn’t choose to become a political activist; he was a peasant farmer trying to grow tea and making a living. By doing so he discovered he couldn’t make a living growing tea because the price the government was paying was so low that it was causing him to lose money to grow tea. And yet the contract he had signed with the government monopoly prevented him from growing any other crops on his land.

So he organized a farmers’ boycott and protest to try to get the government to justify its policy or change it. And as a result, he was put in jail [and] nearly executed at gunpoint in a forest. He was saved at the last minute because the security forces of Kenya thought he could be more useful to the regime alive than dead. So they tortured him for a week, putting him in a water-filled cell in which he was in constant threat of being killed by drowning, and eventually put in solitary confinement for eight months.

When he was released from solitary confinement, his bank account was frozen and he was prohibited from meeting with more than three other Kenyans at the same time, so his life was effectively over. He had no commercial or social life, and could not even continue his education. He had an incredible piece of luck in that he met some American Peace Corps volunteers who had been assigned to his region, and they had the idea — since he was 7 feet tall — of getting him a basketball scholarship to the United States. This was pretty amazing because he had never seen a basketball! So this was a pretty far-out idea.

Nevertheless, they pursued it. They persuaded an American basketball coach to come from Colorado to Kenya to see him play basketball, and meanwhile frantically taught him how to play basketball.

He ended up coming to the United States on a basketball scholarship. He got a U.S. college degree, and when his education was over, Daniel arap Moi, who was in charge of Kenya when he was jailed and tortured, was still in power. So he applied for asylum. The book tells the story of his four-year struggle with our immigration services, in which he was constantly denied asylum by one bureaucracy after another, and eventually forced to go back to Africa, where he was nearly killed once again.

For those who might be unfamiliar with asylum, can you talk very generally about what an applicant would have to show [to win asylum]?

A person can apply for asylum if he has come to the United States either legally or without permission, and says that he is afraid to go back to his home country because of a fear of persecution on account of his race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Kenney of course was afraid to go back on account of persecution as a result of his political opinion.

If you apply for asylum, you get fingerprinted and photographed. Your identity is checked to make sure you’re not a terrorist. But more important than that, you are required to file hundreds of pages of corroborating evidence if you want to have a good chance of winning your case. It’s very difficult to obtain this corroborating evidence if you don’t have a lawyer working for you and if your friends and relatives back home are afraid that if they cooperate with you they themselves would get in trouble with the regime. This is a very challenging process for any asylum applicant, and most people who apply for it do not win asylum.

Is his experience with the system typical of the challenges that asylum seekers face?

Well, every case is different, of course.

Mr. Kenney, for example, was denied [asylum] by an immigration judge even though she believed that everything he said was true and he had a lot of documentation.

When he was halfway through his college education in 1997, he got a letter saying that his younger brother, a boy he had brought up as his own son after his father died, had been arrested and was being tortured in a Kenyan prison. And he knew very well what that meant.

So Mr. Kenney dropped everything, flew to Kenya, hired a lawyer, got his brother out of jail, and immediately returned to California to resume his studies. But because of this trip to rescue his brother, the immigration judge ruled that he had forfeited his status as refugee — that he was a legitimate refugee but he had returned home, proving that he was not eligible to be a refugee anymore.

His case went even further than that, correct?

Yes. He was represented at the initial stages of the case at the immigration court by students of mine at the clinic I run here at Georgetown Law School. It’s called the Center for Applied Legal Studies. The Center and clinics like it throughout the country have students who do all the work that lawyers would do, for academic credit, under the supervision of professors who are experienced lawyers.

And these students did a fabulous job of representing Mr. Kenney. One of them even made an impassioned closing statement at the trial, comparing his [Mr. Kenney’s] tea boycott with the Boston Tea Party of 1775, which did impress the judge despite the fact that she denied asylum. So they did a great job, but he lost there, he lost at the Board, and I took his case to the United States Court of Appeals.

Recently there have been some press reports, especially an article in the Washington Post that quotes the dean of Georgetown Law School, saying that interest in immigration law and immigration law clinics in general has really increased. As a clinical instructor yourself, what really excites you about this increasing interest in immigration law, and what are the hopes that you have for this new group of students moving into the field?

This field has just burgeoned in the last 20 years. In the early 1980s, there were virtually no courses in immigration law at most American law schools. It was a real backwater of legal education. Thanks to a small group of people who started popularizing this field long before I got into it, it is expanded, and now there are immigration law courses at most American law schools, and there are clinics in which students represent immigrants in real cases, as my students did in Kenney’s case.

Students find this area of law extremely exciting and interesting for several reasons. One is that they are little death penalty cases: there is a lot at stake! If a person wins asylum, they can apply for a green card after a year, and then start on the road to American citizenship. If they lose, they are ordered deported. If they are deported to their own country, which is the usual case, they may face imprisonment, torture, or death.

I was curious if you had any surprising or noteworthy examples where you’ve learned of how one of your clients who has received word that they can stay indefinitely in the United States has embraced their new country of the United States?

I think that the most dramatic instance of that occurred today! We recently won asylum for a young woman who had escaped from Zimbabwe — a political activist who had escaped from Zimbabwe — where you know that the human rights record, especially during the last election, has been very bad. She not only won asylum, but because she won asylum, she is able to bring her husband and children over to the United States, and everybody will be safe from retaliation and persecution. Well, she called our offices today and offered her services to volunteer to help other people in the clinic because she was so impressed with what the students had done to help her win her case.

Do you think that we are a generous and welcoming country, or do you have concerns in that area?

Our refugee law isn’t perfect. There are many blemishes and problems with it. But we’ve really come a long way since the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the most terrible incidence in American immigration history was when Hitler allowed 939 Jews to leave Germany in 1939. They thought that they could go to Cuba, but the Cuban president refused to let them in. The Christian captain of the ship then sailed the ship toward the United States, and off the coast of Florida radioed President Roosevelt and asked for permission to land his passengers in safety in the United States. And Roosevelt refused to let them land.

The ship went back to Europe, where nearly half the passengers, a little over half the passengers, were killed in the Holocaust.

We’ve come a very long way since then. In 1980, we passed a Refugee Act, and now we’re one of the most welcoming countries in the world at a time when other countries are again turning away refugees. We resettle a lot of people who are in need. Refugees are about 10 percent, maybe 15 percent if you include asylum winners, of all U.S. immigration. In 2006, we resettled about 40,000 refugees from United Nations camps around the world, and granted asylum to another 30,000 or so additional refugees. So that’s a pretty large number.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things we could do to make our system more fair. Perhaps the principal one, one of the first things that we should do is that we should enable people to get fair representation in asylum proceedings when they are indigent. The chance of winning asylum without a lawyer or a representative is 16 percent in immigration court.

With a lawyer — all lawyers combined — it’s about 41 percent. With a lawyer from a law school clinic or a nongovernmental organization [NGO] such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, or a pro bono lawyer from one of the large law firms, the chance of winning asylum in immigration court is about 90 percent. Not because these organizations select the cases more carefully than others, and not because they’re more brilliant than the other lawyers who represent asylum seekers, but because lawyers from big law firms and NGOs limit their caseloads and devote enormous amounts of resources to investigating the facts of each case, getting all that documentation to prove the case so that the judge doesn’t just have to accept the asylum applicant’s word for it.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough such lawyers to go around, so providing free legal representation to indigent asylum seekers is essential for fairness in our system.

[Without giving away the ending] what is the outcome of the case and your relationship with Mr. Kenney?

Mr. Kenney, despite being nearly killed three times in his life, is currently back in the United States. He is a lawful permanent resident and has applied for American citizenship. He has graduated from an American law school, Catholic University Law School, and is working in the district attorney’s office of Montgomery County, Maryland. So it’s been an extraordinary odyssey for him from being a peasant farmer, to being a political prisoner, to being a student at an American college, to being ordered deported and leaving the United States and being nearly killed in Africa again, to coming back to the United States and graduating from law school here. During that period, I have been fortunate enough to become his friend and his co-author.

Scott Kuhagen

A lack of basic health care during pregnancy and delivery in parts of Africa leaves some women with debilitating physical injuries after childbirth. Mary Olive Smith’s new documentary A Walk to Beautiful examines their hardships — and their quest for a cure.

Smith recently spoke with filmmaker and ITF Director Andrew Blackwell about how the documentary came about, the women in the film, and the political implications of her decision to let the camera linger on Ethiopia’s incredible landscapes.

Interviewer: Andrew Blackwell
Interviewee: Mary Olive Smith
 
What is the story of A Walk to Beautiful?
 
It’s about five women in Ethiopia who have suffered from serious childbirth injuries, and live in isolation and loneliness as a result. The film follows their journeys to a special hospital in Addis Ababa, where they hope to find a cure.

The real story is one of women who have been shunned by society and who are trying to regain their dignity and their lives, and become whole people again. It’s a human story, a story of personal transformation, not a medical story. The medical problem is the struggle, and we explain that, but the journey is a personal one.

 
What is the medical problem they are struggling with?
 
It’s called fistula, and it’s really a hidden problem. Very few people know it exists. The [United Nations] U.N. campaign to deal with it only began five years ago, although the problem has been around as long as humankind.

It’s an injury that is caused by prolonged, unrelieved, obstructed labor. Even in the [United States], obstructed labor occurs in 5 percent of all deliveries, but here the problem is overcome by Caesarean delivery. But in the poorest countries of the world, where there are not enough doctors or hospitals, these women basically need a Caesarean section, but don’t receive it. And there are higher rates of obstructed delivery as well, due to early marriage and pregnancy as well as malnutrition. So these women end up in obstructed labor for days on end, and they either die or they end up with severe injuries. They can be crippled, or get fistula, which causes incontinence.
 
The reason they’re incontinent is that, after days and days of obstructed labor, they end up with a hole between the vagina and the bladder. And there’s no way to get better without surgery. The bladder doesn’t hold the urine, so it’s constantly coming out. They smell, they are too poor even to have diapers or underwear, and it doesn’t matter how much they wash.

They think they are cursed. They have no idea that it’s a physical injury. Many of them go to hospitals, and the hospitals don’t know what to do with them. And their communities shun them. A lot of the doctors call them modern-day lepers. They are no longer part of society. They just disappear. The response depends on the family, but as a rule, they no longer can hang out at the market or at the well. Some of them are so afraid and ashamed that they go to wash their clothes at night, and their families just leave food out for them.

There are exceptions, in which the family maintains strong support, and it varies from country to country. But in rural Ethiopia, the stigma is very strong. It’s not that they blame the person; they just don’t want to be around them. And the women are too ashamed to go out as well. For the most part, they are rejected by their community. In the case of Ayehu, a young woman who we followed for the film, her siblings were really cruel. Her mother was her only defender. When we met Ayehu, we found her living in a makeshift lean-to that she had put together with sticks against the outside of the back wall of her mother’s house. She would crawl in there and sleep on the floor. Even during the day, she would just sit in there. She would never come in to the house; she wasn’t allowed.

 
Why is the community and family response so harsh?
 
The families don’t abandon them at first. I met family after family who took them to the hospital. They’ll sell their goats to raise money to try to get them help. But often they don’t encounter anyone who knows how to deal with fistula, and if they haven’t heard about the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, or if it seems too far away, then there’s nothing they can do.

It’s true, women in these areas are second-class citizens: They do most of the work, they don’t have property rights, and they are definitely subordinate. But if a man had the same condition, I think he might not be treated much differently. The smell is very bad; there’s no way to control the flow of urine, and people just don’t want to be around the person. I don’t think you can really point your finger at the culture. The situation comes more from poverty, which creates both the conditions that lead to the injury in the first place, and the circumstances that keep it from being treated.

 
How did you come to make a film about fistula?
 
I work for a company called Engel Entertainment, a documentary production house based in [New York City]. I’ve been working there for 12 years. The idea came from an op-ed in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof in May, 2003, called “Alone and Ashamed,” in which he wrote about women at the hospital suffering from fistula. It was a really moving piece. A friend of Steve Engel, who is the president of our company, brought the idea to him, and Steve took it up as a documentary project. He asked me if I would be interested in directing the film, as I have a longstanding interest in human rights in general, and in Africa in particular. We had always done television in the past, for [stations] like Discovery, PBS, and so on. But this time we wanted to do it as an independent feature documentary.

 
And so the film follows these women to the hospital?
 
The first half of the film is that journey to the hospital. Ayehu knew about the hospital before we met her, but she was too afraid to go. Again, it’s a long way away, and they’re unsure if it’s going to be costly, and they’re afraid of going to the city. Going to Addis Ababa can seem like going to the moon for them. But she was convinced to go by another woman who had had the treatment. And so we followed her, as well as two other women, who made the journey separately. The trip means walking for hours and hours, and then a 16-hour bus ride. The treatment itself is free, and they can even get money for the trip home, if they can just get themselves to the hospital.
 
The middle of the film is at the hospital. When Ayehu gets to the hospital and is given a bed, you see her smile for the first time, as she realizes that she’s not the only one with this problem. … she is amazed that there are 120 women also there who have the same problem as her. And it’s a really open, neat place — very lively — and they can socialize. There’s a real transformation in them as people, even before they get the surgery.

The twist in the film is Wubete, another woman who we met in the hospital. At age eight, she was married off against her will. She was beaten by her husband, became pregnant by him, and had this fistula as a result of the delivery. She’s so beautiful, and her family doesn’t want her. But in her case, the treatment was more complicated, and it was unclear whether or not she would be cured, and we followed her as she dealt with that. In addition to her story, the latter part of the film shows the other women returning to their homes, and becoming part of their community again.

 
Ethiopia has a lot of stereotypes associated with it, going back at least to the famines of the 1980s, which received so much media coverage. But your film really seems to portray it in a different way.
 
Some films really show the squalor and hopelessness in African countries, so I really wanted to show how beautiful Ethiopia is. I get tired of the portrayal of Africa as a hell on earth. There is so much beauty and hope there. And there was such a contrast between Ayehu’s situation and the beautiful landscapes. So Ayehu’s leaving her shack and going on this journey through this beautiful environment sort of represents the hope in her poor conditions. Our cinematographer and editor really brought that out.
 
Although I hadn’t been to Ethiopia before, I wasn’t surprised at how beautiful it was, as I had been to other parts of Africa. And I wanted to bring out the beauty of the country, in a way to represent the dignity of the people there. The women in the film have so much dignity as they go through this process. Ethiopians in general have responded really well to the film. Although it shows a difficult situation in their country, they see the dignity of the people we show, and realize that it’s a personal story, not an indictment of their entire country.
 
Also, after the devastation of what the film shows — people often describe the film as “devastating” — there’s excitement that comes with realizing that these women can be helped. The Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital is becoming better known, and more women therefore have the possibility of making the journey there. And if you can imagine being a leper of sorts, and then after being treated, being allowed to rejoin the community again, there’s real joy there.

 
For those who wish to help women suffering from fistula receive restorative surgery and care, visit www.fistulafoundation.org.

Andrew Blackwell

Lupe Anguiano is a former nun who offers a religious framework that counters Christian conservatism. She was a pioneer in welfare activism and the women’s rights movement, and reframed religious debates to include issues of social justice. At the opening of the Lupe Anguiano archive at UCLA earlier this year, she was called, “truly an unsung heroine of the American civil rights movement.”

Below, Anguiano discusses the perils of large, rich institutions, and recounts a time when the church actually leaned left.  

Interviewer: Anja Tranovich
Interviewee: Lupe Anguiano

How have your religious beliefs influenced your activism?

I was always raised knowing we were made in the image and likeness of God. Fighting for equality has always been part of my upbringing. I was always brought up with the dignity of people.

Equality is something I have always struggled with. My dad was from an Indian background, and my mom was a Spaniard. My dad’s mom was the housekeeper to my mother’s parents. There was struggle from both of my grandparents’ sides. There were a lot of equalities issues.

To tell you the truth, the whole issue of standing up for your rights, I didn’t feel the need or strength of that until the ’60s.

You went into the convent when you were young, but got reprimanded because of your activism during the ’60s, especially on civil rights issues. What were you doing then?

I was a missionary sister, and the whole training is to respect others’ languages and cultures and not to impose your own ideas, and to be respectful of people, particularly of the poor. If people are poor, it shows the need for education; it’s not an issue of intelligence.

I feel very strongly about the issue of equality because I am Latina — Mexican American — and I had experienced problems of inequality among our people and black people. Some of the training I had as a missionary sister was to observe, judge, act — you observe, you judge, you act. You, as a citizen, have responsibility to stand up and do your part to make things equal for everyone. I was working with agricultural workers, with Latinos and black people as a missionary sister, and I saw some [of] the discrepancies and discrimination in how they were treated, especially with red lining. I thought that the church needed to stand up for these people.

One of my big confrontations, or rather challenges, with the church was with red lining, when blacks and Mexican Americans were not allowed to buy homes in certain areas of Los Angeles. I started to work for open housing. So did other nuns and priests, and many people were reprimanded.

I eventually left the missionary sisters because of that issue. The cardinal in Los Angeles then, Cardinal McIntyre, really forbade the sisters and priests from getting involved. The cardinal had local ties with developers, so he didn’t want to offend them. Some of us felt that it’s not an issue of not wanting to offend, but an issue of educating the Catholic community, that this is what the church stands for: equality.

That’s when you really saw the first exodus, not only myself, but also many others.

Pope John XXIII called for us to get involved with social issues. The pope called a Vatican Council and said that the church needed to be more involved and, like Christ, go out and work with people instead of just working in the convent.
So from the pope’s standpoint, and really knowing the doctrines of [the] church, we had to speak out and oppose on the local level.

The church used to have more involvement in these types of social issues. If you look at New York when unions were first founded, when the worker was exploited, the church stood up in support of the worker. And as a result of the church’s support, the unions were able to form.

Now you don’t see that kind of activism from the church.

You are right. Some of the very conservative churches have used the name of God and Christ to discriminate, particularly against women. It’s very confusing right now. You see the evangelical churches really coming down very hard on the equality of women and immigration, and supporting unjust things like the war. In those days [in the ’60s], the churches would be up in arms against the war. Today you just don’t have that.

Why is that?

[In] my honest opinion, I think it’s because of wealth and institutionalization of religion. Many times, ministers and priests and cardinals and bishops are more concerned about supporting the buildings and institutions instead of the message of Christ.

When Christ started the church, he lived his example — compassion, love, equality, peace, and justice. The church has become more concerned with sustaining the institution instead of Jesus’ message.

You see that in government as well. There is a general trend toward protecting the institution for the institution’s sake.
My feeling is that we’ve come to the point where people have to act. They have to look at their communities and voice their concern.

I was really delighted with the change in Congress, but there are still so many issues. Oil companies are really raiding the pocketbook[s] of the American people; it’s the height of injustice to Americans and all people. Bush doesn’t do anything about it, the church doesn’t say anything about it, and neither does the government.
I thank God we are in a free country; there is always the opportunity for change. I am 78 and I rely a lot on young people.

You did a lot of work for women in the ’70s alongside Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, forming the National Women’s Political Caucus and advocating for policies like the Equal Rights Amendment, which still hasn’t passed. In the ’70s, did you think that movement would have made more gains than it has?

Yes, because you know we were like on a roll; the Equal Rights Amendment was almost certified. I did a lot of work to bring church support to the Equal Rights Amendment.

You are often credited with changing the religious debate on this issue.

I was disappointed that it didn’t pass.

There were internal struggles within the movement as well. When I was fighting to change welfare so that it promoted education and training to help women go to work, some feminists decried having Latina women out of the house and working. Well, they were already working! Even the women at the Women’s Conference felt that we might be dismantling the safety net of Latina women by helping them work. How would we be dismantling their safety net by giving them the right to work? Not to do so would be condemning them to live in poverty. “Protect the minority women.” What is this?

Here we are, and women still earn 70 cents on every dollar earned by men. Talk about inequality! We still have it right now.

Gloria, Bella, and I thought, if you are going to talk about equality, we have to talk about equality across the board. They were very supportive.

I think we need the Equal Rights Amendment and its clear interpretation of equality for all. We need to really see equal rights from a total perspective of all people.

What I would like to see is young people really looking at equality from a local, state, and national perspective, and using their global eyes to really look at the world. You guys have a big job to do. I really believe in young people.

I sometimes feel that those concerned and active in younger generations are in the minority.

That’s always the case. Revolutions are started in groups of 10 or 12. If you can educate people to the issues and provide information, people will start to come out.

What are you working on now?

We are fighting the oil companies here in Ventura County, California. 
The Houston-based Northern Star natural gas company is trying to bring liquid natural gas into the area. For two years we’ve been fighting against them. All the independent studies commissioned on the topic show that the need for natural gas is flat. It’s questionable whether or not we really need it, and it will do great harm to the coastal environment.

California is very resourceful. We have a lot of innovators, companies creating wind and solar solutions. Investing in liquid natural gas will prevent us from investing in clean energy. The lieutenant governor [of California] has been really fighting with us.

We are also really dealing with the legacy of Enron. We’ve heard the tapes, how Enron manipulated the California energy market, manipulating the need. This seems like such a clear parallel, and we are very conscious of that. 

You’ve been involved in so many different campaigns: workers’ rights, unions, women’s rights, welfare reform, and environmental activism. What draws you to a particular subject or campaign?

Well, I am going to share with you a big secret. In reality, what I think happens to me is that our Lord just places me at the right place at the right time.

I do not enjoy confrontation. I would like to go to the hermitage and get away from all this stuff.

But I am placed in a situation, and I say, in my [conscience], I say: this is wrong. And I start becoming involved with people who are really doing something about it. I come in and support that work.

Recently I’ve been working with the Environmental Defense Center and Susan Jordan. She’s been an environmentalist all her life. She’s come up with some concise documents pinpointing some of the inequalities with the liquid natural gas issue. You have to be really dumb not to see it.

I’ll tell you what got me really ignited: when President Bush and the Congress signed the energy bill. It was more than I could handle. I just saw the exploitation [by] oil and gas companies. You’d have to be very callous and not very alert to see that. That [becoming angry] happens to me, and I guess it should really happen to a lot of people.

It’s a challenge. I would like to have young people take over so I can just rest.

What advice do you have for those young people?

To be strong.

We have a [conscience], and we know what’s right and wrong. We need to listen to our intelligence and come together.
And not to lose hope.

We can’t allow ourselves to get into a situation where we are ruled by the institutions around us.

Anja Marie Tranovich

Ashraf Khader’s group, Combatants for Peace, brings Israeli military veterans and former Palestinian fighters — people who have actively fought against each other — together to advocate peace.

“After brandishing weapons for so many years, and having seen one another only through weapon sights, we have decided to put down our guns and to fight for peace,” reads the group’s mission statement.

Combatants for Peace organizes meetings between former fighters of each side of the conflict, protects threatened communities, and presses the Palestinian and Israeli governments to stop the cycle of violence.                   

Khader discusses the difficulties of renouncing violence in a land plagued by armed conflict, how inciting violence led him to fight for peace, and his group’s hope for a politics without militarization.

Interviewer: Anja Tranovich
Interviewee: Ashraf Khader

You’ve personally fought against Israelis in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. What did you do?
 
Like many Palestinians living in the West Bank, I threw stones and then Molotov cocktails. I also took part in organizing protests and recruiting people to resist the occupation. Once, the Israeli army caught me and forced me to clean a very long road under the threat of their guns.

But I don’t want to talk about what I did in the past, because I don’t believe in violence anymore.

Really, you have to understand that in the first intifada, just raising the Palestinian flag could lead to one year in prison. Despair causes many Palestinians to forget nonviolence and revert to armed conflict, with the belief that this will make their voices heard. Some are filled with hate for the Israelis as a result of a lost family member or friend to violence or prison.

Once this is understood, it is easier to analyze hatred, prejudice, and despair. These sentiments grow out of a lack of understanding that there is a real partner for peace on the ground — one that is not represented by either government.

Part of Combatants for Peace’s mission statement is that “We no longer believe that the conflict can be resolved through violence.” What changed your perspective — from being involved in the violence to thinking the conflict can’t be resolved through violence?

Though members of Combatants for Peace paid a high price for their violent activities, both physically and emotionally, they did not witness any change on the ground. The occupation continues, the societies remain polarized, and we realized that we were a part of this cycle rather than part of the solution. Throughout the world, this may seem perfectly logical, but within the context of Israel and Palestine, it is revolutionary.

 
How did the group begin?

The group began when a group of Israeli soldiers, who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories (refuseniks), and a group of Palestinians, who had served prison sentences in Israel, began speaking about a peaceful solution based on nonviolence and dialogue.

It started in 2004, but remained largely underground until our public launching in March of 2006.

The organization has a membership that fluctuates between 150 and 170 members from each side, Israeli and Palestinian. These members are governed by a 14-member steering committee that is also composed of equal numbers of Israelis and Palestinians who meet in our central office in Al Ram [Israel].

There are plans right now to expand our presence on the ground by creating a number of smaller groups that are geographically distributed in the north [Tulkarm-Tel Aviv], the middle [Ramallah-Jerusalem], and the south [Beersheva-South Mount Hebron]. These smaller, more autonomous groups will meet to decide their actions on a local level before sending coordinators to the steering committee for approval. We envision these groups becoming small, tightly knit, autonomous units, able to understand and react to the particular conditions in their area.

This allows us to expand our presence and visibility, but will also make it much easier for Palestinians especially to attend events in the face of movement restrictions.

Do you work with other groups?
 
Ta’aeosh [coexistence] is one organization we work with, but we are hoping to expand our cooperation as well; our garden project also has many more partners.

In general, Combatants have worked with communities rather than organizations. This weekend, for example, we are assisting Palestinian farmers in Tulkarm and Hebron with the olive harvest, and protecting them from radical settlers who often attack during this time.

How will you protect them from radical settlers who might attack? Do you go armed?

We don’t use violence in any way. We bring Israeli peace activists, media, and international activists with cameras to prevent the settlers and the army from [starting a] conflict.

[Abir Aramin, the 10-year-old daughter of] one of the founders of Combatants for Peace, Bassam Armin, was recently shot by Israeli solders close to her school in Anata. Combatants aligned with other groups and began a project to build a playground in Anata where children can play safely. The killing was a sad testament to the need for groups like Combatants for Peace.

How is fundraising going for the Abir Aramin’s playground project?

We are making progress in our first stage of funding, but are very far off from the second, much larger stage.
 

What do other veterans of the conflict think of Combatants for Peace?

Combatants is a volunteer-based, grassroots organization that depends upon the commitment of our members. This commitment is continually tested by our communities and those who believe that peace is not possible. Members are accused of being naïve, collaborators, or worse, yet we choose to continue anyway. We are able to do so by the overwhelming moral support we receive from the international community that helps to reaffirm our position and assure us that we are not alone.

Is it hard for supporters of either side of the conflict to support or advance a politics without militarization?

It is hard to fight against the perception that there are no partners for peace. Yet our existence is proof that this claim is wrong. Without proving this, there is no reason to believe that peace without militarization is possible. The more our message is spread, the easier our job of convincing people otherwise becomes.

What do you hope will happen in the next five or 10 years in Israel and Palestine?
 
The end of the conflict based upon a just, secure, and mutually agreed upon solution that is in accordance with international laws and norms … and we hope this happens sooner than five to 10 years down the road.

Anja Marie Tranovich

Raphael Cohen-Almagor is a is a world-renowned political scientist (D. Phil., Oxford) who published dozens of books and articles on education, free expression, media ethics, medical ethics, multiculturalism, Israeli democracy and political extremism. An organizer of the international “Gaza First” campaign, a campaign for the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and soldiers from Palestinian territories beginning with the Gaza Strip, he was the founder and director of the Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa. At a peace education conference in Turkey, Cohen-Almagor discussed with ITF contributor Aditi Bhaduri his disenchantment with Israeli politics, the Middle East peace process, and what motivated him to establish the Center for Democratic Studies.

The interviewer: Aditi Bhaduri
The interviewee: Raphael Cohen–Almagor

You founded the Center for Democratic Studies at the University of Haifa. What inspired you to do that?

[T]he idea for the institute came up on November 5, 1995, the day after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. I was one of those who saw the writing on the wall — and I warned against political assasination. I was teaching then at the University of Haifa, at the Faculty of Law and Department of Communication. When Rabin was murdered, this was not a shock to the mind, but a shock to the heart. I started thinking, what could I do to help the decision-making process — as a scholar? Realizing that there is a large gap between Israel as a democracy and the public that does not understand what democracy is all about, I decided to establish a center designed for the study of democracy and its underlying values:liberty, tolerance, equality and justice. These values are clear to students in United States or in England. I ask students what … liberal democracy is, and they will give me a detailed answer in ten minutes. In Israel, however, the discussion may last an hour until a full answer is provided. The center serves as a meeting point for people from all walks of life: Christians, Muslims, Jews — those who are religious and those who are not. It is a platform for discussion; of pluralism, of tolerance, of mutual recognition. For the past four years since the founding of the center in , what I tried to do is promote awareness, in Israel and outside the country, of democratic virtues, to promote justice, pluralism, multiculturalism, freedom, peace. People at the center do this through seminars, conferences, education. My dream is that the Israel Ministry of Education will [embrace] democratic studies … and introduce these studies into the curriculum both at the primary schools as well as at high schools. Presently, there are no studies on democracy in Israel — and there should be.

What are the challenges to Israeli democracy?

Israel, being the only Jewish democracy in the world, suffers from intricate symbiosis: we would like to be Jewish and we would like to be democratic. But when you look at the values that underline these two concepts — Judaism and liberal democracy — they are difficult to be reconciled with each other because the first premise of liberalism is to put the individual at the center of attention:, everything stems from the individual and returns to him or her … you allow the individual maximum rights … to develop to his or her fullest potential so long as [he or she] does not harm others. [C]onsequently, the individual will contribute to the development of society. But in Judaism, the belief is that you owe your freedom to God, and you owe an explanation about your life to God. There is no autonomous freedom. Freedom is given to you to serve God and His aims. Now, the zealots within Judaism (this is just a fraction of Judaism) believe that we are all sailing in the same boat, and if there are secular people like me in that boat, who follow the maxim “live and let live,” we will make holes in the boat, and we all sink down to [the bottom of] the ocean. So, they cannot let me live by that maxim. Therefore, coercion is going to be used to make me toe that line.

Israel is a secular country. The religious people make [up] 20 to 25 percent of the population. Still, Israel is following Jewish law, Jewish values and norms are infiltrating every aspect of one’s life as an individual. In the most private issues of your life, religion interferes even though Israel is a secular state, and this creates a tension between Judaism, on one hand, and liberal democracy, on the other. That's a major problem that we have to address.

The other major problem is our relations with the Arabs — the Palestinians living inside Israel — which constitute about 20 percent of the population, about one million people. They don't believe in the raison d'etre of a Zionist state. They are in Israel because their forefathers were born there, they were born there, and for them Israel is actually Palestine. And this, of course, creates tension and problems.

And then we have Palestinians outside of Israel — some of them Hamas who don't recognize Israel, don't recognize Israel's right to exist, and believe that I should return to Bulgaria (that's where my family came from) or preferably I should drown in the sea. They don't recognize me, [which makes it nearly impossible for us to have a discussion.] … So as long as there is terrorism and as long as there is war between us and Palestinians, then this … creates a major challenge for Israeli democracy.

Israel is a society under stress, where security plays a considerable role in its daily life. In a liberal democracy, you have to invest in the people, in the individual worker, health, education, etc., and that's difficult to do so when security consumes 30 percent of your budget … there's not much left for other purposes.

Given the current international scenario, where religion is playing an increasingly larger role, do you think it will be easy for Israel to sever completely religion from state?

Israel is a secular country. There is a lack of separation of religion from state, but but I don’t think that is because of the rise of religion in world politics. Separation between state and religion is an Israeli decision in Israel’s interest, but you need a courageous leader to take that decision. Right now, because of narrow political interests, and the fact that all governments in Israel were coalition governments, most of them included a religious component, those in power were afraid to take a drastic step and and separate religion from state. This was the only consideration.

I believe that it’s better to separate religion from politics, but unfortunately the religious parties believe otherwise. … Anyway, we live in separate communities — we don’t eat together, we don’t live together, we don’t study together. So [why] does it bother them if I want to have a civil marriage? [B]y making this an issue, … I think it weakens them because all it does is create alienation. People don’t like to be coerced. True, the majority of Israelis don’t care so much about these issues, but a significant part of us does. The state is there to cater for the interest of 100 percent of the population, not just the 70 or 80 percent. There should be more freedom for people to lead their lives the way they want to.

So what do you think the solution is [for] the conflict over Israel and Palestine?

Unfortunately, peace is not something that you can do alone. It’s like dancing the tango alone — you need two to tango. From 1993 onwards, the Rabin government, the Barak government, and the Sharon government were willing to take significant steps to build an independent Palestinian state. What we got in return was terrorism. We did not get any reciprocal recognition of Israel, of our needs or interest[s], and a willingness to create a two-state solution from the Palestinians.

When this is the [situation], there is not much we can do. My hope is that the Palestinians realize that Israel is here to stay, that the two-state solution is the only way out of the impasse. Not one state called Palestine at the expense of Israel, but a two-state solution, meaning deserting what Hamas is upholding now, and instead going through reconciliation steps and accommodation of [each] other [so] we will have a partner to talk to. And then I am sure that the Israeli government will be willing to take the necessary steps to build upon trust between the two nations and build a Palestinian state. But we cannot do it alone, and we cannot subject ourselves to Qassem rockets. Would India allow daily rockets and missiles to fly from Pakistan and hit Kolkata, New Delhi, and other Indian cities daily? No, there will immediately be war.

You began a “Gaza First” campaign. Tell me about how it started and what it is.

In 2000, I began an international campaign for “Gaza First.” I nagged the government, wrote letters to all parties, to the prime minister, and also campaigned outside of Israel in every place I could.

The plan was adopted by Sharon in 2003 and implemented in 2005. I campaigned for Gaza first, meaning this was the first step towards reconciliation between the two sides, and then [we were supposed to give up] the West Bank, when, in return, we got Hamas and the Qassams, we [cannot] proceed further. Israel is a very small country … it’s only 40 kilometers between East and West and all the major cities, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, will be easily covered by Qassams from the West Bank. Therefore, no sane prime minister can do that because this is suicidal. Great opportunity is lost. The Palestinians have one of the most dovish government[s] in the country's history. Minister of Defense Amir Peretz has been working for peace all his life.

What do you think of Israel's recent war with Lebanon? How will that affect politics in Israel?

Again, almost from the beginning I said this was insane. Prime Minister Olmert made a mistake — the government went into war without realizing that it was opening war. I call it the “Hezbollah War.” This unnecessary war was a big blunder and Olmert is going to pay a big price for that. The Israeli public will not forgive him [for] this misconduct. Observing how the events unfolded, the Hezbollah did a nasty thing: they kidnapped two soldiers and killed eight. Now what’s the way to retaliate? First of all I think, take your time and ponder. [That] doesn’t mean you won’t have to do anything. But the retaliation came within 24 hours [with] the bombing of Southern Lebanon and … the capital city of an Arab state, Southern Beirut. Now, if Olmert knew that the Hezbollah [was] going to answer by non-stop rockets on the North of Israel, then he made a tragic mistake. And if he didn't know, then again he made a tragic mistake. If you are going to such a war, then you have to prepare the North for the barrage of rockets that might come in and out on a daily basis.

There is a growing movement in Israel calling for elections and calling for Olmert, Amir Peretz and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz to resign because of this costly mistake. Some 160 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. I believe that this public voice will gain momentum, and that ultimately Olmert will be forced to resign or to call upon elections.
[Chief of Staff Halutz had resigned since the time of the interview. A.B.]

And what is your prognosis?

Well, I am not a prophet, but we may envisage the following scenario: there will be three leading contenders fighting for elections. One is Olmert, head of Kadima, [the political party] founded by Sharon. Next is Bibi Netanyahu of Likud, and third is Labour. Within [the] Labour [party], I presume Peretz is going to face severe challenges. One of the leading contenders is Ami Ayalon, who was the admiral in charge of the navy. He is calculating his deeds in a sensitive and political way, and might be able to challenge Amir Peretz and to take over. So at the end of the day, we may have Ayalon, Olmert, and Netanyahu. At this stage, Bibi Netanyahu is leading in the polls, but the polls are not real elections. Anyway, we do not know yet when elections will take place. According to [the] official timetable, it should be within three-and-a-half years. I can't believe that this government will survive more than a year. It may collapse any day.

Aditi Bhaduri