Julia Ward Howe, author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, began Mother's Day for Peace as part of her work on behalf of peace and social justice. She wrote the original Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870 as a way to protest the carnage of the Civil War.
We believe that today is an appropriate time to reclaim the original intent and promise of Mother's Day as it represent women's historical role in movements working for peace and justice. Stephen J Spiro Catholic Peace Fellowship [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, For caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." >From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe our dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace... Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God - In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality, May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace. http://icasualties.org/oif/US_CITY.aspx *** Toronto Sun March 26, 2006 The Final Say Three years after George Bush declared 'mission accomplished,' parts of Iraq lie in ruins, threatened by anarchy and approaching civil war By Eric Margolis U.S. President George Bush again reassured Americans last week they were winning the war in Iraq. Please, Mr. President, no more "mission accomplished," no more victories. Your debacle in Iraq recalls King Phyrrus' famous lament, "One more such victory and we are ruined." The Bush administration invaded Iraq for two key reasons: 1) To seize Iraq's vast oil reserves and turn Iraq into a base to dominate the Mideast; 2) To destroy one of Israel's two main enemies (Iran being the other). Three years later, the first goal remains elusive while the second was achieved. Large parts of Iraq -- once the Arab world's most developed nation -- are in ruins, anarchy, or approaching civil war. Operation Swarmer U.S. forces in Iraq struggle just to defend their bases and vulnerable supply lines. Their fruitless, Vietnam-style search-and-destroy missions, like this week's Operation Swarmer, are a sure sign of strategic failure and senior officers too stupid or arrogant to draw obvious lessons from recent guerilla wars. More than 2,300 American soldiers have died; 16,300 wounded. Some 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died. The U.S. holds 15,000 to 18,000 Iraqi prisoners -- more than did Saddam Hussein. The stalemated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost Washington a staggering $9.8 billion (all figures US) monthly as the U.S. Treasury borrows billions from China and Japan just to keep the government running. That figure excludes hundreds of millions in secret CIA bribes to rent co-operation from tribal chiefs and politicians, or hire mercenaries called "contractors." What was to have been a jolly little war to "liberate" Iraq's oil has cost over $500 billion so far. That's $50 billion more than the Vietnam War's total cost in 2006 dollars. Clearly, the U.S. armed forces are too expensive to send to war lasting longer than a few months. While a debacle for the U.S. and Iraq, the war has greatly benefited Iran and Israel. Iran's influence in Iraq grows daily. The recent remarkable public agreement by Washington to open talks over Iraq with Great Satan Iran shows even the Bush people see the writing on the wall in Babylon. Besides, occupying Iraq has left the U.S. too weak to invade Iran. After getting Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, and funding the ensuing eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. now watches helplessly as Iran slowly ingests large portions of Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq handed power to pro-Iranian Shia religious parties. Shia spiritual leader Ali al Sistani warned followers they would go straight to hell -- and lose their wives -- if they did not vote for Shia religious candidates. Some democracy. Israel has been the second beneficiary of the Iraq war. The long-term strategic goal of Israel's rightists -- shattering unstable Arab states to leave Israel dominant in the region -- has been half attained by Iraq's fragmentation into three parts. Syria is destabilized and faces possible civil war. Any future challenge by Iraq to Israel's Mideast nuclear monopoly has vanished. Meanwhile, Israel has been able to cut defence spending, intensify pressure on the Palestinians, and is quietly extending its influence into the semi-independent, oil-rich Kurdish region of northern Iraq. $10B a month Ironically, the third major beneficiary of Bush's war has been his nemesis, Osama bin Laden. The only way to drive U.S. influence out of the Muslim world, bin Laden has long maintained, is to tie it down in a series of small wars that bleed it financially. The nearly $10-billion-a-month wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are doing just that. Iraq, as even Bush admits, has become an incubator, magnet, and call to arms for anti-American jihadists across the Muslim world. Worse, the United States has lost its honour in this brutal little neo-colonial war. The neoconservatives' ambition to plunder Iraq's oil has become a mirage, and the Bush-Cheney diumverate presidency is quickly sinking into the quick-sands of Iraq. [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Jimmy Carter: Punishing the innocent is a crime International Herald Tribune SUNDAY, MAY 7, 2006 ATLANTA Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life. Overwhelmingly, these are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, shopkeepers, and their employees and families who are just hoping for a better life. Public opinion polls conducted after the January parliamentary election show that 80 percent of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel based on the international road map premises. Although Fatah party members refused to join Hamas in a coalition government, nearly 70 percent of Palestinians continue to support Fatah's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as their president. It is almost a miracle that the Palestinians have been able to orchestrate three elections during the past 10 years, all of which have been honest, fair, strongly contested, without violence and with the results accepted by winners and losers. Among the 62 elections that have been monitored by us at the Carter Center, these are among the best in portraying the will of the people. One clear reason for the surprising Hamas victory for legislative seats was that the voters were in despair about prospects for peace. With American acquiescence, the Israelis had avoided any substantive peace talks for more than five years, regardless of who had been chosen to represent the Palestinian side as interlocutor. The day after his party lost the election, Abbas told me that his own struggling government could not sustain itself financially with their daily lives and economy so severely disrupted, and access from Palestine to Israel and the outside world almost totally restricted. They were already $900 million in debt and had no way to meet the payroll for the following month. The additional restraints imposed on the new government are a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will yield to the economic pressure. With all their faults, Hamas leaders have continued to honor a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months, and their spokesman told me that this "can be extended for two, 10 or even 50 years if the Israelis will reciprocate." Although Hamas leaders have refused to recognize the state of Israel while their territory is being occupied, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for peace talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. He added that if these negotiations result in an agreement that can be accepted by Palestinians, then the Hamas position regarding Israel would be changed. Regardless of these intricate and long-term political interrelationships, it is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians. Although some Arab nations have allocated funds for humanitarian purposes to alleviate human suffering, the U.S. government is threatening the financial existence of any Jordanian or other bank that dares to transfer this assistance into Palestine. There is no way to predict what will happen in Palestine, but it would be a tragedy for the international community to abandon the hope that a peaceful coexistence of two states in the Holy Land is possible. Like Egypt and all other Arab nations before the Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Palestine Liberation Organization before the Oslo peace agreement of 1993, Hamas has so far refused to recognize the sovereign state of Israel as legitimate, with a right to live in peace. This is a matter of great concern to all of us, and the international community needs to probe for an acceptable way out of this quagmire. There is no doubt that Israelis and Palestinians both want a durable two-state solution, but depriving the people of Palestine of their basic human rights just to punish their elected leaders is not a path to peace. (Former President Jimmy Carter is founder of the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization working for peace and health worldwide. ) http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/07/opinion/edcarter.php ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Everything you need is one click away. 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