Remember These Children Booklet Inspires Activist’s Giant Display

By Elaine Pasquini


Val Schaaf in front of his display based on the Remember These Children booklet (staff photo E. Pasquini).

STANDING in the driveway of his hilltop home in front of a 6-foot-square display featuring photos and text from the Remember These Children booklet, retired civil engineer Val Schaaf explained his interest in activism and why he created the attention-grabbing display. “I’m interested in social justice,” he told the Washington Report, “and the Palestinian situation is the key component in peace in the Middle East.”

Activism is not a new activity for the 84-year-old San Anselmo resident. Schaaf became involved in social activism in 1946, at the end of World War II—and, he added, his wife, Evelyn, has been involved in social activism even longer, since she was a young teenager in 1933.

Schaaf explained how he scanned and enlarged photos and text from Remember These Children, a joint project of the American Educational Trust, Americans for Middle East Understanding, Inc., Black Voices for Peace, and Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel. The booklet, available from AET, was published in March 2002 and updated in 2003. On two 3-foot-by-6-foot panels Schaaf interspersed photos of dead Palestinian children—and one photo of the flag-draped coffins of two Israeli sisters—with charts showing the number of children killed and the amount of financial aid to Israel. A large photo of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on March 16, 2003, looks down from one panel. Poignant quotes from the booklet accompany the images.

In order to display the billboard, which towers well over seven feet, Schaaf constructed a wooden stand, which he made collapsible in order to transport it to different venues.

The altruistic octogenarian first publicly revealed his tour de force—a true labor of love—at the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition’s booth at the Marin County Fair last July. He also displayed the exhibit at the Petaluma Progressive Festival in September.

Erlich calls U.S. View on Afghanistan A “Mixture of Fact and Fiction”


	Reese Erlich (staff photo E. Pasquini).

After promising his San Francisco Commonwealth Club audience his April 20 talk would not be bland, boring, or uncontroversial, veteran journalist, author and scholar Reese Erlich kept his word, delivering a straightforward and energy-charged 30-minute briefing on the current situation in Afghanistan.

In January, Erlich made his second trip to Afghanistan since the Bush administration launched its campaign to oust the Taliban in October 2001.

“The view put forward by the White House and echoed by the mainstream American media is a mixture of fact and fiction,” Erlich charged, “but, like most things out of the Bush administration, it’s mostly fiction.” The journalist disputed Washington’s claims that Afghanistan has been liberated and is becoming a democracy. While acknowledging a repressive regime had been removed, “It was a repressive regime which the Bush administration was perfectly happy to go along with for a period of time when it looked like UNOCAL was going to be building a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan,” Erlich reminded the audience. Adding that, in April 2001, the United States was going to reward the Taliban government financially for its anti-drug efforts, Erlich sconfed, “Shortly before they became Enemy No. 1, they were good enough to be promised $43 million in U.S. aid!”

In order to understand what’s really happening in Afghanistan, Erlich said, it was necessary to travel beyond Kabul—although that is very dangerous. While he was staying in Kandahar, Erlich recalled, bombs exploded every night. “The bombs were aimed at the U.S. military, but frequently missed their target and killed civilians,” he lamented. “The U.S. likes to pretend that the fighting is only near the Pakistani border, but the situation is far from stable.”

In the past few months, Erlich continued, the U.S. has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan from about 9,000 to 13,000. “If the war is going so well, why do we need to send more troops?” the foreign correspondent asked. U.S. forces also have had to quell rebellions by “supposed Karzai allies in certain northern provinces,” he added. “The country is ridden with warlords.”

Although the Taliban eliminated 95 percent of the drug trade, according to the United Nations, 50 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is drugs, primarily heroin and hashish, Erlich noted. “The only agricultural fields you see are planted with opium poppies,” he said, “over acres and acres.”

As a result of his interview of the head of Afghanistan’s equivalent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Erlich stated, “Drugs are the number one industry in the country.” According to Erlich, the official admitted that corruption runs very high up in the Karzai government. “Almost everyone is involved in it,” Erlich told his audience, “including government officials.

“The U.S. is not creating a democracy,” he warned, “it’s creating a warlord-driven country that’s main industry is drugs that will come back to haunt the U.S. one way or another.”

Bake Sales Abound to Bounce Bush


Bake sale participants (l-r) Daphna Michaeli, Ryan Firestone, Judy and Christopher Geyer (staff photo E. Pasquini).

Reminiscent of 1940s and ’50s grassroots fund-raisers for schools and churches, the political action committee MoveOn recently sponsored bake sales across America to raise money the old-fashioned way for its anti-Bush campaign. More than 100 makeshift pastry shops—bearing such names as “Bake Bush Out of the White House,” “Banish Bush by Baking,” “The No-CARB (Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Bush) Diet,” and “Lose-the-Dead-Weight (by Nov. 2) Bake Sale”—were opened for business April 17 throughout the San Francisco Bay Area’s nine counties. Proceeds from the sale of the homemade cookies, brownies and other comfort foods benefited MoveOn PAC, the online advocacy group created in 1998 by Berkeleyites Joan Blade and Wes Boyd to raise interest in politics and promote the power of the people. The husband-and-wife founders oppose the Bush administration’s policies and have produced anti-Bush television ads in hopes of engendering a regime change in Washington in November. (To view the ads visit the Web site <www.moveon.org>).

Berkeley activist Ryan Firestone held his modest “Bake Sale for Regime Change” on the sidewalk in front of the Elephant Pharmacy on Shattuck Avenue. Through the Internet, Firestone told the Washington Report, he received offers of baking assistance from total strangers. Buying cookies and muffins at Firestone’s sidewalk sale, one local couple said they were walking to as many sales as they could within a three-mile radius. More than 20 patisseries were held in Berkeley, some in public spaces and others in residents’ backyards. According to organizers, the more than 1,100 sales held nationwide raised some $750,000—$2,272.50 of which, Firestone boasted, came from his little stand.

Elaine Pasquini is a free-lance photojournalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.