Pasadena Coalition Repeats Demands for Rep. Adam Schiff to Heed His Constituents

By Pat and Samir Twair

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has been put on notice that his constituents—at least those who seek world peace—will vote him out of office if his voting record continues blindly to support Israel.

Disgruntled with Schiff’s pro-Israel stance, his constituents organized the Pasadena Area Coalition for a Just Palestinian-Israeli Peace and met with him April 22 to present him a petition signed by 83 religious leaders within his 27th district, which comprises Burbank, Pasadena, Altadena and Glendale. When Schiff side-stepped their requests to consider recommending a peacekeeping force in the West Bank, more than 200 people staged a vigil April 28 in Pasadena’s trendy Old Town. Lining both sides of busy Colorado Boulevard, they handed out fliers demanding peacekeepers in the West Bank and an end to the occupation.

On June 14, coalition members gathered for a press conference expressing their concerns over Schiff’s voting record, then marched two blocks to his office to deliver more petitions asking Schiff to support the need for international monitors to protect Palestinians from Israeli violence.

“Israel flaunts U.N. resolutions on settlements and refugees,” noted peace activist Blase Bonpane. “Only one side has tanks, military bulldozers and helicopter gunships.”

Stated Cal Poly Pomona Professor Mahmood Ibrahim: “The Israeli occupation is in itself the ultimate violence. The West Bank has been cut into eight separate zones with a hundred checkpoints. It is an evil message that will be sent by Congress if it rewards Israel with $200 million for invading Palestinian civilian centers.”

A Schiff aide welcomed the 60-plus demonstrators to the congressman’s district office, offering them cookies and soft drinks. Carol Smith of the National Lawyers Guild told the aide that Congressman Schiff is a smart man, and knows that each time he votes for money for Israel, he is complicit in abetting war crimes.

“It is a war crime to use grenade launchers and military gunships to wipe out a civilian population,” she said. “How can Schiff be voting for more military aid for Israel to slaughter an occupied people?”

The aide assured the group that Schiff shared its goal for peace in the Middle East.

“Sharon supports peace, too,” retorted one activist. “It’s peace with justice that matters.”

The Rev. Darrel Meyers asked how it is possible for those who make foreign policy not to travel to the Middle East and see what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people.

A member of the California Teachers Association voiced concern that the Democratic Party is slipping on human rights.

“The Democratic Party is listening more to its corporate sponsors than to its human rights sponsors,” the teachers’ union representative said. “But we are responsible for voting out your Republican predecessor, and we can cause another Republican victory by switching our vote in September to the Green Party.”

Many in the group described themselves as Jews who don’t approve of Schiff’s voting to please the Israeli lobby.

A copy of the Washington Report was presented to the aide, who said he would pass along the coalition’s viewpoints to Representative Schiff.

Nakba Commemorated in East L.A.

“The thing that frightens me is that the last few weeks are not unique—this has been going on for 54 years,” said British photographer Peter Fryer, during a May 17 exhibit at East Los Angeles’ Galleria Coyolaxauhqui of his black and white stills of Palestinians refugees.

The event marked a first for Palestinian and Muslim groups in meeting with Latino activists at the gallery, named for the Aztec Goddess of the Moon. Located on a rising slope, the painted blue stucco building is accented by a large papier maché likeness of the moon deity.

Fryer’s enlarged photos of Palestinian refugees languishing in Lebanese camps set the mood for the event commemorating the 54th anniversary of the Nakba and the Deir Yassin massacre. As Arabic and Mexican dishes were served to the audience, Fryer described the despair and indefatigable humor of the Palestinians living in Lebanese camps. He told of widows wounded during Israeli air strikes who were raising large families, of youths who had no hope of gaining permits to work in Lebanon, and of children with enough hope to continue their studies on the chance they could emigrate elsewhere.

In three weeks, Fryer disclosed, he would be traveling to Palestine to work with refugee children in Save the Children-UK’s Eye-to-Eye program. He had last been in Palestine in 1996, the photographer said, and he feared what he would observe in the camps.

“In pre-intifada II days,” Fryer explained, “the average salary a man could earn was $1 a day. Now there are no jobs, houses have been pulverized and, since the Israelis don’t allow the Palestinians to add rooms to their dwellings, the rooms are divided and just get smaller and smaller as families grow.”

In the refugee camps, Fryer said, he will distribute cameras and film in workshops accommodating 25 refugee children who will then record events and objects in their lives and discuss their emotions since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon attacked civilian centers with the Middle East’s largest military arsenal.

Graduate student Elham Bayour, who was born in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, showed slides documenting that Palestinians enjoyed a cultural and prosperous life prior to the Israeli takeover of their land. Among the slides were ones of Jaffa factories that exported 15 million crates of oranges in 1937—at a time when California exported 7 million. Bayour, whose academic research is on Palestinian women held in Israeli prisons, also showed slides of Palestinian couples in the 1930s exchanging Western-style wedding vows, young women in school graduation photos, and libraries, gardens and orchestras—further documenting that Palestine was no cultural desert prior to the arrival of European Zionists.

Bayour showed pictures of camps which hold Palestinians who are “refugees in their own country,”and photos of decomposing corpses in Jenin, where, she said, up to 10,000 residents are missing. More slides were of Israeli refrigerated container trucks, reported to be transporting Palestinian bodies to the border for burial.

One poignant scene from 1948 showed Israeli tanks positioned in front of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. “Then, the Zionists used British tanks,” Bayour noted. “Today, they have U.S. tanks aiming at the Church.”

ICUJP Meets in Islamic Center

Mother’s Day was celebrated May 12 by the International Committees United for Justice and Peace at the Islamic Center of Southern California, with Rabbi Leonard Beerman and Dr. Hassan Hathout as the key speakers.

Edith del Carmen Penate translated the Spanish remarks of Rosa Ismerio, who said that no mother on this Earth wants violence, and offered an overview of the reverence for motherhood from the ancient Greeks to 1872, when Julia Howe founded the observance of Mother’s Day in the U.S.

Rabbi Beerman quoted Moses Hess, who wrote, “God being incapable of being everywhere created mothers.”

Dr. Hathout, who had just returned from a trip to Cairo, told the audience, “In Egypt I had the opportunity to see people’s anger over what is happening on the West Bank, and to see on TV the Israeli assaults that are not shown in the U.S.

“The Palestinian situation could be solved in one day,” he said.

The retired physician said that he is asked repeatedly if he regards the suicide bombers as martyrs or as criminals. “As a scientist,” he replies, “I believe that people are unable to behave normally when living under abnormal conditions.

“There is a voice of peace in Israel. There is a voice of peace in Arab countries There is a voice of peace in the U.S.

“Unfortunately, the decision is not theirs. The U.S. won’t change from the top down,” he declared, “but from the bottom upward.”

He closed with the observation that the real crisis of the world is a love crisis: “Everyone is fully engaged in loving themselves.”

AFP Raises Funds for Ambulance

American Friends for Palestine and the Southern California American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee saluted Palestinian mothers at a May 11 fund-raiser at the Buena Park Holiday Inn.

“Palestinian mothers of the intifada are suffering in refugee camps and living under a terrible burden,” stated Joe Dibsey. “We can live with Israel if we have equal rights, but the siege of Bethlehem, the city in which I was born, makes it clear that Israel has no tolerance for other religions.”

The only thing Palestinians desire, he said, is to be free from hardships and subjugation in their own homeland.

MEF Supports New Video on Occupation

”Beyond the Mirage: The Face of Occupation,” a video written, filmed and narrated by David Neuneubel, was premiered at the June 9 meeting of the Middle East Fellowship and Southern California Friends of Sabeel.

Neuneubel is a successful stockbroker who has risked his life numerous times to serve as a Christian Peacekeeper Team monitor in Hebron. A moving musical score and expertly edited presentation make this one of the best videos produced on the Palestinian tragedy. For more information on the video, visit <www.AJPME.org>.

The Rev. Darrel Meyers introduced the latest convert to seeing the light about the Palestinian tragedy, Rev. John Hickox, chaplain and director of spiritual care at Northridge University.

Rev. Hickox told the audience that he had never been particularly interested in the Middle East. In late March, however, he heard a radio broadcaster announce that anyone who believed he is a religious person should be in Bethlehem at that moment.

“It was like a message from an angel,” said the former financial planner. “I know Darrel Meyers and was aware of his Friends of Sabeel trip to Jerusalem. I asked him if I could come aboard and he said it was too late.”

Within hours, Hickox had borrowed plane fare, found someone to assume his professional duties at Northridge and packed his bags for a flight to Israel.

“I’ll never be the same,” Hickox averred. “That eight-day trip changed my mind. Now I intend to call on congressmen and get them to accompany me back to the West Bank. Our politicians haven’t heard the truth. I’m convinced that once they see what is going on, they will forget the power of the Jewish Lobby and act on their conscience.”

Hickox recalled talking with Canadian peace monitors who had seen fellow Canadian paramedics killed by Israeli gunfire strafing ambulances. He witnessed a man die of a heart attack at an Israeli checkpoint and tried to express his sympathy to Palestinians for their misery caused by U.S. tax dollars.

The cleric reckons that, at most, AIPAC has 61,000 members, which represents one percent of American Jewry. That tiny minority should not be bossing the U.S., he said, and he promised with conviction that he would take a contingent of politicians to the West Bank in August.

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.