Israel’s ultimate plan for Gaza
Electronic Intifada - 9 Mar 2008
rr r r rr r rr r rr r rr r rr rrr rIsraeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah”—the Hebrew word for the Holocaust—was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip. More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories. EI contributor Jonathan Cook comments.

UK and US Culture
UKWatch.net - 9 Mar 2008
Can I claim that my age [78], my life’s experience [WWII Nazi occupation, two dictatorships plus a revolutionary civil war], my birthplace [Athens, Greece], my profession [civil engineering], and my strict adherence to rationality and honesty, as an atheist, give me the right to address [mostly] young Britons and young Americans and “lecture” them on the subject presented below? The answer is: No! I do not have the right. I have the duty to address them. Here is the subject: The German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” [“The Mirror”] is one of the most important mainstream magazines of Europe and arguably of the world. “Der Spiegel” is definitely not a radical leftist publication. In its latest issue, that of February 25, 2008, on page 56 we read: “A clean ‘surgical coup’ would have been ‘attractive in many respects’, noted on May 6, 1976 the Planning Staff of the British Foreign Ministry”. Now, what is a “clean surgical blow”? It is a method of killing women and children by using technology developed in institutions of higher learning, also known as “universities” or “institutes of technology”. The greatest experts in the world in this kind of “surgery” are Bush father and son, husband and son, respectively, of Barbara [of New Orleans fame]. This technology involves bombs, rockets, etc. By extension a “surgical coup” is an occupation of a country without the use of bombs, etc, but through torture and intimidation. What was the target of this “surgical coup”? Rome! The cradle of Christianity [or something of the sort]. Note the date: it is 1976! Why would rational people want to do a thing like that? The [rational] people we are talking about are: US President Gerald Ford [plus “Kissy” of Harvard, aka Henry Kissinger], James Callaghan [British Prime Minister], Valery Giscard d’Estaing [President of France], Helmut Schmidt [Chancellor of Germany], et al. The reason for the coup: a “horror picture” [Horrorvorstellung] of the Italian Communist Party winning the elections. [Note: That the Italian Eurocommunists (a term coined by the CIA!) were very “soft” communists, almost social democrats of the German kind, and most importantly note that they were completely independent from the Soviets and therefore they did not constitute a “threat” to the West, that was known to the Americans, the British, and the rest of the “civilized” West.] The “Der Spiegel” article goes on: “Since the end of the Second World War again and again the USA has paid millions to [foreign] politicians and parties. One part of the money landed at Secret Service officers who cooperated with extreme rightist terrorists, whose bomb attacks with dozens of dead were then charged to radical leftists.” Beautiful and Christian world! Thus, declassified documents in the UK, the US, and Germany “show that the British above all [the others] were thinking about a radical solution… a coup d’etat through rightist military in Rome”, by means of the above mentioned civilized “surgery”! Now, addressing the ordinary Britons, especially the young Britons, one could ask why the British insisted in sowing murderous violence (that is what a coup means) in the lives of a peaceful people? The answer is not very difficult. The British elites are the poodle of the American elites. To secure the favor of the “owner” they, the British elite, have to be arse-lickers. The expressions: “The British are the lieutenants of the Americans” or “there is a special relationship” between them, are rather hypocritical. How about the ordinary Britons? On the basis of my personal experience I have concluded that, in very general terms, in any given population the “distribution” of socio-political ideology is approximately as follows: about 30%, for a strange biological [?] reason, are rightists (that is crypto-fascists or even crypto-Nazis, but are called, simply, “conservatives”), about 40% consider themselves “moderate” or even “progressive” (but in reality they are scared people striving to make a living), about 15% are politically indifferent to the point of cynicism, about 10% are leftists (honest people with integrity and dignity), and finally there is the 5% of economic elite with their servant personnel ( the latter are called, also, politicians, military, etc). Therefore, it is a considerable part of the ordinary Britons that allows the British elites to be the “poodle” of the US elites. That part could be the 30% of the “conservatives” reinforced by part of the cynics or it could be the 40% of the “moderates” aided again by the cynics. The nomenclature in Britain is Conservatives vs. Laborites, in the US it is Republicans vs. Democrats, and so on for other countries. Let us go back to the case of Italy. Notice that the date for the discussion about a coup in Italy is May 1976. Only 20 months before that date, in July of 1974, the same coup scenario ended in Greece after a seven-years-long dictatorship instigated by the US elites through the rightist military in Greece. No need to elaborate on the brutality of the 1967-1974 military dictatorship in Greece. However, there is an interesting lesson to be learned: today in the central prison of Athens there are two members of the military dictatorship, Ioannidis [the master torturer and dictator for the last lap of the scenario] and colonel Dertilis [a sheer murderous person]. They have been in prison for 33 years. The only protection their US mentors could offer them was a modicum of luxury in their cells. It would be equally interesting to follow the fate of Musharraf of Pakistan, when the people tortured by his goons demand justice. The “Der Spiegel” article closes with the following paragraph: “Luckily for Italy things turned differently. In the June 1976 election it was surprisingly the DC [Christian Democracy] that won 38.7 percent. The PCI [Italian Communist Party] stayed at the opposition with 34.4 percent.” Does the word “luckily” show how “mainstream” is the position of the German magazine or does it mean that the Italian people avoided “surgery”? Let us hope it is the latter. As for the 34.4 per cent of the 1976 Italian communists, in no way all of them can be considered leftists of the above mentioned 10%. Most were of the “moderate” variety. What would have happened if the Italian communists had won? Not much. The state would have been a copy of the Christian Democrats with a more humane face this time and possibly with some benefits for the working people. However, the climate could have been favorable to plant the seeds for a pareconish kind of society! So, finally, we arrive at the crucial question. Why is it that the British and the American elites, products of Oxford and of Cambridge or of Harvard and of Yale, respectively, do not give a damn about human life and act in an immoral and even in a rather “psychotic” way? Let us try to see who these elites are. They are white, they profess to be Christians, they are very rich, they have the arrogance of the highly “educated” [education supposedly based on the classical Greek ideas], they are deeply racist, they carry the complex of the awareness of being untalented [so, they buy Rembrandts!], they grow in families of cruelty and hypocrisy, they are cowardly [so, they build armies and brutal police forces to dominate the ordinary people and thus feel secure], their women are equally brutal [in some cases even worse, e.g. Thatcher]. No need to go on, there is enough accumulated evil up to this point to last for the next dozens of Vietnams and Iraqs, not to mention “surgical” interventions in Italy, Greece, etc. But, as the [Chomskyan] argument goes: it is the institutions that use the individuals to carry out the brutality. If the present “batch” of elites goes, then there would be another one to replace them, say a “batch” of Soviet communist elites. However, could it be that the institutions are products of the culture of the particular societies, the UK and the US ones, for the case we are talking about? But the culture of a population is the sum of the beliefs and acts of the individuals that constitute that specific population. Therefore, the only way to stop the brutality by the UK and the US elites is for the ordinary people of these countries to start thinking about changing their culture. [Note: Of course I did not mean to “lecture” anybody. All I tried to do is furnish some bits of information about the Italian case which might be unknown to young Britons and to young Americans. Information, that helps one to understand the human pain of the Iraqis, the Afghans, and the Palestinians.]

How Not to Bore the Pants off Kids
UKWatch.net - 9 Mar 2008
Over the last ten years or so, the government has brought a regime into schools that has battened down on teachers to teach reading and writing in a way that bores teachers and bores kids. What?s more, evidence has come out over the last few months that it doesn?t work. The government has reduced the whole exciting, entertaining, uplifting world of books to what they call ?literacy?. Then they created a testing system which narrows this down to a set of questions about the so-called facts of stories and poems which emphasise the idea that the best a child can do with a story is to get its logic and order right. The results of the tests (SATs) are published so a school?s worth is measured against the school?s SATs results. The consequence of this is that schools are teaching to the SATs. When teachers look at stories and poems, they immediately start asking the children SATs-type questions ? spot the adjectives in this poem, what happened next in the story, and so on. Teachers are forced to spend less time reading and enjoying stories and poems and more time reading parts of stories and asking children ?fact? questions. This is a disastrous way to treat books and reading. Books are about ideas and feelings. We read in order to find out what it would feel like to be in this or that situation. We explore other people?s way of thinking and we look and how they and the society changes. Reading small extracts from books, followed closely by ?fact? questions, misses all this. The government has introduced something else that detracts from what books are for ? one hour a day, compulsory synthetic phonics teaching for all children between the ages of four and six. This is to ensure, they say, that every child gets hold of what they call ?the alphabetic principle? ? showing children that letters correspond to the sounds we make with our mouths. The problem with this is that English spelling is not regular. Many combinations of letters produce different sounds and a single sound we might make, can be spelt in several different ways (think of ?ee? in ?sleep?, ?ea? in ?lead? and ?ei? in ?receive?). This means that synthetic phonics will never be enough to teach reading. We need other systems to learn how to read, such as learning whole words (known as ?look and say?) and the only way we get the hang of that is reading from context, that?s to say, reading the words from understanding the meaning of the sentence, the paragraph and the story. The meaning is vital. What follows is that we have to spend a great deal of time, thought and energy in working out how to make the meaning of what children read exciting, interesting and fun. And here we have the key to it all. If we want children to read, we have to work out how to make book-loving schools and book-loving homes. This means rethinking the whole matter of reading and writing. Schools should have the money to employ trained librarians and home-school reading liaison staff to work with parents on finding and reading interesting books. Schools need time, advice and money helping teachers to get in the most exciting and interesting books and exploring the most interesting ways of reading them. We need to dispense with the futile system of asking children questions that teachers already know the answers to. Instead, we need to set up a space where we invite children to ask the people in a story questions that puzzle them and where other children can pretend to be those characters and try to answer the questions. Books can also be seen as starting points for putting on shows, creating art, dance, music, film and powerpoint displays. The work that children write shouldn?t be shut away in scrappy little exercise books but should be published and performed. This way a connection is made in the children?s minds between the world of literature and their own ability to write. The crazy thing is that we knew all this thirty years ago, but successive governments have got away with rubbishing it all. They even created the perfect democratic, professional structure (called Language in the National Curriculum, or LINC) where teachers, researchers and advisers came together to work out and publish the best kinds of classroom practice. It started to become so successful (and threatening to their top-down, dictatorial methods) the government of the day scrapped it. We need to fight for a return to the ways of LINC. This way teachers can research their own practice, share it with others and grow professionally as they work, rather than carry on with the present mind-numbing method of teaching by numbers. And this is how reading and writing about our ideas and feelings can be put back at the heart of education. Just as socialists fight for the right of people everywhere to be without war, poverty, exploitation and injustice, so we must fight for people of all ages to be able to express ourselves through what we read and write.

Brown and Class-less
UKWatch.net - 9 Mar 2008
I was recently invited to give a speech at the annual general meeting of the NUJ Black Members Council, which I duly did on Saturday morning. I generally try and avoid preaching to the converted so I began, on the subject of how ethnic minority journalists can break the glass ceiling, by illustrating how race intersects with class. I started with this: “Over two weeks, BBC 2 films will give voice to the prejudices, alienation, fears and confusion of white working class Britain – a constituency that rarely finds its voice on the BBC, at a time of sweeping social change. ... ‘What we wanted to do was look at these issues in a rounded, non-political way and I think we’ve done that,’ says season commissioner Richard Klein.” That from the BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel. Two points should immediately be noted, I said. Why does the white working class rarely get heard on the BBC, by its own admission? Second, how can you make a series featuring immigration, Muslims, the BNP and Enoch Powell in a non-political way? Anyway, there was an issue here being overlooked by everyone. The experience of minority groups in the UK is sometimes more affected by class and yet we keep viewing issues through the prism of race or religion. This applies to educational achievement as much as it does to media. Race relation “experts” such as Lee Jasper (good riddance) were prime candidates reponsible for using this scattergun approach and branding the entire education system as racist without asking why Indian and Chinese kids consistently outperform white kids of either gender. The same applies to employment. Most ethnic minorities who work in the press are of middle class backgrounds from Oxbridge and may be under-represented simply because most Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and African-Caribbean households are working class. The media industry and politics throw up further complications. Because these industries depend much more on personal relationships and the understanding you’re going to fit into the culture, class differences are exacerbated by race. So if you’re not going to socialise or network with white colleagues, it affects your promotion prospects. Furthermore, media employers sometimes cannot get over the person’s race or religion and over-politicise it. That can mean minority journalists are either condemned to “specialist stories” or not allowed to go near them. That makes it harder for them to break the glass ceiling. The big problem here is that many white commentators apply this class blindness to ethnic minorities (and sometimes women) too. The BBC’s “provocative” White season is a prime example of this silliness. Last week a researcher from Radio 4 called after reading an earlier article when I asked who had failed the white working class. The corporation is simply the latest to fall into this trap. The problem faced by white working classes isn’t that of race but their class, as Chris Bertram and Chris Dillow point out. Does anyone really believe there aren’t Asian working class families who resent Polish workers moving into the area? When the BBC’s Richard Klein told an audience of programme makers, according to Ariel, that the corporation was “ignoring, at its peril, a great swathe of white, working class audience”, then its symptomatic of a wider problem: that media gatekeepers reflect only their own experiences in programming and journalism rather than that of wider Britain. The White season is a tokenistic effort after which the middle class commissioners, pleased that they’ve done their bit for the proles, will go back to their usual habits, as they do with ethnic minorities. Except, there the lives of working class minorities are ignored while shiny happy middle class Asians making music or becoming successful entrepreneurs are lapped up. But even worse is the patronising attitude that underlies it all. Here, I can’t really do better than quote Justin McKeating: “Going by the website, the season reduces working class people to exhibits in a zoo, to reality television show freaks, to anthropological curiosities in National Geographic. Here’s some knobbly-faced salts of the earth in a Bradford working men’s club. Here’s every little-brained, little Englanders’ worst nightmare, a white girl in a hijab.” It’s spot on. Any discussion of the white working class cannot go without a mention of Enoch Powell or the BNP can it? Because middle-class people aren’t racist you see, only white working class males can be remember. To ensure the White season gets complete overkill across the corporation Newsnight invites Nick Griffin on to debate the series. From there it can only go downhill. Kirsty Wark pointed out that the BNP doesn’t get much electoral traction and that their own polls illustrated many working class people didn’t cite immigration as a top concern (so why invite the BNP leader then?), while drugs and drinking culture were. Griffin still managed to blame that on Pakistanis and Islam, to which Wark limply replied: “I think there is a number of people who would dispute that.” I can only shake my head in despair at this travesty of journalism. (Though, she would be competing quite strongly with Andrew Anthony of I’m-not-sure-what-liberal-values-are fame, since he was recently found complaining that the series gave Muslims an easy ride.) I tried to sum this all up for the Radio 4 researcher and my audience at the NUJ. Ethnic minorities in Britain are basically treated similarly to white working classes: as problematic and stereotyped guinea pigs who are sometimes seen through tokenistic efforts but usually ignored until an issue comes up. Then the middle-class media land likes to get all “provocative”. What the industry needs is to re-examine how they employ people and how that affects output, not just the odd season of programming. And that minorities are sometimes affected by class more than race. The researcher never called back.

Baghdad to Block Oil Contracts Signed by Kurds
AlterNet: War on Iraq - 9 Mar 2008
Central government brands Kurdish deals illegal.

Pick up your gun and shut up
UKWatch.net - 9 Mar 2008
I?ve been resisting the urge to write anything about the current flap concerning Armed Forces members being ?abused? in Peterborough. The story appears to be a thin concoction based on a single incident some 15 months ago. Nor, as it happens, do I see much point in hurling verbal abuse at squaddies, anyway. Unfortunately, the sheer inanity and reflexive nationalist windbaggery that the story has called forth (exemplified by the pre-fascist racist bear pit that is the BBC?s Have Your Say) is just too maddening. I shall try to be brief. Argument number one from the blusterers is that the troops deserve our support regardless of whether we agree with the war(s). Our anger, they say, would be better directed at the Government who sent them. This position is similar to that which the Liberal Democrats adopted during the invasion of Iraq -their ?opposition? lasted only as long as it hadn?t happened. The moment it did they fell meekly into line and supported ?our boys?. I have little idea what the exhortation to support our troops really means, particularly when it is said that we can support them without supporting the war. If this is so then clearly it cannot mean wishing them success. Rather, it must mean wishing that they don?t get hurt. Well, fair enough, I don?t want to see British troops get hurt. But then I don?t want any troops to get hurt. I do recognise that it’s inevitable, however, so if combatants on one side or another have to get hurt, as complicated as matters may be, I?d rather it was the aggressors. The logic of this is clear. If I see a man attacked in the street, I do not want to see either him or his assailant hurt unnecessarily but, since I recognise both the victim?s right to self defence and the attacker?s aggression, I?d rather see the latter hurt than the former. The same is true for our troops in Iraq. I don?t want to see any of them killed but if they continue to aggress against the Iraqis, then I?d rather British troops were hurt. Anything else is simple racism. Yet those who call on us to support our boys, while saying that we don?t have to support the war, were they to apply their principle evenly, would be calling on us to support the mugger even if we don?t agree with mugging. ?Just doing my job? is no defence if your job stinks. As a side point, it?s also worth stating something else that really should be obvious: there is nothing intrinsically honourable about serving in the Armed Forces. The Armed Forces are an organisation maintained to pursue certain goals, frequently through violence. How honourable it is to be a soldier depends upon how honourable the goal is and the methods one uses ? if you?re defending a people against aggression with minimum force, be proud. If you do it with excessive force, be less proud. But if you?re inflicting aggression against a defenceless people, hang your head. I might feel proud of getting involved in a pub fight if the cause of my violence was to defend a man from a racist attack but I would feel ashamed if I was involved in the same fight in order to commit such an attack. Nor is being a soldier honourable becaue they are often in genuine danger and carry out their orders knowing that there is a serious risk they might be killed. Otherwise, being a terrorist would be honourable for the same reason and suicide bombers would be confered even greater respect. There is nothing intrinically honourable or dishonourable, respectable or ignoble, about placing oneself at risk. Again, the cause in which one does it is key. Nor is bravery an issue: I?m not brave enough to be an armed robber, doesn?t mean I can?t condemn them. Nor do I accept the defence that soldiers are only obeying orders and have no choice. Of course they have a choice, they can refuse to obey orders, which I believe they should. Yes, consequences flow from that choice but I’d rather go to the stockade than kill innocent people. I’d also hope that I’d be brave enough still to take that stance if I faced a firing squad instead. To argue in the 21st century that ?theirs is not to reason why? is actually an insult to them -it suggests that either they are incapable of moral judgements or that they should ignore their own consciences. I believe the first is false and the second indefensible, not least because those who take this line are unlikely to apply it universally. Would those who believe that our troops should follow orders without question have condemned Iraqi troops who defied Saddam? Or German troops who refused to take orders from the 3rd Reich? Of course not. Certainly, it is true that many of our forces, from the poorer and less educated parts of society, may have joined the army because they needed a job and are very likely heavily indoctrinated once they?re in. But this can only be a mitigation. If they are fully aware of what they are doing, disagree with it, yet do it anyway, they are cowards. If they are propagandised then they are to be pitied in the same way that some who are convicted of a criminal offence are judged to be less than competent and so not entirely responsible for their actions. Uncritical devotion to authority is not honourable, it’s pathological. Then there is the argument that we should support our troops out of gratitude, for defending us now or for having defended us in the past. Both arguments are misguided. It is no more logical to support the army uncritically because of good it does in some areas than it would be to support any other organisation for similar reasons. I?m grateful for nurses: doesn?t mean I have to support them when they start offing pensioners. The argument that we should show respect because of the British Army?s defence of Britain during WWII is similarly vacuous. What it actually amounts to is capitulating to a group of people today because a group of people under the same name 60 years ago did us a very big favour. In fact, it is entirely the same principle that a few people still use for disliking Germans today -because of what ?they? did 60 years ago. In fact, with a few exceptions, Germans today did nothing 60 years ago – it was another bunch of people who happened to live on the same piece of land. Nor is true, in any case, that the army is defending us now. In fact, it is much more plausible to make the case that they are actively endangering us. Several studies have shown that, by ?riding pillion? on US policy, the British Government and its Armed Forces are actually putting all of us at far greater risk. Having been reduced to a mercenary force for US strategic interests, it should hardly be surprising that the actions of the British Army have made us a target for terrorists. In any case, it?s a pretty repugnant argument that our gratitude to troops for services rendered to us excuses atrocities committed against others. It?s a selfish assertion that our welfare outweighs that of someone else. I might be grateful to my next door neighbour for the loan of his lawnmower but I don?t have to defend him when he?s found guilty of beating his wife. Another argument in the windbags? arsenal is that one shouldn?t criticise the troops because we don?t know what it?s like on the front line. Again, it’s a specious argument. Otherwise, it would be wrong for me to criticise the ?enemy? troops as well. I certainly don?t recall criticism of Iraqi troops being off the table during the Gulf War because we didn?t know what everyday life in the Republican Guard was like. The argument makes about as much sense as saying that we shouldn’t criticise a murderer because we don?t know the circumstances in which he did it. If one disagrees with the objective then the circumstances of its pursuance are simply not relevant. Our troops may fight bravely sometimes (when they’re not slaughtering people from miles away at sea or up in the air) and, amongst the imperialist carnage, there are doubtless genuine acts of bravery and heroism. Nor do I believe that every squaddie out there goes to the Middle East with the intention of doing ill. In the end, though, this does not matter. What matters is that they are thinking, feeling human beings who are responsible for their actions. If they agree with the war(s), they are culpable, if they oppose them yet fight anyway, they’re cowardly. If they ‘re conditioned, they are pitiable. True bravery is not to fight against people who are not your enemy -it is to make a stand for what you believe is right, even knowing that you may suffer greatly for doing so. Sometimes that can mean picking up a gun. Too often, it means never picking it up to begin with.

Stop the biofuels bandwagon
UKWatch.net - 9 Mar 2008
The tide of public and expert opinion has been turning inexorably against biofuels in recent months. First news began to leak out about hungry Mexicans protesting about rising corn prices, as more and more of the global harvest was siphoned off for ethanol. Then studies by scientists confirmed that all current biofuels are worse ? some by an order of magnitude ? in greenhouse emissions terms than conventional mineral petrol and diesel. Now the government?s chief scientist has come out strongly against biofuels, again because of the long-term threat they pose to our food supply. There?s only one problem: the UK and Europe still have targets to massively ramp up biofuel use. These targets were set prematurely, when governments enthusiastically jumped at the chance to encourage the use of so-called renewable fuels which offered the promise of allowing people to keep driving while not destroying the climate. Unfortunately, the celebrations were premature. We now know that biofuels release far more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels because of the emissions that are caused through deforestation and agriculture in their production. We know also, as Professor Beddington emphasised in this week?s lecture, that there simply isn?t enough land space to feed a growing world population if valuable carbohydrates from staple food crops are burned in cars. The oft-repeated statistic that it takes a year?s worth of food for one person to fill the petrol tank of the average 44 is reason enough to abandon this failed enterprise. Now is the time to act, before the biofuels mistakes of the past get compounded by the EU?s rush to prematurely set targets for their increased use. The case is very simple: meeting the EU?s targets on biofuels use ? of 5.75% by 2010 ? will dramatically worsen both carbon emissions and the food supply crisis. The targets must be abandoned immediately. Gordon Brown should listen carefully to Professor Beddington?s advice, and act on it. The government must quickly abandon our national targets for biofuels use, and urge its EU partners to remove the target across the entirety of Europe. Much damage has already been done to the rainforests of Indonesia as a result of rising demand for palm oil as a feedstock for biodiesel. We know that there is no such thing as ?sustainable? palm oil, because any rise in demand will lead to further encroachment into these unique forests. Europe should offer Indonesia financial assistance to protect its remaining areas of tropical forest, instead of adding to the pressure for their destruction through biofuels demand. Estimates vary, but a few billion euros would go a long way to preserving what is not only the last surviving habitat of the orang-utan but also a vital store of standing carbon. In the longer-term, European politicians need to face up to the fact that the future of road transport is far more likely to be electric than liquid fuelled. Already Israel is planning the installation of a network which will allow electric cars ? charged with renewable energy from solar power ? to travel the whole country. No one is arguing that research on second-generation biofuels, which may be able to produce fuel more efficiently without harming food supplies, should be stopped. But more research is needed to study their potential ecological impacts before governments again get too enthusiastic. The lesson from the biofuels debacle is clear: look before you leap.

Teenage Peer Counselors Attending Annual Meeting of NY Family Planning Advocates
Democracy Now - 9 Mar 2008
We speak with two high school students who have traveled from Buffalo to attend the annual meeting of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. They are both teenage peer counselors. Samantha Vuich is a senior at McKinley High School in Buffalo and Shabar Rouse is a junior at City Honors High School in Buffalo.

Reproductive Rights, the Role of Religion and the History of Abortion Activism: A Roundtable Discussion
Democracy Now - 9 Mar 2008
We host a roundtable discussion on reproductive rights with Margaret Roberts co-president of Planned Parenthood Mowawk Hudson; Rabbi Dennis Ross, the director of Concerned Clergy for Choice; Rev. Donna Schaper, senior Minister of the Judson Memorial Church and Rev. Tom Davis, author of the book “Sacred Work, Planned Parenthood and Its Clergy Alliances.”