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| {{Anti-war topics}} | {{Anti-war topics}} | ||
| '''CODEPINK: Women for Peace''' is an ] ] grassroots ] and ] movement of women who seek social change through proactive, creative protest and non-violent ]. In addition to its anti-war activism, the group works to oppose the sale of war toys, claiming that such toys are "pro-war propaganda disguised as innocent toys." In keeping with the name of the group, participants at Code Pink events normally wear pink. | '''CODEPINK: Women for Peace''', as defined by its website, is "an ] ] grassroots ] and ] movement of women who seek social change through proactive, creative protest and non-violent ]." In addition to its proclaimed anti-war activism, the group works to oppose the sale of "war toys", claiming that such toys are "pro-war propaganda disguised as innocent toys." In keeping with the name of the group, participants at Code Pink events normally wear pink. | ||
| ⚫ | The name "Code Pink" itself is a play on the ]'s ]'s color coded alert system. Common forms of activism that take place at their rallies are the singing of anti-war songs and putting anti-war stickers on war toys. | ||
| Code Pink was organized on ] ], when they marched through the streets of ] before setting up a four-month vigil in front of the ]. | Code Pink was organized on ] ], when they marched through the streets of ] before setting up a four-month vigil in front of the ]. | ||
| At the center of Code Pink is legendary organizer Medea Benjamin, the 50-year-old mother of two widely credited as a chief organizing force behind the 1999 Seattle riots in which 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage in their effort to shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization. In addition to Code Pink, Benjamin’s San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange was the founding force for United for Peace and Justice coalition, the nexus of the anti-war protests. | |||
| ⚫ | The name "Code Pink" itself is a play on the ]'s ]'s color coded alert system. Common forms of activism that take place at their rallies are the singing of anti-war songs and putting anti-war stickers on war toys. | ||
| The United for Peace coalition, which includes Socialist Action and the Socialist Party USA, is also led by Leslie Cagan, who has a long history of activism with the American Communist Party. If you want to know what anti-war activities United for Peace and its more radical partner, Act Now To Stop War & End Racism ] have planned for the near future or contact information for how you can join in, you can click on the ] website, one of the central grassroots clearing houses for communist organizers in the United States and around the world. | |||
| In the 1990s, Benjamin and other Code Pink members focused their energies on organizing sometimes-violent protests against free trade across the globe, targeting large corporations with high-profile campaigns and lawsuits that cost consumers and companies like ], ] and ] millions of dollars. As with the anti-war protests of the moment, the ] website has played a crucial organizing role in their anti-corporate activities, letting would-be agitators know when and where to show up for demonstrations. | |||
| Meanwhile, other Code Pink organizers were making a name for themselves in domestic and eco-terrorism in the 1990s. Code Pink Co-Founder ] also sits on the board of directors of ] (RAN), a radical anti-capitalist, anti-corporate coalition of environmental groups co-founded by ], who also founded the domestic terrorist organization ] (ELF), which along with the ] (ALF) is ranked the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat by the FBI. The FBI attributes over 600 criminal acts and $43 million in damages to the two groups since 1996. Wherever RAN pops up, you’ll also tend to find the ], which has trained activists for ELF/ALF. Ruckus Society organizer ], also a Code Pink coordinator, has helped train activists in the agitation tactics that have earned the Ruckus Society its reputation. The Ruckus Society, it’s also worth mentioning, is a coalition member of Benjamin’s ]. | |||
| Code Pink has organized protests at ] in ] in order to gain increased veterans' benefits.<ref>, accessed 28 June 2006</ref> | Code Pink has organized protests at ] in ] in order to gain increased veterans' benefits.<ref>, accessed 28 June 2006</ref> | ||
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| Code Pink encourages counter-recruitment in opposition to US military recruitment in schools.<ref>, accessed 03 July 2006</ref> | Code Pink encourages counter-recruitment in opposition to US military recruitment in schools.<ref>, accessed 03 July 2006</ref> | ||
| ==Medea Benjamin Bio== | |||
| * Anti-war activist | |||
| * Founder of Global Exchange, leader of the anti-Iraq war movement | |||
| * Has said that living in Castro's island prison made her feel "like died and went to heaven." | |||
| * Exhorts Americans to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world - from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel." | |||
| * Organizer of Iraq Occupation Watch, an organization dedicated to undermining the US presence in Iraq | |||
| Anti-war activist Medea Benjamin was born in 1952 with the name Susie Benjamin, and was raised as a self-described "nice Jewish girl from Long Island," New York. During her freshman year at Tufts University, she renamed herself after the Greek mythological character Medea. Having completed a year at Tufts, she then dropped out of school and spent some time hitchhiking across Europe and Africa, supporting herself by teaching English, picking grapes, and doing a variety of odd jobs. In Africa, she worked at refugee camps that housed ill and hungry people. She thereafter returned to New York and, after passing undergraduate equivalency tests, earned master's degrees in economics and public health. She then lived for some time in Cuba with her first husband, who was the coach of that country's national basketball team. Because Cuba's Communist social and economic structure satisfied Ms. Benjamin's own political leanings, her move to that island nation initially made her feel "like I died and went to heaven." She was deported, however, after writing an anti-government article in the Communist-run newspaper for which she worked. She moved to San Francisco in 1983 to work for Food First / The Institute for Food and Development Policy. Soon thereafter, she and her husband separated. | |||
| In 1988 Ms. Benjamin founded the activist organization Global Exchange, which devotes its resources and manpower to a variety of leftist causes - most prominently an anti-war agenda. In Benjamin's view, America's declared war on terror is, itself, a form of terrorism. She asserts that President Bush "has responded to the violent attack of 9/11 with the notion of perpetual war . . . a war in Afghanistan that included dropping over 20,000 bombs, many of which missed their targets and led to the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians." Global Exchange has pressed the U.S. government to create a fund that would pay $10,000 apiece to Afghani victims of the war who need medical care, help in rebuilding their homes, and compensation for the loss of a caretaker or breadwinner. | |||
| Late in 2002, Ms. Benjamin led a group of Americans, each of whom had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, to Afghanistan to meet people whose relatives had perished in the U.S. bombing campaign there. "We must insist that governments stop taking innocent lives in the name of seeking justice for the loss of other innocent lives," she said. "Let's be clear," she stated on another occasion. "These people had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or the al-Qaeda network, and they didn't vote to have their country taken over by the Taliban. Some were sleeping in their humble dwellings when the bombs hit. Others were walking in their fields and accidentally stepped on an unexploded bomblet from a cluster bomb. Many of the victims are young children." | |||
| Ms. Benjamin exhorts Americans to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world - from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel." The bombings in Afghanistan, she says, have "made Afghans so upset that some talked about waging a jihad, or holy war, against the United States." "If the Muslim world sees the United States as willing to bomb but not feed people," she adds, "it will deepen the suspicion and mistrust already felt by millions . . . that the United States doesn't care about the lives of the Muslim people." "We are . . . determined," says Benjamin, "to stop the U.S. government from unilaterally dictating to other people - be they Palestinian, Iraqi or Venezuelan - who their leaders should be. This is for the people themselves to decide." In 2003 Ms. Benjamin was one of the signatories to the widely publicized Not in Our Name (NION) anti-war statement, which asserts that the U.S. war on terror poses "grave dangers to the people of the world." "War and repression," adds the NION document, " . . . has been loosed on the world by the Bush Administration . . . a spirit of revenge." | |||
| A harsh critic of many aspects of American life, Ms. Benjamin states, "When most Americans hear of human rights abuses, they likely think of atrocities in some far-off country in a forgotten corner of the globe. . . . abuses against individuals' basic rights also occur regularly here in the United States, and our money-saturated political system hardly deserves the title 'democracy.' " | |||
| Many of the causes that Ms. Benjamin espouses are Communist in nature. For instance, most of the major anti-war demonstrations at which she has spoken were organized by the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization that openly supports Kim Jong Il's dictatorship in North Korea and proudly proclaims its dedication to "fight against capitalism" in America's "racist, sexist society." In years past, she vehemently opposed U.S. military aid to those fighting against Communist forces in Central America. | |||
| Passionately anti-capitalist, Benjamin is widely credited as a chief organizing force behind the 1999 Seattle riots in which 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage in their effort to shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization. | |||
| During the last week of December 2004, Benjamin announced in Amman, Jordan that Global Exchange, Code Pink, and Families for Peace would be donating a combined $600,000 in medical supplies and cash to the terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Fallujah, Iraq. This news was reported by Agence France Press but was picked up by only two small news outlets. In an article dated January 1, 2005, the leftist online publication Peace and Resistance reported that Rep. Henry Waxman (D - California) had written a letter addressed to the American ambassador in Amman, Jordan to help facilitate the transport of this aid through Customs. Fernando Suarez Del Solar - an antiwar activist whose son, a 20-year-old Marine, was killed in Iraq on March 27, 2003 - carried Waxman's letter. He was accompanied on the trip by other family members of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq, as well as relatives of victims who had been killed in the 9/11 attacks. Said Benjamin, "I don't know of any other case in history in which the parents of fallen soldiers collected medicine . . . for the families of the 'other side.' It is a reflection of a growing movement in the United States . . . opposed to the unjust nature of this war. This is the positive face of the American people which we would like to show . . . so that we are not looked at with animosity but with love. Our hearts go out to the people of Fallujah and to all the Iraqi people." | |||
| Benjamin is currently married to Kevin Danaher. | |||
| ==Notable members== | ==Notable members== | ||
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Revision as of 12:35, 5 July 2006
"Code Pink" is sometimes used to refer to a possible child abduction. See Code Adam.CODEPINK: Women for Peace, as defined by its website, is "an anti-war feminist grassroots peace and social justice movement of women who seek social change through proactive, creative protest and non-violent direct action." In addition to its proclaimed anti-war activism, the group works to oppose the sale of "war toys", claiming that such toys are "pro-war propaganda disguised as innocent toys." In keeping with the name of the group, participants at Code Pink events normally wear pink.
The name "Code Pink" itself is a play on the Bush Administration's Department of Homeland Security's color coded alert system. Common forms of activism that take place at their rallies are the singing of anti-war songs and putting anti-war stickers on war toys.
Code Pink was organized on November 17 2002, when they marched through the streets of Washington D.C. before setting up a four-month vigil in front of the White House.
At the center of Code Pink is legendary organizer Medea Benjamin, the 50-year-old mother of two widely credited as a chief organizing force behind the 1999 Seattle riots in which 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage in their effort to shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization. In addition to Code Pink, Benjamin’s San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange was the founding force for United for Peace and Justice coalition, the nexus of the anti-war protests.
The United for Peace coalition, which includes Socialist Action and the Socialist Party USA, is also led by Leslie Cagan, who has a long history of activism with the American Communist Party. If you want to know what anti-war activities United for Peace and its more radical partner, Act Now To Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) have planned for the near future or contact information for how you can join in, you can click on the Communist World Workers Party website, one of the central grassroots clearing houses for communist organizers in the United States and around the world.
In the 1990s, Benjamin and other Code Pink members focused their energies on organizing sometimes-violent protests against free trade across the globe, targeting large corporations with high-profile campaigns and lawsuits that cost consumers and companies like Gap, Nike and Starbucks millions of dollars. As with the anti-war protests of the moment, the Marxist World Worker’s Party website has played a crucial organizing role in their anti-corporate activities, letting would-be agitators know when and where to show up for demonstrations.
Meanwhile, other Code Pink organizers were making a name for themselves in domestic and eco-terrorism in the 1990s. Code Pink Co-Founder Jodie Evans also sits on the board of directors of Rain Forest Action Network (RAN), a radical anti-capitalist, anti-corporate coalition of environmental groups co-founded by Mike Roselle, who also founded the domestic terrorist organization Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which along with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is ranked the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat by the FBI. The FBI attributes over 600 criminal acts and $43 million in damages to the two groups since 1996. Wherever RAN pops up, you’ll also tend to find the Ruckus Society, which has trained activists for ELF/ALF. Ruckus Society organizer Steve Kretzmann, also a Code Pink coordinator, has helped train activists in the agitation tactics that have earned the Ruckus Society its reputation. The Ruckus Society, it’s also worth mentioning, is a coalition member of Benjamin’s United for Peace and Justice.
Code Pink has organized protests at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. in order to gain increased veterans' benefits.
On their offical website, Code Pink has listed allegations of US war-crimes, and claimed thousands of innocent civilians were killed in Fallujah in 2004 due to the actions of the US military.
Code Pink, along with other groups, gave over $600,000 to the residents of Falluhjah in 2004. Medea Benjamin is quoted as saying the supplies were given to the "other side".
Code Pink encourages counter-recruitment in opposition to US military recruitment in schools.
Medea Benjamin Bio
* Anti-war activist * Founder of Global Exchange, leader of the anti-Iraq war movement * Has said that living in Castro's island prison made her feel "like died and went to heaven." * Exhorts Americans to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world - from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel." * Organizer of Iraq Occupation Watch, an organization dedicated to undermining the US presence in Iraq
Anti-war activist Medea Benjamin was born in 1952 with the name Susie Benjamin, and was raised as a self-described "nice Jewish girl from Long Island," New York. During her freshman year at Tufts University, she renamed herself after the Greek mythological character Medea. Having completed a year at Tufts, she then dropped out of school and spent some time hitchhiking across Europe and Africa, supporting herself by teaching English, picking grapes, and doing a variety of odd jobs. In Africa, she worked at refugee camps that housed ill and hungry people. She thereafter returned to New York and, after passing undergraduate equivalency tests, earned master's degrees in economics and public health. She then lived for some time in Cuba with her first husband, who was the coach of that country's national basketball team. Because Cuba's Communist social and economic structure satisfied Ms. Benjamin's own political leanings, her move to that island nation initially made her feel "like I died and went to heaven." She was deported, however, after writing an anti-government article in the Communist-run newspaper for which she worked. She moved to San Francisco in 1983 to work for Food First / The Institute for Food and Development Policy. Soon thereafter, she and her husband separated.
In 1988 Ms. Benjamin founded the activist organization Global Exchange, which devotes its resources and manpower to a variety of leftist causes - most prominently an anti-war agenda. In Benjamin's view, America's declared war on terror is, itself, a form of terrorism. She asserts that President Bush "has responded to the violent attack of 9/11 with the notion of perpetual war . . . a war in Afghanistan that included dropping over 20,000 bombs, many of which missed their targets and led to the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians." Global Exchange has pressed the U.S. government to create a fund that would pay $10,000 apiece to Afghani victims of the war who need medical care, help in rebuilding their homes, and compensation for the loss of a caretaker or breadwinner.
Late in 2002, Ms. Benjamin led a group of Americans, each of whom had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, to Afghanistan to meet people whose relatives had perished in the U.S. bombing campaign there. "We must insist that governments stop taking innocent lives in the name of seeking justice for the loss of other innocent lives," she said. "Let's be clear," she stated on another occasion. "These people had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or the al-Qaeda network, and they didn't vote to have their country taken over by the Taliban. Some were sleeping in their humble dwellings when the bombs hit. Others were walking in their fields and accidentally stepped on an unexploded bomblet from a cluster bomb. Many of the victims are young children."
Ms. Benjamin exhorts Americans to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world - from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel." The bombings in Afghanistan, she says, have "made Afghans so upset that some talked about waging a jihad, or holy war, against the United States." "If the Muslim world sees the United States as willing to bomb but not feed people," she adds, "it will deepen the suspicion and mistrust already felt by millions . . . that the United States doesn't care about the lives of the Muslim people." "We are . . . determined," says Benjamin, "to stop the U.S. government from unilaterally dictating to other people - be they Palestinian, Iraqi or Venezuelan - who their leaders should be. This is for the people themselves to decide." In 2003 Ms. Benjamin was one of the signatories to the widely publicized Not in Our Name (NION) anti-war statement, which asserts that the U.S. war on terror poses "grave dangers to the people of the world." "War and repression," adds the NION document, " . . . has been loosed on the world by the Bush Administration . . . a spirit of revenge."
A harsh critic of many aspects of American life, Ms. Benjamin states, "When most Americans hear of human rights abuses, they likely think of atrocities in some far-off country in a forgotten corner of the globe. . . . abuses against individuals' basic rights also occur regularly here in the United States, and our money-saturated political system hardly deserves the title 'democracy.' "
Many of the causes that Ms. Benjamin espouses are Communist in nature. For instance, most of the major anti-war demonstrations at which she has spoken were organized by the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization that openly supports Kim Jong Il's dictatorship in North Korea and proudly proclaims its dedication to "fight against capitalism" in America's "racist, sexist society." In years past, she vehemently opposed U.S. military aid to those fighting against Communist forces in Central America.
Passionately anti-capitalist, Benjamin is widely credited as a chief organizing force behind the 1999 Seattle riots in which 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage in their effort to shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization.
During the last week of December 2004, Benjamin announced in Amman, Jordan that Global Exchange, Code Pink, and Families for Peace would be donating a combined $600,000 in medical supplies and cash to the terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Fallujah, Iraq. This news was reported by Agence France Press but was picked up by only two small news outlets. In an article dated January 1, 2005, the leftist online publication Peace and Resistance reported that Rep. Henry Waxman (D - California) had written a letter addressed to the American ambassador in Amman, Jordan to help facilitate the transport of this aid through Customs. Fernando Suarez Del Solar - an antiwar activist whose son, a 20-year-old Marine, was killed in Iraq on March 27, 2003 - carried Waxman's letter. He was accompanied on the trip by other family members of soldiers who had been killed in Iraq, as well as relatives of victims who had been killed in the 9/11 attacks. Said Benjamin, "I don't know of any other case in history in which the parents of fallen soldiers collected medicine . . . for the families of the 'other side.' It is a reflection of a growing movement in the United States . . . opposed to the unjust nature of this war. This is the positive face of the American people which we would like to show . . . so that we are not looked at with animosity but with love. Our hearts go out to the people of Fallujah and to all the Iraqi people."
Benjamin is currently married to Kevin Danaher.
Notable members
-
A participant holds up a sign as part of Code Pink's four-month vigil outside the White House
-
Code Pink protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention
References
- Fox News, accessed 28 June 2006
- Code Pink Website, accessed 03 July 2006
- Turkish Press, accessed 02 July 2006
- Code Pink website, accessed 03 July 2006