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Hi Robin - great first post, and great to have you aboard. It's so encouraging to see young adults standing up for important issues.

Thank you, Robin, for this important post. The suffering and inequity on this Planet is so overwhelming, it is inspiring and hopeful when young people do something to help.

I hope this does some good, and I hope it catches on.

Our government should have been banging this drum years ago, but they were afraid of offending...who? The Saudis? I don't get it. There was a rumor that Colin Powell resigned over the Bush administration's refusal to take up this cause. I don't know if it's true, but I'd like to think that it was.

Good for the students at Thacher -- don't let anybody shut you up, but don't be surprised if someone tries.

Welcome to the Post, Robin, and thank you for your activism.In a time when it is all too easy to stereotype young people as plugged in, but tuned out, it is heartening to see your efforts.

While I too commend Thacher students for getting involved politically, this statement from the main post immediately caught my attention:

"Arguably the worst humanitarian crisis today, it is estimated between 400,000-600,000 civilians have been killed since 2003 and over 2.5 million civilians have been uprooted from their homes, while many more depend upon international aid to survive. The United States government labeled the Darfurian crisis a genocide in 2003."

Darfur? Take a look at what else has gone on in the world since 2003:

According to the latest count, 1.22 million Iraqi civilians have been murdered as a result of Bush's war (according to a recent study by British firm ORB):

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78

In early 2006, the British Journal Lancet published a study (pre-"Surge") showing over 650,000 dead Iraqi civilians as a result of Bush's war. Of those, the study showed that at least 185,000 of those civilian deaths were documented as directly at the hands of U.S. or UK forces.

At least 2.7 million Iraqis have fled the country since 2003 and are registered as refugees in host countries. (This is almost certainly an undercount, since it does not include those who do not register refugee status in their host country.) To keep that in perspective, that is approximately one-in-ten Iraqis.

We now know that among policies including torture, indiscriminate home invasions and disappearances, our military has engaged in classic genocidal actions, such as the devastation of Fallujah, or the use of snipers who "bait" Iraqis by placing goods that are apparently abandoned on the street, and then shooting to kill Iraqi civilians who come pick them up.

If Darfur is a genocide, why isn't what Bush is doing in Iraq in our name as well? The consequences make Darfur, as horrible as that is, appear to be relatively mild in comparison.

Recall that Bush's war, based on false pretenses at home, is also without any doubt a war of aggression, condemned by the U.N. Charter and Nuremberg as the supreme international crime, a crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. (While international war crimes cases have been brought against some of the architects (witness Rumsfeld fleeing across the border of France last week to avoid arrest on a criminal complaint brought by human rights activists!), the only prosecutions to date have been of low level personnel. As we all should be aware, the architects of Iraq are now busy planning to do the same thing in Iran.)

In any event, as Americans, young, old, or in between, it strikes me that we have no credibility condemning Darfur while we at the same time are perpetrating the lawless horror in Iraq.

Might be a good subject for a STAND.

Excellent point! All the more reason to support the move to Impeach Bush and Cheney. Today I received about ten e-mails announcing that beginning November 5th, Dennis Kucinich will introduce a bill to impeach Vice President Cheney. Exercising his right of personal privilege, his courageous act will put members of the House on record. Are they going to fulfill their oath of office to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic" ?

And we should still help the people of Darfur.

excellent point, Skeptical. i think it would be AWESOME for anti-genocide groups to start openly and specifically opposing the Iraq War, in order to show it for what it is.

(Robin, please don't misconstrue this as non-support for the Darfur actions. those are massively important too, and we appreciate your energy!)

What about forming a group for past atrocities, like the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people !

I'm not sure Anon 05:37 PM (does 05:37 PM really exist?) is serious about "forming a group for past atrocities, like the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people !"

In fact s/he may be cynical.

But just in case it is serious, may I submit for your consideration:

"The Armenian Genocide Bill and the Turkish Reaction
in Iraq
Anthony H. Cordesman
Tragic as the fate of the Armenians may have been in the aftermath of World War
I, the fact remains that the issue is more than half a century old. Turkish-Armenian
conciliation might serve an important purpose, as might any effort to reconcile
Armenians, Turks, and Azerbaijanis. The dead, however, are not grateful, and
stirring up new sources of ethnic and sectarian tension are the last thing the region
needs.
This is particularly true when the end result is to create problems for the living.
Pushing Turkey to be more hostile to Armenia is scarcely a useful goal, but Iraq
and the Kurds are affected as well – along with vital US interests. As a result, the
net impact of the Armenian genocide bill may well be to create yet another
pointless regional source of anger against the US – this time coming from the
Congress instead of the Administration."

Now this comes from
and for all I know the CSIS may be a crypto-fascist organization.

But waking the Armenian genocide sleeping dog led to another $5 increase in the price of a barrel of oil.

Let's really think through the issues we get involved with, as I hope and trust and assume the Thacher STAND chapter did when they decided to take a stand around the Darfur issue.

the link to the quote got omitted.
it is:
http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071015_genocidebillturkishreaction.pdf

I absolutely agree to the above comments; the problems in Iraq are indispuatbly egreqious, and the crisis is by no means a small one. By labeling the genocide in Darfur "the worst humanitarian crises today" I in no way intended to belittle the enormity of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. Perhaps I should have added "one of the worst humanitarian crisises today." While the violence in Iraq is indeed ghastly, it is also in the Darfurian region. Is our credibility to condemn the genocide in Darfur lessened because we arguably perpetrate similar violence in Iraq? Absolutely. It is further lessened by our response to inhumanities in the past; we need not look past our abominable response (or lack thereof) to the genocide in Rwanda. The opportunity to gain credibility in regards to genocide, however, has presented itself. We have the opporunity to have a hand in the termination of the violence and inhumanity that saturate the lives of Darfurian people. We have the opportunity to substantiate our now empty words "never again." We have alreadly labeled the situation in Darfur a genocide; something we failed to do regarding the Armenian genocide decades ago. We now have the opportunity to have a hand in its termination. The situation in both Iraq and Sudan is abonimable. I would like to hope, however, that we will find the means to bring an end to the violence in both, and not allow the fact that violence exists in both to limit and constrain our response to each.

http://www.indiewire.com/people/2007/10/indiewire_inter_120.html

Please think about getting out to see "Darfur Now" with Don Cheadle when the opportunity arises. It opened in limited theaters last week, and if it receives enough attention, it has the chance of going wide...

I assume that the passionate, intelligent Anonymous comment posted above LTOR's excellent suggestion, is from Thacher author Robin Walter.

Regarding the documentary DarfurNOW, it is an excellent documentary; I saw it at a conference about genocide I attended in Washington D.C. There will be a screening this Friday in Pasadena at the Laemmle's Playhouse at 7 p.m. I highly recommend it and think that it is worth the drive. I, along with 5 other Thacher students, will be manning a table at the screening so we hope to see you there!

a gentle correction: it seems to me that you will be womaning the table, or at least staffing it! ;)

duly noted: we will in fact be womaning said table.

Right on Robin! Great work! Great heart!

I look forward to meeting you. I am interested in seeing if the peace and justice activists in high schools in Ventura County can connect in a functional and meaningful way.

Go Toads! (both my kids went to Thacher)

kychiro@pacbell.net