Nonviolent education and action against war and occupation in Iraq and Palestine for justice and universal human rights.

* Introduction * Tour Platform * Speaker and Personnel Bio's * School Programming *

Members of Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org), the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (www.Al-Awda.org), the Middle East Children's Alliance (www.mecaforpeace.org), and affiliates of the International Solidarity Movement (www.palsolidarity.org) take to the road in a colorfully decorated full-size school bus for the Wheels of Justice Tour.  Starting in mid-August 2003, this tour will canvass the western United Sates to challenge and educate North Americans on the occupation of Palestine and Iraq.

Having seen and lived with war, terror and occupation in Iraq and Palestine, participants in the Wheels of Justice offer first-hand experience irrespective of partisan politics and sound bite sloganeering. To build upon the growing domestic opposition to war against Iraq and occupation of Palestine, the Wheels of Justice Tour will cover the United States with education, outreach, training, active non-violent resistance, and community-building.

The Wheels of Justice Tour Platform

We call for adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We oppose all violence against any civilians; every human being has a right to live.

Through education, outreach, nonviolent actions and personal witness, we stand in opposition to the violence and injustice of war, terror and occupation. 

We recognize that to find peace, the root injustices must be sought, seen and directly dealt with. 

We seek and practice nonviolent alternatives to the current violence and advocate solutions to the roots of war in Iraq and Palestine/Israel and our own communities.

Speaker and Personnel BIO'S

Michael Birmingham (on tour sept 18 – oct 15)

Michael Birmingham of Dublin, Ireland, joins the tour after having spent most of the last 16 months in Iraq. He is a co-founder of the Irish Campaign to End the Sanctions on Iraq, a campaign comprised of Iraqi exiles and Irish anti-sanctions activists. He also co-founded the Irish Anti-war Movement, a broad-based organization opposed to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Birmingham also managed a Dublin-based human rights advocacy service.

Prior to the most recent invasion, Birmingham spent six months in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness; he volunteered with the United Nations Development Programme in Baghdad and maintained personal contact with the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq and top UN agency officials in the World Food  Programme, UNICEF, and World Health  Programme.  From ground zero in Iraq, Birmingham coordinated delegations to Iraq--European Parliament (thirty elected members of that parliament from 13 countries) and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, as well as other U.S. and international delegations.  After witnessing the first ten days of "Shock and Awe" and seeing the effects of the attacks on civilian sites, including hospitals, Birmingham was deported by Iraqi intelligence services.

From April 2003 until May 2004, Michael Birmingham traveled throughout Occupied Iraq, meeting with a wide spectrum of Iraqi society in Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Falluja, Nasiriyah, and other locations; he lived in Baghdad's poor eastern suburbs, and inside and around Sadr City. Birmingham worked for housing rights with people facing eviction; he supported Iraqi families whose loved ones disappeared during and after the war and worked with families of civilian by-standers killed by U.S. soldiers.

Birmingham arrived in Falluja shortly after U.S. soldiers opened fire on unarmed parents protesting the military occupation of their children's school, an event which saw the death of 18 civilians. This incident, which occurred in the infancy of the U.S occupation, ignited anger in Falluja and HEAVILY influenced the Iraqi general public’s perception of the U.S. military presence in their country. Birmingham was in Sadr City during some of the large-scale fighting between U.S. soldiers and members of the Mehdi Army, and he was in the United Nations building when it was bombed in August 2003.

What was there to witness? The many ways in which the United States military presence deliberately undermined and endangered humanitarian, human rights and other essential non-military work. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, covert military, mercenary, and espionage operations have made it almost impossible for both local and international non-military workers to operate in a way distinguishable from them. This is the face of occupation.

Michael Birmingham has given interviews to CNN, BBC, ABC, Al Jazeera, and other major U.S. and international news networks; he is a frequent contributor to alternative media covering the Iraq war and occupation, including Democracy Now.  As a result of his extensive experience and immersion in much of Iraq under occupation, Birmingham has strongly criticized the biggest failure of the outside world regarding Iraq: throughout nearly two years of incessant discussion, the outside world has yet to truly to listen to the voices of the oppressed in Iraq.

In his own words: "An inability to dialogue, to work effectively in solidarity, to value truth, to face fear with courage, and to keep focus on serious destruction of human life (when distracted by petty arguments with those near us) characterize some of the serious problems that have inhibited the effectiveness of the outside world's response to the war on the Iraqi people."

Michael Birmingham returns to Iraq November 2004 after a month with the Wheels of Justice.

Mazin Qumsiyeh (on tour sept 18 – oct 8, oct 20 - 23)

Mazin Qumsiyeh (qumsiyeh.org) is Palestinian American and an Associate Professor of Genetics  Yale University School of Medicine. He is author of the widely acclaimed book Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle.  He founder and president of the Holy Land
Conservation Foundation. He is a cofounder of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (see www.al-awda.org), www.AcademicsForJustice.org and www.BoycottIsraeliGoods.org campaigns. He won the Jallow activism award from the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1998. He was co-founder of Triangle Middle East Dialogue and the Carolina Middle East Association. 

Dr. Qumsiyeh's specialty is media activism. He published over 120 letters to the editor and 50 op-ed pieces and interviewed in TV and radio extensively (local, national and international). Appearances in national media included the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, CNBC, AlJazeera, C-Span, and ABC, among others. He is a member of a number of human rights groups (Amnesty, Peace action, Human Rights Watch, ACLU etc.).

In CT, he is Vice President of the Middle East Crisis Committee (TheStruggle.org) and volunteers and participates with several other local groups including We Refuse to be Enemies (Jews, Christians, Muslims, others in dialogue and constructive work). He last visited with his family in the occupied West Bank in October 2003.

Chrissy Kirchhofer (Oct 10 - ?)

While completing a degree in Social Work, Chrissy Kirchhoefer discovered her life work when she moved into the Catholic Worker community in Columbia, Missouri. Through her relationships with people living on the streets mostly veterans, those suffering from mental illness and undocumented workers, she began an informal education on the dynamics of systematic violence and its ravaging affects on individuals lives which compelled her to grassroots organizing. Over the past six years, Chrissy has worked with various national campaigns to close the School of the Americas, lift the sanctions/ stop the war in Iraq, prevent weapons in space and to halt the death penalty and has been placed in jail quite a few times for her efforts.

In May 2002, she traveled to Iraq on a joint delegation with Voices in the Wilderness US/UK and the Veterans for Peace Iraqi Water Project. While in Iraq, the UN passed the "smart sanctions" resolution in an attempt to counter the growing international outrage to the genocidal impact of the sanctions upon Iraq’s population. After her travels in Iraq, she returned to her hometown of St. Louis, also home to the ‘smart bomb’ at Boeing’s international weapons production headquarters. While working as the Coordinator of the Peace Economy Project, an organization committed to raising awareness and direct action around the military industrial complex, Kirchhoefer organized hundreds of people for numerous direct actions at Boeing, preventing the production or delivery of over 200 "smart bombs".

From December to January, Chrissy Kirchhoefer traveled to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to work with the International Solidarity Movement and various organizations working to end the illegal occupation and erection of the Wall. She joined hundreds of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals in an intensified time of nonviolent direct actions against the construction of the wall; at one gathering she witnessed Israeli soldiers attempt to disperse the nonviolent demonstration by throwing stones into the crowd and shooting a former Israeli soldier with live ammunition. Kirchhoefer experienced some of the harshness of life under occupation as she lived under curfew for two weeks in the Balata refugee camp during the Israeli Army’s "Operation Stagnant Water" as well as the harshness of witnessing death. While she has been working specifically around disarmament issues for over 3 years, nothing could have fully prepared her for the 32 days of encountering US made and paid for weapons although Miami during the FTAA was a good training ground.

Chrissy enjoys hiking, biking, and traveling to different communities to learn about their struggles but thrives on conspiring with others to bring about change in the world. 

Tom Sager (on tour oct 3 - 8)

Tom Sager was coordinator of the Veterans for Peace Iraq Water Project from 2001 to March 2003. He has traveled to Iraq five times, four times with the Iraq Water Project. His most recent trip was in June/July 2003 during which he visited five of the six water treatment plants, which Veterans for Peace has rebuilt in Iraq. These six plants serve approximately 100,000 people with clean potable water.

One of the VFP plants in the Basra area has become a major filling station for the water tankers that transport purified water to the neighborhoods in Basra with no direct access to purified water.

Unfortunately, some of the plants, which VFP has rebuilt, have been damaged by bombing, looting, and general deterioration due to problems associated with the sanctions and the invasion. Veterans for Peace intends to continues its work in Iraq by repairing the damage to its water treatment plants caused by bombing, looting and deterioration.

Besides rebuilding water treatment plants, the Iraq Water Project has sought to publicize the devastating effects of sanctions and war on the people of Iraq, and mobilize people in the US to work for peace and justice for the Iraqi people.

Tom has been an advocate for peace and justice since 1959 when he participated in the "ban the bomb" campaign. He retired from his job as associate professor of computer science at University of Missouri-Rolla in 2000 in order to be able to spend more time with family and working for peace and justice. The following year, he became an associate member of Veterans for Peace and began working with the Iraq Water Project. After 9/11/01 he began writing Peace Porridge, an occasional electronic newsletter. The most recent letters are posted at Peace Porridge.

This is Tom Sager's third appearance on the Wheels of Justice Tour.

Hedy Epstein (on tour oct 6 - 16)

Hedy Epstein (née Wachenheimer) of Freiburg, Germany was 8 years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933. She remembers her parents and other adults talking about Hitler, saying that they hoped he would not gain power in Germany, and then, after he did, hoping that he would not remain in office very long.

On May 18, 1939, the holocaust gathering steam, Hedy went to England on a children's transport. Hedy's parents had tried for many years to leave Germany as a family, but were unsuccessful, due to emigration restrictions in various countries around the world. Five hundred children were on this transport, part of the almost 10,000 children that England took in between December 1938 and September 1, 1939, the beginning of World War II. Hedy never saw her family again.

Hedy's parents and other family members were deported on October 22, 1940 to Camp de Gurs, a concentration camp in what was then Vichy France. Due to an aberration of the war, inmates of the camp in Gurs could correspond with the outside world. Each person was allowed to write one page each week. Hedy's parents sent her letters for the next two years, but they were careful not to mention the atrocious living conditions they had to endure. They wanted to protect their daughter. The last communication Hedy ever received from her mother was a postcard dated September 4, 1942. The postcard said, "Traveling to the east ... Sending you a final goodbye."

Hedy spent the rest of World War II in England. She went to school and then went to work in a variety of jobs, including a factory producing war materials.

Once the war was over, Hedy went back to Germany to work for the American government--first with the US Civil Censorship Division, and later at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, which tried the doctors accused of performing medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. Part of her reason for returning to Germany was to find her family, but she was unsuccessful.

Hedy came to the United States in May 1948. Her only living relatives were an uncle and an aunt who had emigrated to the US in early 1938. Once here, she worked in a variety of jobs. Although she did not realize it at the time, many of those jobs were part of her quest to find her parents and her family. Soon, Hedy became active professionally and personally in the causes of civil and human rights and social justice. Some of her causes have included fair housing, abortion rights, and antiwar activities. As a peace delegate, Hedy journeyed to Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Cambodia.

Hedy Epstein brought her peace witness to Palestine winter 2003; in her own words:

“In Bethlehem, I saw a Caterpillar bulldozer ripping up centuries-old olive trees to clear a path for rolled razor wire and antitank trenches dividing the town where Jesus was born.

In Qalqilia, I was dwarfed by Israel's separation wall rising more than 25 feet. In President George W. Bush's phrase, it "snakes in and out of the West Bank." It keeps farmers from their fields and hems in 50,000 residents on all sides.

In Masha, I joined a demonstration against this wall. I saw a red sign warning ominously of "MORTAL DANGER" to any who dare cross this fence. Then I saw Israeli soldiers aiming at unarmed Israeli and international protesters. I saw blood pouring out of Gil Na'amati, a young Israeli whose first public act after completing his military service was to protest against this wall. I saw shrapnel lodged in the leg of Anne Farina, one of my traveling companions from St. Louis. And I thought of Kent State and Jackson State, where National Guardsmen opened fire in 1970 on protesters against the Vietnam War.

Near Der Beilut, I saw the Israeli police turn a water cannon on our nonviolent protest. And I remembered Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 and wondered why a democratic society responds to peaceable assembly by trying literally to drown out the voice of our protest.”

Hedy Epstien is a member of the Speakers Bureau of the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center and the Speakers Bureau of the Missouri Humanities Council. Her writings have been published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Jewish Light, Frost Illustrated of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and others. In addition, Hedy's autobiography was published in May 1999 by Unrast-Verlag, a German company. The book, titled Erinnern ist nicht genug: Autobiographie von Hedy Epstein ("Remembering Is Not Enough: The Autobiography of Hedy Epstein"), is available in German. The book, written by Hedy, covers her entire life and her experiences. Her story is featured in the Academy Award winning documentary, "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport."

Mike Ferner (on tour oct 11 – oct 26)

Fresh off the boat from a 2-month stay in Iraq, Mike Ferner joins the Wheels of Justice Tour in early April. He also spent February 2003 in Baghdad and Basra with the Iraq Peace Team among ordinary Iraqi civilians as a peace witness and to an impending invasion.

Mike Ferner served two terms as an independent member of the Toledo City Council, 1989-93 and ran for mayor as an independent candidate in 1993.

A veteran of the United States Navy, Mike Ferner served in the Navy Hospital Corps 1969-73; afterwards. He became a union organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and communications director for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) AFL-CIO; he co-founded Toledo Coalition for Safe Energy, 1975. Mike Ferner is a member of Veterans for Peace, the Labor Party, and the ACLU.

Nancy Stohlman (oct 16 – 29)

Nancy Stohlman, former coordinator of Colorado Campaign for Mideast Peace, is a Denver writer and co-author/editor of Live From Palestine: International and Palestinian Direct Action against the Israeli Occupation (South End Press), which is a finalist for a Colorado Book Award.

Stohlman was in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement during the Spring 2002 incursion, and her journals from Palestine were circulated internationally. She joins the wheels of justice as witness and key organizer in the Palestine solidarity movement.

Brian Buckley (on tour oct 25 - nov 16)

Brian Buckley is a member of the Little Flower Catholic Worker Farm in Louisa, Virginia. Searching for his next rite of passage six years ago, he was looking towards graduate school programs when he stumbled upon the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, where he ended up spending the summer. Slowly becoming aware that his graduate work was underway as he was living in community with people of different classes, serving beans and rice on Skid Row, and vigiling against an obese military budget; he found his education in the discipleship taught and practiced in East LA. To be a Christian in America was beginning to look a lot more engaging than he previously thought possible. 

After three years in Los Angeles, Buckley moved back to Virginia, where he settled into the rural alternative to the urban scene at Little Flower with its wood stoves, quiet nights, and animals. 

Exploring and practicing different methods of peacemaking has challenged Brian to be more creative.  Buckley and his community felt that traveling to occupied Iraq during fighting between Iraqi and American soldiers was an appropriate response to war – in the tradition of Gandhi and Christian nonviolence, one stands by the marginalized and occupied amidst the violence to challenge it, expose it, and work towards ending it. 

Since returning from Najaf, Iraq and Palestine in mid-May, Brian has been talking to groups about appropriate responses and lifestyles to the violence that is being waged in the name of security, freedom, and the American people.  Please join him and others to seek a way to healing and peace-making through the seeds of compassionate listening and honest discussion.

Lauren Anzaldo (on tour oct 29 – nov 19)

Lauren Anzaldo has traveled twice to Occupied Palestine. She spent two months summer 2003 living and working in Jenin (West Bank). There she taught English as a second language to elementary school students at a summer camp and to employees of Physicians Without Borders. She also volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement of Palestinian and international activists committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to raising worldwide awareness about the conflict (www.palsolidarity.org). After returning to her home town of Pensacola, Florida, Lauren Anzaldo co-founded the Florida Palestine Solidarity Network.

Lauren Anzaldo returned to Palestine in May 2004 as part of a weeklong Florida youth delegation. There she has visited and talked with residents of Qalqilyah, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem and has witnessed the devastating, compound impact of Israeli settlements and the Apartheid Wall in those areas. Lauren has also met with members of the brave Palestinian, Israeli and international nonviolent resistance movement to the Wall in the village of Biddu.

This is Lauren Anzaldo’s second Wheels tour.

Jeff Leys (on tour nov 15 – early dec)

Jeff Leys, 40, traveled to Iraq with the Iraq Peace Team project organized by Voices in the Wilderness. He spent the month of February 2003 in Iraq with ordinary Iraqi civilians, saying, "It seemed to me that we need to have people over there who can experience what the Iraqi people are experiencing and then bring their voices back to the United States." He returned to Iraq in November of 2003 with a delegation from Christian Peacemaker Teams, an effort of the historic peace churches, to witness the aftermath of this war and return to the United States. Having stood with the occupied and the war-torn, Jeff offers nothing less than an honest, realistic perspective on the current occupation and war.

Leys has long been involved in social justice work, dating back to his years in high school when he was active in opposing the renewal of registration for the draft in 1980 and the US war in Central America. His peacemaking efforts are a three-decade vocation in nonviolent witness and direct actions. Active around the ELF campaign in the mid-80's, he and others disarmed ELF (Extra Low Frequency) transmitters, which send low frequency signals to coordinate a nuclear first-strike and missile attacks, in 1985. From '88-'92, when American Indians in northern Wisconsin began to exercise their treaty rights regarding hunting and fishing, Leys and members of the Witness for Nonviolence campaign, maintained a nonviolent presence at the docks. They also interpositioned themselves between American Indians and armed agitators who threatened Native fishermen with violence for exercising their treaty rights.

Until recently, he worked as a union representative for SEIU District 1199 Wisconsin representing health care workers. He left that position to work full time with Voices in the Wilderness and to build opposition to the ongoing war against Iraq and the export/expansion of U.S. global militarism. Jeff Leys joined the Wheels of Justice tour shortly after serving a prison sentence for an action at ELF. He is currently coordinating the “Life Under Occupation” project for Voices in The Wilderness.

School Programming

We find younger students to be very curious about basic things—what Palestinians and Iraqis look like, what they think of Americans, etc. We often illustrate this by bringing in first-hand stories of visits with Iraqi and Palestinian students, artwork, artifacts and poetry from young people in the region. We draw similarities between needs and interests of children here and there, highlighting points of interest that close the distance between our two worlds.

For high school and college students, we frame our presentation thus: eyewitness to war and occupation tapered to the particular class. Typically we give brief testimony that provokes discussion and debate moderated by the professor (but often led by the students), especially to suit the course material (religious studies, political science, history, etc). We hope that our witness be a current events supplement and applicable reality to accompany the course material. Either going to the classroom or having classes visit us in a reserved room is the norm, but we are flexible.

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