Saturday, July 22, 2023, 11 a.m., at Scranton Army Ammunition Plant (General Dynamics), 156 Cedar Avenue, Scranton, PA.
Scranton and the world need peace, movement away from nuclear apocalypse, and investment in better jobs, education, healthcare, environment, and retirement, not endless war! Join us, Mr. President!
President Biden: Call for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine; end weapons shipments to Ukraine.
Speakers
Ariel Gold is the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She was the national co-director of the antiwar group CODEPINK, where she specialized in campaigns for Palestinian rights. She is a member of Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York where she resides and has been a longtime active member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Martha Hennessy, seventh grandchild of Dorothy Day divides her time between the family farm in Vermont and practicing the works of mercy at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City.
She is 67, a retired occupational therapist, and grandmother of ten. She has been imprisoned protesting war and nuclear power/weapons, the use of drones, and the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and US prisons.
She has traveled to Russia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Korea, and Palestine to understand the effects of United States foreign military policy and its effects in countries around the world.
Martha travels and speaks on the topics of her Catholic faith, family life, work in community, Catholic Social Teaching, war and peace, nuclear abolition, and peacemaking efforts in the tradition of the Catholic Worker movement.
Doctor Gloria Caballero Roca has been an academic, educator, researcher and activist for more than two decades. Cuban born, raised and educated in Havana, her global experience throughout her career took her to explore topics on translation, Latin American, Latinx and Caribbean studies, Women´s and Gender and Gender and Diversity studies. With two Ph.D.’s, two MA´s degrees, her mission in education has been to form sophisticated critical thinkers who can recognize our interdependency and connectedness among ourselves and with Mother Earth. Her publications and international talks focus on the intersectionality of diaspora, anti-imperialism, social justice and transnational experience.
Susan Schnall was an active duty Navy nurse (LT.JG) during the American conflict in Vietnam. In 1969 she was tried and found guilty by general court martial for anti-war activism. Susan Schnall has been an Assistant Adjunct Professor in Healthcare Management at New York University for the past 25 years. Susan is a member of the core of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, President of the New York City chapter Veterans For Peace, President of the National Veterans For Peace Board of Directors, and lifetime member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Susan H. Smith is Director of Operations at the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She assumed this position in December 2018, after involvement in several FOR-USA programs, campaigns, and projects during the past four years. Her first experience with FOR-USA was traveling to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, during the Ferguson Uprising, where she trained in militant nonviolent civil disobedience and was arrested in a women-of-color-led occupation of the St. Louis Police Department headquarters. In 2015, while host of “From Ferguson to Palestine” radio program at Vassar College, she produced a show highlighting FOR-USA’s work in Ferguson, and another on its Centennial celebration.
In 2016, Susan moderated FOR’s “Women Confronting Islamophobia” symposium at Union Theological Seminary; and published the article “Christianity Is Not the Enemy” in Fellowship magazine. More recently in November 2018, she attended the International Fellowship of Reconciliation’s “On the Move” conference on global migration in Catania, Italy, where she spoke on the topic of “Strategies for Hospitality and Action: Sanctuary from a U.S. Perspective.”
In addition to her duties at FOR-USA, Susan serves as Community Liaison for the Muslim Peace Fellowship, a FOR affiliate. She belongs to the Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center, an intentional residential community of Jews, Christians, and Muslims that help operate the New York retreat center, while engaging in peace and social justice work at local, national, and international levels. Her main areas of interest are: confronting the United States’ military-industrial complex; raising awareness that Islamophobia is a lay ideology manufactured by the U.S. empire to justify its war economy; uncovering and exposing neocolonial root causes of the global refugee crisis; refugee resettlement; and the creation of sanctuary spaces.
Susan brings strong leadership, administrative, operational, organizational, human resources, and communications skills to FOR. She has 15 years’ experience working in nonprofit program management with Islamic Relief USA, Volunteers of America – Greater New York, the Dispute Resolution Center of Orange and Putnam Counties, and as the principal of three Islamic schools. Prior to that, she worked for the United Nations Department of Public Information, U.N. Department of Peace-keeping Operations, and as the assistant and speechwriter of the Ambassador of Lebanon to the United Nations.
Susan holds a master’s Diploma in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo and master’s degree in Educational Counseling and Development from Long Island University. She is the author of Biblical Children’s Stories as Told in the Qur’an published by Tahrike Tarsile Quran Press (Elmhurst, NY: 2015).
She is the mother of two daughters, who are her greatest loves and greatest teachers.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Swanson was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. He was also awarded a Beacon of Peace Award by the Eisenhower Chapter of Veterans For Peace in 2011, and the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award by New Jersey Peace Action in 2022.
Swanson is on the advisory boards of: Nobel Peace Prize Watch, Veterans For Peace, Assange Defense, BPUR, Military Families Speak Out, Fields of Peace, and Peace in Ukraine Coalition. He is an Associate of the Transnational Foundation, and a Patron of Platform for Peace and Humanity. He is on the Consultative Council of the SHAPE Project.
Find David Swanson at MSNBC, C-Span, Democracy Now, The Guardian, Counter Punch, Common Dreams, Truthout, Daily Progress, Amazon.com, TomDispatch, The Hook, etc.
Debra Sweet is the Director of World Can’t Wait, initiated in 2005 to “drive out the Bush regime” by repudiating its program, forcing it from office through a mass, independent movement and reversing the direction it had launched. Based in New York City, she leads World Can’t Wait in its continuing efforts to stop the crimes of our government, including the unjust occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture and detention codes, as well as reversing the fascist direction of U.S. society, from the surveillance state to the criminalization of abortion and immigrants. She has worked with abortion providers for twenty-five years, organizing community support and helping them withstand anti-abortion violence. Since the age of 19, when she confronted Richard Nixon during a face-to-face meeting and told him to stop the war in Vietnam, she has been a leader in the opposition to U.S. wars and invasions. Debra says, “Stop thinking like an American, and start thinking about humanity!”
Endorsers
Cluster Bombs
Veterans For Peace and other U.S. anti-war organizations denounce the Biden administration’s decision to send cluster bomb munitions to Ukraine and they will hold a rally on July 22 at 11 am at the Scranton (PA) Army Ammunition Plant to oppose sending cluster bombs, and all weapons, into the Ukraine War, and call for an immediate ceasefire.
The Scranton plant produces 11,000 artillery shells a month but cannot keep up with the demand for killing. That the U.S. would even consider sending cluster bombs, a weapon designed to wound as many people as possible, into the Ukraine War to make up for the lack of artillery shells, is horrifying and also revealing.
It reveals to the world just how little the U.S. cares for Ukrainian people and their futures and the futures of the Russian people. In postwar areas where cluster bombs have been used, they wreak a horrific toll on children who pick up the unexploded duds. Corporations reaping bloody profits from cluster bombs are the only beneficiaries of this tragic policy and this war.
Cluster bombs prove how ready the U.S. is to turn Ukraine into a desperate, barely governable country like Afghanistan or Iraq, where it also used cluster bombs, as one more way to dominate those nations and control their resources.
Cluster bombs expose the lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go, the suffering that it is willing to cause, and the proxies that it is willing to exploit in its ceaseless effort to dominate the planet.
Precedents set by the United States on the use of cluster bombs and the deployment of nuclear weapons to other countries are being used as excuses by Russia to do the same, and the last remaining taboo — that against the use of nuclear weapons — must be upheld for the sake of continuing life in Earth.
On July 22, we will call for:
1) President Joe Biden to announce that the U.S. wants an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and the start of negotiations to end the war.
2) An immediate halt to all U.S. weapons shipments into the Ukraine War and the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons and weaponized drones from Europe.
We urge President Joe Biden to attend the July 22 Scranton rally to discuss his Ukraine war policy.
The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant is operated by General Dynamics, the fourth largest U.S. weapons producer, with revenue of $38.5 billion in 2022.
Contact Us
For more information, contact Jack Gilroy or Nick Mottern at jgilroy1955@gmail.com or nickmottern@gmail.com
