by Laura Love
In early 2012, a series of Anonymous actions came to my attention via my Twitter account. By that time, I’d begun to actively seek out and follow anyone whose Twitter handle included the words, “Anonymous,” or “Occupy.” Most of the actions were everything from DDOS, (distributed denial of service) to wholesale destruction of the websites of corporate bad guys, as defined by the Anonymous family. I enjoyed reading about the inconvenience and mayhem they caused wealthy criminals. I never disagreed with them about the shadiness of the entities I saw them go after, or thought they unfairly targeted innocent people. I remember breathlessly retrieving tweets with the words TANGO DOWN written in all caps, directing me to open the link to the latest online video, telling me that another evil-doer had been hacked. I thought that employing the phrase Tango Down was a wonderful co-optation of the military term used when a terrorist has been eliminated. I read these words when Anonymous brought down Stratfor, a super secret organization of governmental and private sector villains with deep pockets. It was delicious how they disclosed the names and personal information of all its members, as well as published highly classified information about where their money was going and how it was being used to control the American political process and steal from the rest of the world. Not only had they exposed lots of sensitive information about Stratfor, they also broke into member bank accounts and made a series of small donations to good-guy agencies and favorite causes like the Sierra Club and Doctors Without Borders, totalling a million dollars. My heart beat out of my chest for them, as I read about hacks into CIA, NSA, FBI, and Fed websites. I saw them as modern-day Robin Hoods.
Not only had the explosion of technology allowed me to stay current with Occupy—I was suddenly able to communicate directly with people in embattled and impoverished countries all over the globe in real time. One night, I stumbled onto a tweet by an Occupier who was communicating with a Syrian man, named Mulham al Jundi, who was hiding out in the city of Homs. He had recently been shot twice in the leg by a sniper from the Syrian Army. Mulham, along with his friends and neighbors, were rebelling against a bloodthirsty dictator named Bashar al Assad, whose family had ruled the country with an iron fist and a well-equipped, murderous army, for many decades. It was February 2, 2012, that I found myself sitting on a sofa in Pam’s hospital room. She had just dozed off when I began monitoring Jundi’s live stream.
Mulham had actually been outside the city when Assad began his brutal assault on the Homs rebels and started indiscriminately killing men, women, and children by a number of means, including shelling them with mortars, gassing them with deadly chemicals, and firing upon them with snipers. Hearing of the attack, he had immediately snuck himself back into Homs and joined his countryman in fighting for the right to freedom and self-determination for all Syrians. He and his rebel comrades were mostly unarmed, though some did possess crude, minimal weapons, which they occasionally managed to take out a sniper with. Though it was past midnight in my Wenatchee, Washington hospital room, it was fully daylight in Syria when I began chatting, via Twitter, with Mulham. He looked fatigued and stressed as I began asking him if he was warm and had enough to eat. He replied “no,” in English, to both questions. He said it was cold outside and there was very little food to eat inside, but that he was not concerned about that, nor was he worried about his injuries, which he dismissed as “extra motivation to defeat Assad.” His calm resolve in the face of extraordinarily precarious circumstance astonished me. He was fully aware of the perils he faced, yet used the deaths and injuries to his friends and family to overcome fear. I asked him about his surroundings and he insisted on walking out into the street with his camera to show me his neighborhood, which had been bombed and shelled beyond recognition. Flattened cars covered in dust and concrete stood parked in the street. Doorways to multi-story brick apartment buildings gaped cavernously open, as exposed rebar and iron framing protruded, twisted and deformed, from upper floors. Occasionally a child or two would emerge from such a building to stand, dazed, in the street, among the shattered remains of their neighbors’ homes. Mulham described the constant mortar attacks that had battered his neighborhood to a shambles—where those who had survived, having nowhere else to go, still remained. He said that many of his neighbors on that street had died in recent weeks, and that he too expected to die, but hoped to bring attention to the suffering of the Syrian people before becoming a martyr. The more he shared, the more I came to feel deep empathy and compassion for him and his neighbors, along with a mounting frustration that I could do nothing to help him. He and other Muslims that looked like him were the people my country told me I was supposed to fear and be suspicious of, yet all I could see was a soft-spoken, intelligent, brave, kind man that had placed himself in a horrifying situation, to come to the aid of his countrymen. I stayed with Mulham al Jundi for hours, off and on, as he had to shut down periodically, so that Assad’s forces could not locate him by his signal. By the end of our conversation, I felt compelled to tell him that I loved him and his people, and that I would do everything I could to make Americans aware of their struggle against tyranny and oppression. Before I closed down my computer, I “followed” @MulhamJundi on Twitter and resolved to seek out other Syrians to become friends with. I was profoundly moved by our conversation. More than anything I’ve ever read or seen on television, this intimate, one-on-one interaction with an injured man in a war-torn country showed me that there are few things more precious to human beings than justice and liberty. And the capacity for seemingly ordinary individuals to care for their sisters and brothers, is limitless. People will risk anything to either live in freedom or try to secure it for future generations. He reminded me too, how tenuous the balance between war and peace is on this tiny planet.
At the time of this writing, I am relieved to note that Mulham is still alive, though suffering and subsisting. After he and I talked, I began to search the web for other streamers in Syria. Before long, I was corresponding with a number of them, holed up in the remnants of bombed out buildings, attending to their wounded and dead, or simply sitting in tattered rooms anxiously listening to the explosions coming at regular intervals around them. Some families still had electricity, while others were capturing it from car batteries and inverting it to AC. All were quietly waiting to die. One time I opened a link sent to me by a group of Syrian rebels who’d begun using carrier pigeons to stay in contact with others and relay messages back and forth after an Internet blackout. On another, I logged in with Syrian doctors at makeshift field hospitals who were spattered with blood, frantically trying to save gravely wounded civilians. At one point a doctor began to lament that the hospital itself was under attack by “Assad’s Dogs” and, “how were they supposed to treat people under such conditions.” Then, a man was brought in who everyone in the room recognized as a beloved rebel live streamer. The doctor cried out in grief, along with many other men who began to embrace him and weep over his blood soaked body. The streamer who was filming this then panned around the small room to show the mutilated bodies of men, women, children, and tiny babies, who were laid out on every square inch of available space. Someone looked into the camera and spoke in Arabic as he began raising the sheets on the infants, and I was overcome with sadness as I observed the beautiful faces of the children, some with parts of their heads missing, others showing gaping wounds and missing limbs. At some point the speaker picked up one of the dead babies and cradled her in front of the camera. She looked as if she were sleeping peacefully in her brown velour jumpsuit, until he raised the jacket and, just above her diaper, I saw holes in her skin, and blood stains all over her tiny body. He gently returned her to her spot, as tears streamed down his face and he continued to speak beseechingly. Time after time, I witnessed similar scenes, as I sought to educate myself about Syria. On February 5 I sat at home in front of the fireplace, watching the Super Bowl with my family, as I scrolled through videos being put up every minute, by Syrian Rebels, of their slaughtered families and friends. I
t was freakishly surreal being able to ask, those who spoke English, specific questions about their daily reality, even as they turned their cameras on the carnage to reveal their gory surroundings. At the end of every session, I thanked the streamers for sharing their stories with me, I apologized for my government’s and the world’s inaction, and I told them I loved them. I learned how to say, Allah Allahu Akbar which means, “God is Great.” Even though I don’t believe in God, I wanted to offer something, anything at all, in their language, to acknowledge their grief. Certainly, it was inadequate, but I had heard them say this often as they cried out in agony, lamenting the death of their loved ones. Many, even in their despair, took the time to thank me for my viewership, or my words, which made me feel even closer and more connected to them. The only thing that I was consistently able to do to help was RT, or “retweet”, their messages and encourage others to learn about their history and follow them. I was angered by my government’s and NATO’s failure to do anything substantive to help them. How could one man, Bashar Al Assad, be able to kill and maim so many innocent people, without intervention? Wasn’t there something short of entering into World War III, that could be done by the global community to stop the genocide? From my perspective, no one had even begun to exhaust options for humanitarian aid. People were freezing to death, dying of curable diseases, and starving, while we all did nothing. Radical, right-wing, fundamentalist groups, like Al Qaeda and Al Nusra, were finding fertile ground in places like Homs, Damascus, and Aleppo, to recruit rebels who were now willing to go to any lengths to stop Assad’s forces. On the nightly news, Hillary Clinton spoke of the brutality of the Assad regime and of the necessity to oppose him in some vague way, while NATO was “unable” to render assistance because of resistance from two members—China and Russia. What the hell good was NATO anyway, if they couldn’t get even minimal help to people who were being massacred by the thousands. I sometimes lay awake in bed at night, grinding my teeth as I tried to invent ways to get women and children out safely, until some international coalition could find a way to stop Assad’s army from killing. I wondered if something similar to this was how the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, came to hold such a fierce love for the Afghani people—so much so that he joined them in taking up arms against their enemies, which included the United States, who’d aligned itself with the Northern Alliance to oppose them and exact revenge on Osama Bin Laden for 9/11. I could never see myself taking up arms against anyone—it’s all I can do to put a worm on a hook and kill a fish to eat, but it does seem tragic that such a caring young man could now be serving a twenty-year sentence for having fought with the Afghanistan Taliban army, both before and after American forces were allied with the Northern Alliance to oppose them. Lindh had not known of the September 11 plans when he joined the Taliban, nor had he had any particular affinity for Osama bin Laden, whom he’d heard lecture on one occasion and found to be, “unimpressive.” He understood why Americans were upset with his actions, however, rather than some lofty, complicated, political rationale for his membership in the Taliban, he simply professed his love for the Afghani people, who he described as “kind and generous”. According to Lindh himself, he had gone for long periods of time speaking only Arabic, rather than his native English, which he admitted having little need for. When asked how he had come to find himself in such a predicament, he was quoted as saying, “My heart became attached to them.” Which, the more I think about it, is what I think would happen to most of us if we made the effort to befriend people from other cultures. The “other” gradually becomes “us” as we get to know each other and realize how similar we are. Every day that I spoke with the exhausted, beleaguered Syrians, I felt my heart becoming more and more “attached” to them, regardless of what others said.
After establishing relationships with Syrians, I began to follow and befriend Muslim sisters and brothers from all over the Middle East, as well as in America. I’ve chatted with Egyptian protesters gathered by the thousands in Tahrir Square, demanding an accelerated end to the military rule which they’d been subjected to ever since the uprising the year before, which resulted in the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011. Mubarak had had a stranglehold on Egypt for thirty years, but was summarily ousted from power in what became known as the Arab Spring, a Middle Eastern populist movement that inspired millions worldwide to rise up and begin a revolution. Less than a year later, many of those who launched the American Occupy Movement, cited the Arab Spring as one of their greatest influences. A short period of transition was expected by the Egyptian people, who understood the necessity of allowing the military to restore order and keep the peace, immediately following the President’s ouster, but along the way, many became wary of the military’s increasingly menacing presence, and had sought to quicken the pace of the transition to an elected government. It boggled my mind that things I’d only been vaguely aware of the year before were now uppermost on my mind, as I established personal connections with other revolutionaries around the planet. As my Occupy friendships began to take shape, the lines began to blur between news story and personal tragedy. I’d hear a radio story on Democracy Now, or read something on the web about a bombing here, or an uprising there, and I’d shush everyone in the room and stay glued to the source, until I could determine if anyone I knew had been affected. Even if the stories’ main characters were unknown to me at the time, I knew that many of them were only a click away from being friends. Amazing.
A woman whose Twitter handle is OccPal, sent out daily messages detailing the Israeli army’s frequent land and air strikes on Palestinians living in Gaza. Her name came up when I did a Twitter search for accounts beginning with the word, “Occupy.” She held the viewpoint that the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) had been radicalized by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, to commit atrocities against her community of Muslims, who were living under Israeli domination. She compared Zionism and the misdeeds of the Israeli army to those committed during the Holocaust against Jews. Facilitated by social media, she made a compelling case that her rights as a human being were being routinely violated by Israel, whose soldiers killed, maimed, and harassed her friends and family perpetually, and whose expanding settlements stole land from her people, forcing them to live in subhuman conditions in an Apartheid-like system of segregation and subjugation. Her volumes of firsthand accounts of deprivation, coupled with links to articles about the indignities she and others were forced to endure, provoked an intense curiosity within me, to know much more about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. I’d never before had such a burning desire to acquaint myself with the details of conflicts happening a world away, and probably would not have, had I not been reluctantly introduced to the miracle of social media. It was one thing to read a stuffy New York Times editorial about Palestinians being relegated to stark, impoverished ghettos while Israeli settlements grew and prospered, and yet another to actually talk with someone trying to survive in one of those bleak places. I recalled reading dry, distant descriptions of the place 1.7 million Palestinian called home—sometimes referring to their environment as “the world’s largest open-air prison,” and “a concentration camp.” OccPal actually answered my questions, no matter how naive, and gave me insights to the region’s complexities from a unique perspective, that no one else could have. Her words prompted me to look more closely at my country’s relationship with the country she said oppressed her. I’d known for some time that the United States was one of Israel’s staunchest allies, and that America provided Israel with considerable military support, but I’d never questioned that support or wished to probe any further until I began to follow OccPal.
It has long been a slippery slope in America to question Israel’s policies toward Gazans because of the fear that opposition to Zionism could be viewed as a form of anti-Semitism. The sensitivity of the issue was clear as I tried to form my own opinions on the issues that confronted Israelis and Palestinians daily. Because
Twitter and Facebook had suddenly given me direct access to the players making the news, the personal instantly became the political for me. My exchanges with OccPal and other Muslims living near her inspired me to try to figure out what was really going on over there. So then, I began to ask some of my Jewish friends here in this country what they thought about the whole mess. One of those friends, Penny Rosenwasser, told me of the work she was doing to bring Jewish and Palestinian children and their parents together, to learn to embrace each other’s cultures. She was, in fact, writing a book about this work, Hope Into Practice, Jewish Women Choosing Justice Despite Our Fears. Another influential voice was that of friend Ed Pearl, who helped make history in the sixties during the Civil Rights Movement, as the owner of the Ash Grove Coffeehouse in Hollywood, California. Ed booked and promoted hundreds of groundbreaking, revolutionary artists during those tumultuous times, including The Freedom Singers, Pete Seeger, Miriam Makeba, Joan Baez, and Taj Mahal, among many others, and was known for his political activism, particularly through music. I met Ed first when he booked me to perform in his club. We became fast friends as I came to understand the depth and breadth of his commitment to social justice. Every day, Ed put out a blog-style newsletter, which was loaded with materials he’d culled, that reflected his own political leanings. After I asked him to add me to his list of readers, I saw how keenly focused he was on the situation in Israel. As a vocal opponent of the settlements and second-class treatment of Palestinians, his writing has been pivotal in helping shape my conclusions. Coincidentally, even as I write these words, I am opening a link sent to me by students at Brandeis University, who are disrupting an on-campus seminar featuring Zionist Israeli speakers. The students at the predominantly Jewish institution are standing up, chanting, “Free Palestine,” as audience members look on in amused silence. It astounds me to note that there is almost no area of my life, these days, that has not felt the impact of social media, particularly as a revolutionary tool. It blows me away. For God’s sake, my family had a party line phone connection when I was a child—look it up. Catholic families that I grew up with scrimped and saved for years in order to purchase the latest editions of Encyclopedia Brittanica, so there kids would have access to an infinitesimal amount of the information that is now easily surpassed with the touch of a button. And these mind-blowing volumes of data come to me, most often, by means of a ridiculously small—hardly larger than a deck of playing cards—hand-held plastic device, that I can operate, even while lying in bed at night.