By Orly Benaroch Light
WILPF San Diego
The September 11 attacks are remembered as a double tragedy. The attacks on that day killed almost 3,000 people, and the wars that followed killed and injured hundreds of thousands more. Our thoughts and prayers for the victims, survivors, and families.
After 20 years of war, the Taliban are back. Questions are being asked about how the group will govern Afghanistan, and what their rule means for women, human rights, and political freedoms.
Ex-official Matthew Hoh states that the American media provides false information about what's been happening in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. The media has said things about the war, about how Afghanistan prior to the withdrawal was in a period of relative stability, and how there had been progress. These are complete lies and fabrications. Please watch our fact checking about 9/11, war in Afghanistan, media manipulation, and why Afghanistan is still the worst place to be a woman.
Matthew Hoh is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a member of the Eisenhower Media Initiative. He is a 100 percent disabled Marine combat veteran, and, in 2009, he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the Afghan war by the Obama administration.
Orly Benaroch Light is an Entrepreneur, Women's Achievement & Empowerment, Human Rights Defender, Speaker, and Mom.
Asset mapping refers to the process of creating a visual inventory of the skills, talents, and resources that exist within a branch. It is not just another list of resources; It is a strategy to identify assets that are available from within the branch, more importantly it’s a process for connecting and engaging the branch and to unlock the talents of people to help solve problems and build a better and stronger branch.
There were 28 webinars: from “HOW TO’S – Seeking Solutions” on weekday evenings, grounded in building local pathways to strengthening legislative advocacy, membership, fundraising, building branches, calling out the military recruitment of youth, preserving branch history, caring for the homeless and newly housed and children’s peace camps, to presentations as far away as Ghana and the Americas - Costa Rica and Cuba; Europe – Norway; Middle East -Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel seeking peaceful solutions.
Branches’ and Issue Committees’ input not covered above: After Theoharis’s opening, the Poor People’s Campaign women presented the way to collectively “lift up” those voices mired in poverty. The Philadelphia Branch focused on “Breaking Out of White Supremacy.” The San Diego branch gave impetus to “Turning Down Post-Trump Escalation.” WILPF Des Moines Branch is working with Daoud Nassar, Palestinian farmer (Tent of Nations farm), to write a children’s book about this annual summer children’s camp. The Sacramento Branch interviewed Millee Livingston and Natalie Pahley Zapata on how to grow a peace camp for youth.
Pat Albright is a low-income single mother with a disability and is a former welfare recipient. She is part of the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network organizing for our work as mothers and caregivers to be valued and paid for. She is a member of the New York State Coordinating Committee of the Poor people’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
Selma James launched the unfinished debate on “women’s work” in a 1971 radio broadcast. Today, at 92, she continues to press the case for caregiver wages as an essential component of a social order for survival. Her latest book—Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet-- deftly and deeply analyses the impediments to and the promise of a system we can and must create. Selma was the founder of the international Wages for Housework campaign in 1971 and continues as the international coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike. Her book is widely available, but she asks that we support independent publishing by ordering from 
Marian Kramer is a civil rights, poverty, and labor activist based in Detroit, Michigan. She got involved with the Civil Rights Movement as a child, attending community meetings and rallies with family members. She emerged as a leader in the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) in the 1960s and continues her work today as cofounder, in 1987, and current chair of its successor organization, the National Welfare Rights Union (NWRU). Since the 1960s, the welfare rights movement has organized for the right to an adequate caregiver wage, whether the work be done in or outside the home. Marian is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Alston/Bannerman Fellowship for esteemed, long-time community activists of color.
Margaret Prescod is a decades long community-based women’s rights, anti-poverty and anti-racist campaigner at local, national and international levels. She is the host of “Sojourner Truth” a nationally syndicated drive time public affairs program on Pacifica Radio. She worked with welfare rights leaders in the 1977 Congressionally-mandated conference on women to win a resolution that called for welfare to be called a wage. Margaret has expanded and continued that work through the decades a co-founder of Black Women for Wages for Housework, as a founding member of Women of Color/Global Women’s Strike and as founder of the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network and the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders.
Moderator Mary Bricker-Jenkins is a member of the board of the National Welfare Rights Union and a past Program Chair on the WILPF-US board.
The Corvallis, Oregon WILPF branch paired up with Veterans For Peace, Chapter 132, Linus Pauling chapter to hold our annual commemoration which featured live traditional Japanese koto music, the reading of a letter written by June Ikako Terasaka Moore, a 93-yo Hibakusha woman who lives in Corvallis, and a group recitation of a community affirmation denouncing war and nuclear weapons. Following the program, participants had a candlelight procession to a bridge from which we watched a lantern-lit flotilla of kayaks and canoes come up the Willamette River and pass under us. 
WILPF East Bay (California) co-sponsored a gathering outside the main gate of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in Livermore CA on both 6th & 9th August, the associated photo shows one of the hibakusha, Nagasaki A-bomb survivor Nobu Hanaoka who spoke. Marylia Kelley of TriValley Cares reported: “Among other things, the Lab tried to drown out our opening with a lawnmower! But we brought truth and light and would not be “turned around” by garden equipment. “ The in-person demo was followed by a virtual, streamed on the web, event featuring nuclear analyst and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Nell Myhand, Tsukuru Fors, John Burroughs, Marylia Kelley, and Marshallese climate activists, all dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Musicians Betsy Rose, Benjamin Mertz, and Francis Wong provided the music.
The Peninsula/Palo Alto, CA WILPF members, joined by some community peace activists, stood in vigil commemorating the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, at the busy intersection of El Camino and Embarcadero in Palo Alto from noon to 2 pm on Friday August 6. Our signs and banners urged the U.S. and other nuclear powers to sign the TPNW and transfer funds from the military to human needs. We displayed some of the 1000 remaining paper cranes from our July/August 2020 installation of 2080 paper peace cranes outside a local art gallery. We put garlands of peace cranes on light poles and handed others out to pedestrians with a flyer about WILPF. WE had passers-by sign a petition to the US Senate about the TPNW. Watch this video to learn how 2080 cranes were made and displayed by local residents: 
Photo (left): Deetje Boler and Anne Politeo leafleting in San Francisco’s Japan Town on 6 August. Photo by Betty Traynor, used with her permission.
Ann Arbor branch member, Odile Hugonot Haber was visiting Dijon, France in August and she joined a fast for nuclear disarmament from 6th to 9th August.
The WILPF Burlington Branch, Vermont International Film Festival, and Burlington City Arts sponsored a Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorative event on Thursday, August 5th at the City Hall Park between College St. and Main St. in Burlington, VT. The event had activities for both youth and adults, including painting for peace, origami crane folding, sidewalk chalk drawing, a penny spending survey, the telling of the Sadako story, and information & resources table. That evening Dr. John Reuwer led a discussion on the risks of nuclear weapons and the possibilities for eliminating them. Then they showed the classic film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
#PeaceWave_2021_Maine was held on Friday Aug 6 on the Brunswick Green in Maine to Commemorate H&N, to collect signatures for the petition calling on President/Senate to sign & Ratify the TPNW, to collect words & stories from those persons present, and to educate ourselves about the #TreatyBan TPNW, and to read excerpts from the Ban Treaty text. There is an 8 minute video of the Maine branch event on You Tube, watch here: 
