Help US Organize Peace Events for September 11 Anniversary

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday August 13, 2002 23:56 by United for Peace/Global Exchange - United for Peace/Global Exchange peace at globalexchange dot org Global Exchange, 2017 Mission St, Suite 303, San Francisco, CA 94110, USA 415 255 7296

As September 11 approaches, we ask for your help to make the anniversary of the tragedy in the United States a time to promote global peace by organizing a peace event in your community. Thereby showing that people all over the world are uniting in a call for a world free of violence and war.

Dear Friends,

As September 11 approaches, we ask for your help to make the anniversary of the tragedy in the United States a time to promote global peace by organizing a peace event in your community. We would like to publicize your event on our website Unitedforpeace.org, along with hundreds of other peace events being planned in the United States and abroad, to show that people all over the world are uniting in a call for a world free of violence and war.

United for Peace is a coalition of US peace and
justice groups, including a group of family members who lost their loved ones on September 11 (called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows). We condemn in the strongest of terms the attacks against innocent civilians on September 11, and call for the perpetrators to be brought to justice in accordance with international law. However, we do not want the grief of the American people to be a cry for war. We are gravely concerned about the loss of innocent lives in Afghanistan during the military campaign in that country, and we fear that the US government push to invade Iraq will lead to the loss of countless more civilians. We also share the grief of families
elsewhere around the world—from Colombia to the Middle East to Kashmir—who continue to suffer the tragic loss of their loved ones every day.

Please join us on September 11 in a global show of solidarity by organizing a peace event in your community—such as a peace concert, an educational forum, a candlelight vigil, an interfaith service, a show of support for members of your community under attack, a fundraiser for the innocent Afghan victims of war, or a press conference with diverse community representatives calling on the US government to respond to terrorism through lawful and peaceful means. Please emphasize at all venues your opposition to the impending US attack of Iraq.

Please let us know if we can offer you any help for your event (we will have many ideas and resources on our website) and please keep in touch with us
either through email (peace@globalexchange.org) or through the website www.unitedforpeace.org.

Let us turn the anniversary of this tragedy into a
global mass movement to build a world free of violence and poverty, a world that rejects ethnic and religious divisions, a world that nourishes and celebrates the diversity of the human family.

In peace,
Medea Benjamin, Director, United for Peace
www.unitedforpeace.org
peace@globalexchange.org