Mona Eltahawy Takes Matters into Her Own Hands

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/26/mona-eltahawy-arrested-for-spray-painting-anti-jihad-subway-poster_n_1915832.html?utm_hp_ref=new-york
Many New Yorkers have spoken out against the ads, which read "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

Is Globalization a War on Working People?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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"Notes on a Mass Stranding"/Split This Rock Poem of the Week

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Kamilah Aisha Moon  Photo by: Rachel Eliza Griffiths Notes on a Mass Stranding       I. Huge dashes in the sand, two or three times a year they swim like words in a sentence toward the period of the beach, lured into sunning themselves like humans do-- forgetting gravity, smothered in the absence of waves and high tides. II. [Pilot whales beach themselves] when their sonar becomes scrambled in shallow water or when a sick member of the pod heads for shore and others follow III. 61 of them on top of the South Island wade into Farewell Spit. 18 needed help with their demises this time, the sharp mercy of knives still the slow motion heft of each ocean heart. IV. Yes--even those born pilots, those who have grown large and graceful lose their way, found on their sides season after season. Is it more natural to care or not to care? Terrifying to be reminded a fluke can fling anything or anyone out of this world. V. Oh, the endings we swim toward without thinking! Mysteries of mass wrong turns, sick leaders and sirens forever sexy                                             land or sea. The unequaled rush and horror of forgetting ourselves   -Kamilah Aisha Moon        Used by permission.   Kamilah Aisha Moon's poetry collection She Has A Name is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Her work has been featured in Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou'wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo and Villanelles, among other journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships to Cave Canem, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and The Vermont Studio Center. Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.         Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

"barreras"/Split This Rock Poem of the Week

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  María Luisa Arroyo                                                                      barreras      para Martín Espada (1993) Mami called us away from the roach trap line where novice factory workers, fresh from the island, and I, fresh from Germany, poked protruding yellow chunks of roach bait into black traps with long-stem Q-tips we dunked in alcohol. Another safety meeting. My first. El jefe de la factoría faced us and heard nothing by the silence of women hablando y bochincheando in Tidy-Bowl blue uniforms. "Safety shoes should.... Factory goggles are .... Hairnets must...." All the Spanish he knew could have fit into one of those trampas, too little to translate what Flora, Aida, and Teresa needed to know. A heavy box fell and crushed a few of Flora's dedos del pie. Alcohol splashed into Aida's ojos. The uncovered motor yanked out one of Teresa's trenzas. I broke rank and stood. "If safety is first, then why aren't your updates translated into Spanish?" How all uniforms blue shrank away from me, from my nasal twang, from that language that sounds as if I were chewing papas calientes o mucho chicle. For once, though, my mother was proud of my English. El jefe told me I could have been promoted to the shampoo line. -María Luisa Arroyo     Used by permission. Originally published in Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Press 2008)   Multilingual award-winning poet María Luisa Arroyo enjoys facilitating poetry workshops and has performed her poems widely, including in Chicago and Puerto Rico. Academically trained at Colby, Tufts, and Harvard in German, Arroyo has published poems in many journals, including CALYX, andPALABRA. Her publications include the poetry collection,Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras (Bilingual Press 2008) and the multicultural anthology about bullying:Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, Catharsis(Skyhorse Publishing, 2012) co-edited with Magdalena Gómez.      Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210

Support Split This Rock Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, c/o Institute for Policy Studies, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

In Memory of Joshua Casteel: Conscientious Objector to the Iraq War

Joshua Casteel died from cancer that he believed was due to exposure to toxic fumes during his service in Iraq. 




Some of you may know his story.  From the Pax Christi website:

he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves at age 17 and received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point at 18; after training as an interrogator and studying Arabic, he served at the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, from June 2004 to January 2005, as a member of the interrogation units sent to overhaul the prison after the prisoner abuse scandal; during his time at Abu Ghraib, hecame to realize he was a conscientious objector and was honorably discharged from Active Duty as a conscientious objector. Josh wrote and spoke on his experiences during war, served on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and published Letters From Abu Ghraib in 2008.