Yemen – Courageous Revolutionary Activists Should Be USA Focus, Not Terrorism

Over 70 people came to watch Sara Ishaq‘s film Karama Has No Walls and hear Jeb Boone and Medea Benjamin discuss the situation in Yemen and USA policies which impact Yemenis. Here’s a video of most of the Q&A session:

Here’s a direct link to the audio recording of most of Medea Benjamin’s talk and the entire Q&A session.

We’ve also posted some photos on the Facebook page and Flickr. The local daily paper also covered the event.

Sun Aug 11, 3 pm: The Suffering Grasses – Syria’s Revolution and Civil War

“The Suffering Grasses” Trailer from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.

A free, open to the public screening of the 1-hour long documentary film THE SUFFERING GRASSES: When Elephants Fight, It is the Grass that Suffers, directed by Iara Lee. Discussion to follow.

Sunday, August 11, 2013, 3:00 pm, Headquarters Library, 823 Telfair St., Augusta, GA 30901, 3:00 pm. Ground floor, turn to the right before going through the book detectors at the library’s entrance. Admission is free and open to the public. RSVP on Facebook & Share

Over a year later, with thousands dead and counting, the ongoing conflict in Syria has become a microcosm for the complicated politics of the region, and an unsavory reflection of the world at large. Against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, NATO’s toppling of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, and the complicated politics of the region, this film seeks to explore the Syrian conflict through the humanity of the civilians who have been killed, abused, and displaced to the squalor of refugee camps. In all such conflicts, large and small, it is civilians—women and children, families and whole communities—who suffer at the leisure of those in power. While focusing on the plight of those caught in the crossfire of the hegemons, we seek to unravel the conflict by exploring the motivations of its actors—the Ba’athist regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Free Syrian Army and other geopolitical players like the United States, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, the Gulf countries… When elephants go to war, it is the grass thatsuffers. This is a film about the elephants, but made for the grasses.

Sun, Aug 4, 3pm: Medea Benjamin and Jeb Boone: Eyewitness to Yemen’s Revolution

Augusta, GA native and Davidson Fine Arts High School graduate Jeb Boone (Twitter) is scheduled to talk about his experience as a freelance journalist covering Yemen’s revolution. He is joined by CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, who has recently returned from a trip to Yemen where she spoke with revolutionary activists and relatives of Guantanamo detainees. The program will begin with a screening of the powerful, 27-minute documentary Karama Has No Walls (warning: violence not normally shown on US news broadcasts). This documentary shows footage from the Change Square massacre of March 18, 2011, to which Jeb was a witness, and interviews participants and relatives of a slain protester. The Yemeni revolution provides the proper context to understanding how Yemenis are responding to the United States’s targeting killing program, and Jeb will help us understand the program’s economic, political and diplomatic consequences.