May Day and Save Darfur from what?

Follow ups on a couple posts:

If you won't be in the streets tomorrow for May Day, there are a few things you can still do. 

• Those who can't get out of school are being urged to protest silently in class.


• If you're in an office all day, join the virtual sit-in put on by the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the borderlands Hacklab.


• For news, keep an eye on your local Indymedia and pirate or community radio stations.

On the shenanigans in DC and elsewhere today relating the crisis in Darfur, Yoshie over at Critical Montages has been doing an excellent job following that story and examining the intricacies of it.  She has several great posts up, including one on how today's rally helped to not bring peace to Darfur.  Check it out. 

Comments

[adwred]

Can't wait to get out of this stupid office and to the rally... also Yoshie F. is a woman.

[scott]

Hope you enjoyed that rally...my bad about Yoshie, thanks for letting me know. I've fixed it. Shows my patriarchal inclinations I suppose.

[Yoshie]

No sweat. I enjoy an unintentional cyber-gender-bending experience like this! BTW, I love your blog, though this is the first time I leave my comment here.

[scott]

Thanks Yoshie, I love your blog, too!

[marc cooper]

Zogby Speaks

Last week we stirred up the pot with a posting about who exactly was behind the Save Darfur rally of ten days ago. I had taken some plinks at the lefty Monthly Review online edition for its editor's denunciation of "establishment Jews and some Evangelicals" exercising too much (conservative) influence in the movement.

I wrote that this was excessive concentration on Bush politics and not enough on the real-life conditions of the people in Darfur who were actually doing the dying.

Now, we hear directly from James Zogby, one of the speakers at the rally. And as a founder of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and current president of the Arab America Institute, he was the only Arab on the podium. Zogby was fully aware of who had organized the rally and has absolutely no regrets. Read his entire piece here. Here's a key excerpt:

... there were questions raised by the composition of the coalition itself and the views of some of the speakers who were to participate in the Washington mobilization. It is a fact that a number Evangelical Christian organizations who had been engaged in controversial missionary/conversion efforts in Darfur were involved, as were some Jewish groups who had a history of using Sudan as an issue to drive a wedge between Arabs and Africans.

Some of the rhetoric in the US about Darfur has been shaped by these groups and their perspectives. In some articles, the conflict is presented as an "Arab-led genocide against black Africans," others have either mistakenly or deliberately conflated their oversimplified view of the Southern Sudan-Khartoum conflict with Darfur and have, therefore, portrayed Darfur as if it were an "Muslim assault on Christian and animist Africans!"

With no other Arab speaker on the program, I understood what might be interpreted either by my absence or my presence at the rally. After consultations with several Arab friends and a number of experts on African affairs, I resolved to participate.

It was important that Arab Americans make clear our deep concern with the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Our presence in this multi-ethnic multi-religious coalition sends this message.

And while we may have had questions about some of the groups involved in the Save Darfur effort, the coalition included significant respected US and international organizations as well. The International Crisis Group, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Amnesty International, the AFL-CIO/Solidarity Center and a number of US Muslim groups had signed on as sponsors. My presence, I hoped, would give voice to our concern and help provide some balance in the day's discussions.

This is a straightforward statement of what I call the real art of politics: the art of building coalitiions. The opposite of purification purges.