The face of courage



That's Huwaida Arraf, a co-founder and central figure in the International Solidarity Movement and, recently, the Free Gaza Movement (the folks organizing the boat trips from Cyprus to Gaza). This was apparently filmed by a South Korean TV crew. Here's her Wikipedia bio:

Huwaida Arraf (born 1976 in Detroit, Michigan) is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organization. The stated mission of the ISM is to resist the Israeli occupation using nonviolent tactics. Arraf is married to Adam Shapiro, another ISM co-founder, whom she met while both were working at the Jerusalem center of "Seeds of Peace", an organization that seeks to foster dialogue between Jewish and Palestinian youth.

Arraf, who is Christian, is the daughter of a Israeli Arab father and a Palestinian mother. Arraf majored in Arabic and Judaic studies and political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also spent a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and studied Hebrew on a kibbutz.[1].

Huwaida later earned a JD at American University's Washington College of Law. Her focus was on International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, with a particular interest in war crimes prosecution.


(With many thanks to Mitchel Cohen for alerting many of us to this video.)

Sunday editorials. The Los Angeles Times calls on both sides to halt the fighting, while the New York Times is once again... silent. Not even a major columnist is writing about the subject today. I have no evidence, but once again I suspect this reflects a deep division among the Times' editorial writers on the subject.

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1 Comments

Anne Gilbert said…
Huwaida Arraf is indeed a very courageous person. If some representative of an armed force pointed a gun at me, I don't think I would be able to stand up to them.
Anne G