April 11, 2008
Last month, for the first time, the Iraqi-Canadian community came together to organize a week of action in Toronto to commemorate the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. rabbletv covered this historic occasion and interviewed the keynote speaker, American-Iraqi peace activist Dr. Dahlia Wasfi.
Dahlia Wasfi left her medical career in 2002 and became a full-time activist and speaker calling for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. She uses personal stories and hard-hitting analysis of the conditions faced by Iraqis combined with a passionate and often highly comedic delivery to put a human face on the conflict. In her powerful oratory, she is a blend of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X or maybe Karl Marx and Groucho Marx, as one commentator on an Internet message board put it. In April 2006, she appeared before the Democratic progressive caucus's congressional forum on Iraq.
As the daughter of an Iraqi Muslim father originally from Basra, Iraq and an American Jewish mother from New York City, she says both sides of her family have faced genocide. First, her Ashkenazi Jewish grandparents fled the Nazis in Vienna in the 1930s. Now the Iraqi side of her family is facing genocide as a result of the U.S. attack and occupation of Iraq.
She describes the situation of her relatives on her father's side: "[They] are not living, but dying, under the occupation of this [Bush] administration's deadly foray in Iraq. From the lack of security to the lack of basic supplies to the lack of electricity to the lack of potable water to the lack of jobs to the lack of reconstruction to the lack of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they are much worse off now than before we invaded. 'Never again' should apply to them, too."
"I have the credibility," Wasfi says, "to come forward and I'm willing to risk the false label of anti-Semitism to condemn the policies of the United States and Israel and its continued oppression of the Arab world."
In the rabbletv interview, Dahlia Wasfi confronts the complacency and fatigue that characterizes the reporting of the war in mainstream media. In a country that worships its military, the U.S. corporate media has failed to acknowledge the concerns of returning war veterans. There was a complete blackout, in mainstream U.S. media, of the recent Winter Soldier testimonies, which ran March 13-16 in Silver Spring, Maryland. U.S. veterans who served in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan testified to give an accurate account of what is really happening on a daily basis on the ground in these countries. rabbletv broadcast independent media coverage of these testimonies by DemocracyNow! and The Real News.
