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	Martin Luther King was a radical social reformer, not a saint by Peter Dreier Common Dreams, Truthout USA   January 21, 2013   Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King"s name to justify their beliefs and actions, as President Barack Obama will no doubt do in his second Inaugural speech and as gun fanatic Larry Ward recently did in outrageously claiming that King would have opposed proposals to restrict access to guns.   So it is easy to forget that in his day, in his own country, King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. He was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media.   In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America"s class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation"s labor union movement.   He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers strike. He opposed U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially the country"s misadventure in Vietnam.   In his critique of American society and his strategy for changing it, King pushed the country toward more democracy and social justice.   * Visit the link below to access more.   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/21-2   Progressive Victories in 2012   Progressives are rarely satisfied. It is part of their political DNA. There"s so much injustice in the world, it"s sometimes hard to feel that we"re making progress. But as Chinese philosopher Laozi reminded us, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.   As I document in my book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, the radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next generation.   One hundred years ago, ideas like Social Security, the minimum wage and women"s suffrage were considered radical. Fifty years ago, most African-Americans in the South couldn"t vote, few women were welcome in politics and many professions. In other words, if we take a long view, we can see that things do often change for the better, sometimes in big leaps, but usually in incremental stages.   In their book Organizing for Social Change, Kim Bobo, Steve Max and Jackie Kendall contend that activism is successful if it (1) wins real improvements in people"s lives, (2) gives people a sense of their own power and (3) changes the structure of power so that people begin the next phase of movement-building with greater leverage.   So l"ve looked at 2012 to see if there has been any progress - elections, ballot measures, court rulings, legislation and new waves of mobilization - that meet those three criteria.   99 to 1. In September 2011, a handful of activists took over Zuccotti Park in New York, and then the movement spread to every city in the country. Although Occupy Wall Street was forced after a few months to disperse physically, its ideas have continued to resonate with the American public, including its slogan casting America"s economic divide as the 1% versus the 99%.   Throughout 2012, the Occupy movement changed the nation"s conversation at dinner tables, workplaces and newsrooms. It helped frame the political debate in both the Republican and Democratic primaries by focusing public and media attention on the widening disparities of income, wealth and power. Even in the GOP primaries, Mitt Romney"s opponents attacked him as a job-killing corporate plutocrat. Democrats took advantage of the changing mood to focus attention on corporate power and the billionaires behind the tea party and the new right-wing super-PACs.   Politicians and the mainstream media now consistently refer to the richest 1%, often highlighting the class warfare waged by the super-rich. Language matters. This impressive linguistic ju-jitsu has helped reframe our national conversation over taxes, the distribution of wealth and income and campaign finance.   * Access the full list via link below.   (Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College). Visit the related web page
	We can"t afford to give up hope by The Parents Circle & agencies Israel, Occupied Territories   It was only later, after the intense shock had subsided and a heavy pain was starting to bed in, that Robi Damelin was told what her first words were on hearing that her son had been killed: "You may not kill anybody in the name of my child." She says now: "I suppose that was some kind of prediction of what I would do in the future. But I don"t know what revenge means. How many people should I kill? Would that bring David back? I was very motivated to find something that would prevent other families experiencing this pain."   In 2002, David, a university student who had been doing his reserve duty in the Israeli Defence Force, was killed by a Palestinian sniper while he was guarding a checkpoint. Damelin, who was running a PR agency in Tel Aviv, could no longer work - it felt meaningless. A group called the Parents Circle Families Forum asked if she would like to join them: set up in 1995 by Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose 19-year-old son was killed byHamas fighters, it now comprises more than 600 bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families working together to campaign for reconciliation.   "It was quite extraordinary to meet Palestinian mothers and discover this joint pain, and how powerful we could be as a force together to make a difference," she says. "And so I got swept along, and it became more and more my life. And now, apart from my grandchildren, there is nothing else - I have become a very one-dimensional character, absolutely geared to this idea. This latest Gaza mess is just so indicative of the cycle of violence. It"s not working for either side. Neither of us can win this battle. All that will happen is there will be more and more broken hearts."   We meet a few hours before the ceasefire ended eight days of violencein Gaza. The issue, says Damelin, is how long it will be until the violence flares up again and another short-term ceasefire has to be negotiated. "Sometimes I can"t believe the stupidity of the repetition," she says. It doesn"t threaten the unity of the group "because we don"t allow this situation to affect who we are.   "We continue to work. The Palestinians from our group continue to come to schools and talk. I"m not sure if I watched the news on Al Jazeera every day I would continue to come and talk about reconciliation, so we think that"s a really good indication of the trust within this organisation."   "Sometimes you get very disappointed," says Mazen Faraj, who has been sitting quietly listening to Damelin: "All the work you are doing - and then you find yourself in a new cycle of violence." He was born in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where he still lives with his young family. As a teenager, Faraj and his brothers were imprisoned in Israeli jails several times. In 2002, his father was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.   "Since I was a kid, I have been dealing with the conflict," he says. "It is so hard to live in a country without security, justice, rights. After the loss of my father, I spent a lot of time not knowing what to do. It was a huge feeling. There are options - you can choose revenge and become a suicide bomber, or you can stay at home and die slowly with your memories, or maybe you can really do something useful. To become an extremist is the easy way, but to reach a solution in this conflict through dialogue, and to find understanding, would be more helpful for me."   Joining the group, he says, felt like a rare choice he could make in his life. "When you are living under Israeli occupation, you can"t decide anything. The work with the Parents Circle, I have chosen it and I decide to do it, and I believe it"s the continuation of the struggle." This doesn"t mean group meetings are always easy, or that everybody always agrees, but they want the same outcome. A lot of their work is in education: Faraj and other Palestinian members go with their Israeli colleagues to speak in schools, reaching 25,000 students every year.   "When I was young, all I knew of Israelis was the soldier or the settler, but something happened to change that picture. I met Rami Elhanan [another prominent Parents Circle member], an Israeli from Jerusalem who lost his daughter in a suicide bomb attack. He talked about his suffering and pain, and I found a new picture of the Israeli side, which is the human side. It doesn"t mean I"m falling in love with the Israelis or I forget what has happened in my life, but I have a new picture now."   Each has faced some hostility from their own communities for the work they do and there are many times when their own commitment to reconciliation is tested. Damelin remembers hearing reports - mistaken, it later turned out - that the man who killed her son was one of the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who would be released in exchange for the safe return of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.   Even though she has supported prisoner releases to ease negotiations, "that was really a test. It"s easy to talk about reconciliation and peace and it all trips off your tongue, but do you mean it? Sometimes it"s very hard. You become very defensive about your own people. I love Israel. It"s not that I have become a Palestinian. I just think that the occupation is killing the moral fibre of my country and for that I will fight."   Damelin and Faraj both travel a lot, giving talks, meeting politicians and other groups. I ask what kind of picture she gets of how the conflict is viewed from outside and Damelin sighs: "This whole idea of being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine - what comes out of that is that you are not helping either nation and you are importing our conflict into your country. That is very clear in Britain. If you are pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, and your leaders are encouraging this - some of your politicians, it is very clear whose side they are on - the Jews and Muslims here are beginning to hate each other. It"s very easy for both the Muslim and Jewish communities in the diaspora not to compromise; they"re not exactly put to the test every day. If you can"t be part of the solution, I would really ask you to leave us alone. I really mean that."   Damelin grew up in South Africa. Her recent return to the country was made into a film, One Day After Peace, in which she talked to people about South Africa"s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and what could be learned from it. "The most amazing thing is that it"s such an affirmation of the work we"re doing now," she says.   In South Africa she was an anti-apartheid campaigner but left in 1967, not quite believing apartheid would end: "I believe that a miracle happened in South Africa and I think a miracle could happen for us too. I have hope. We can"t afford to give up hope."   * Writer, Emine Saner for The Guardian.   http://www.theparentscircle.com/Twofaces_en.aspx?ID=60#.UOtUaaz_nTq Visit the related web page
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