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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2008, page 65 Waging Peace Three Arrested at Huckabee’s Iowa Campaign Headquarters
REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL candidate Mike Huckabee’s campaign staff wasted little time in calling Des Moines police to remove three nonviolent activists from the former Arkansas governor’s Iowa campaign headquarters on Dec. 31. Robert Braam, 51, of Manhattan, IL; Kathy Kelly, 55, of Chicago; and Mona Shaw, 56, of Iowa City, IA, members of the Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV) and the Iowa Occupation Project occupied the front office of Huckabee’s campaign headquarters just after noon and unfurled a banner emblazoned with the question “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” As they waited, the trio sang “Auld Lang Syne” in remembrance of lives lost in the U.S. “War on Terror,” read the names of Iraqis and U.S. personnel killed in Iraq, and chanted “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”—bringing normal activity in the office to a halt as stunned staffers sought advice by telephone from their superiors, who were with Huckabee at a press conference at a downtown hotel. A senior Huckabee staffer arrived and gave the order to call police officers to the scene. Outside, in the sub-freezing cold, six activists—Razia Ahmed, Catholic Worker Community leader Frank Cordaro, Elton Davis, Lee Lewis, Catholic Peace Ministry executive director Brian Terrell, and John Tuzcu—acted in support of their colleagues who were risking arrest inside. Tuzcu videotaped the event for later posting on YouTube. Others held banners and placards and spoke with members of the press and with passersby. As a large contingent of print reporters, photojournalists, and broadcast media personnel from local, national and international news organizations arrived at Huckabee’s headquarters for a scheduled event. When Huckabee’s campaign bus arrived, the entrance to his headquarters was effectively blocked, forcing Huckabee to wait in his idling bus as Cordaro, a former Catholic priest, shouted question after question at the ordained Southern Baptist minister. “What kind of Christianity does he back?” shouted Cordaro. “The Jesus of ‘love your enemy,’ the Jesus of the Beatitudes, or the USA-stamped-Jesus, the Jesus of empire?” After about 20 minutes, the bus pulled away with Huckabee still on board. Braam, Kelly and Shaw were arrested for trespassing and escorted by officers through a cheering crowd to a paddy wagon and transported to Des Moines Police Headquarters, where they were issued citations and released. In a news release issued by the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community, Kelly, co-director of VCNV, was quoted as saying, “We’re very respectful of the Iowa Caucus process and the long history behind it, but we feel quite strongly that the issues of this war must be inserted into the process of narrowing down the candidates for the presidential election.” —Michael Gillespie |
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