As a long time resident of Jefferson County as well as long time professor at Howard University in Washington I have been encouraged by hearing about how peoples around the world cope with conflicts in their settings. Most recently, on October 22 Anna Baltzer presented a compelling eyewitness account at the Presbyterian Meeting House in Shepherdstown on how citizens of Palestine are coping with their status of living under decades of occupation. :

Lynn Yellot has donated copies of Anna”s book and DVD, Whitness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupies Territories, and Life in Occupied Palestine: Eyewitness Stories & Photos respectively to both the Shepherdstown Library and the Shepherd University Library. They are excellent resources for facts on the ground concerning the state of civil rights in Palestine, which are hard to discover otherwise, but necessary for informed Americans to appropriately represent their views to the Congress on the sorry state of civil rights in Palestine. After all we are told that an average of 10 million of our tax dollars per day are distributed to the occupiers of Palestine.

Anna, a woman in her 20s, was a Fullbright scholat in the Middle East who then served for many months as a volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service located in Palestine, where she recorded the stories and photographs of a people under occypation. She discovered that she was in the midst of numerous Palestinian citizens, Muslim and Christian, together with Israeli Jewish advocacy groups, who are practicing nonviolent resistance to injustices imposed by the occupiers of Palestine. This resembles the nonviolent resistance efforts led by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Bishop Tutu in their respective countries.

As grand-daughter of Polish Holocaust refugees, Anna brings a sensitivity to the plight of a people absorbing abuse under decades of occupation. She brings a passion to her volunteer advocacy and scholarly work on civil rights abuse among Palestinians. Soon she expects to visit Palestinian communities in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria to report on the wellbeing of those communities.

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Harpers Ferry