Western Courier

Issue date: 3/26/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Craig Finlay Students and staff of Western and Macomb citizens gathered outside of Chandler Park Saturday to take part in a rally to end the Iraq war.

The fourth anniversary of the Iraq invasion was commemorated in Macomb Saturday morning with an anti-war demonstration, public speakers and live music.

The annual event, sponsored by the Macomb Area Alliance for Peace and Justice, garnered a crowd of more than 60 students and Macomb residents.

"What can you do after you send messages to Congress and they debate resolutions that are tepid?" said MAAPJ member and event organizer Sally Egler. "The only thing to do is take to the streets."

"What's great is you can't really spin a protest," said Greg Johnson, senior political science major.

Planning for this year's event started Jan. 1 when the American death toll from the Iraq war reached 3,000. Members of MAAPJ determined that they needed to begin planning for the anniversary "because it was obvious this wasn't going to go away anytime soon, and indeed, now we have a surge. So who knows when the end will come? If the end will come?" Egler said.

Attendees stood along the sidewalk on the north side of Chandler Park to begin the event, holding various signs for an hour. Some of the signs had quotations from renowned thinkers of past generations, and others simply stated, "We are the deciders."

While many passing motorists honked and waved to show their approval, one passer-by merely mooned participants, prompting a masked young man to shout into his megaphone, "It's easy to ignore the American public when your back is turned!"

"This is passive, which it should be," said Western theatre professor Ray Gabica. "But the passive resistance of Gandhi doesn't really work in the world today. It's the guy with the biggest toy, the strongest toy, the smallest telephone that wins. But if for nothing else, this gets the discussion going."

Following this demonstration, the group moved to the First Presbyterian Church on North Dudley Street due to the threat of poor weather for speeches by six Macomb residents, including journalism professor Mohammed Siddiqi, who had not spoken to any media sources regarding the war in two years.

"How can we allow tyranny, oppression and injustice to become our identity?" Siddiqi said. "How can we allow Guantanamo to continue? How can we let our soldiers die every day? How can we let hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians lose their lives?"

Continued...

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