Kathy Kelly
Kathy Kelly, coordinator of Voices for Creative Non-Violence and world renowned peace activist, will speak
on Sunday,
September 18th
at 2:00 PM
at Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren,
783 W. Highland Avenue,
Elgin, IL 60123.
Kathy has been nominated three times for a Nobel Peace Prize. She and her colleagues have travelled into active war zones to live among civilians in the line of fire, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Gaza. She has brought back to Americans compassionate stories of the lives of those civilians. More recently, she has travelled to Russia.
Her topic for this talk will be Confronting State Violence.
The event is sponsored by Fox Valley Citizens for Peace & Justice, the Witness Committee of Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren, First Congregational United Church of Christ in Elgin, and by The Social Justice Team of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva.
Admission is free and all are welcome.
Light Refreshments will be served.
More Background about Kathy Kelly
Kathy Kelly, co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org) a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare.
During each of several recent trips to Afghanistan, Kathy Kelly, as an invited guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence believe that “where you stand determines what you see.”
They are resolved not to let war sever the bonds of friendship between them and Afghan people whom they’ve grown to know through successive delegations. Kelly and her companions insist that the U.S. is not waging a “humanitarian war” in Afghanistan.
Kelly has also joined with activists in various regions of the country to protest drone warfare by holding demonstrations outside of U.S. military bases in Nevada, upstate New York, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
During late June and early July of 2011, Kelly was a passenger on the “Audacity to Hope” as part of the US Boat to Gaza project. She also attempted to reach Gaza by flying from Athens to Tel Aviv, as part of the Welcome to Palestine effort, but the Israeli government deported her back to Greece.
In 2009, she lived in Gaza during the final days of the Operation Cast Lead bombing; later that year, Voices formed another small delegation to visit Pakistan, aiming to learn more about the effects of U.S. drone warfare on the civilian population and to better understand consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan. She returned again to Gaza in November 2012 to meet with the survivors of Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense and to hear their stories.
From 1996 – 2003, Voices activists formed 70 delegations that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicines to children and families in Iraq. Kathy and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing.
She was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites (1988-89) and spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. As a war tax refuser, she has refused payment of all forms of federal income tax since 1980.
She and her companions at the Voices home/office in Chicago believe that non-violence necessarily involves simplicity, service, sharing of resources and non-violent direct action in resistance to war and oppression.