Join Havaar Wed. May 16, 7pm@CUNY, Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions & State Repression

[OWS Global Justice ANNOUNCE]

The Occupy Wall St. Global Justice working group invites you to join
the conversation about Iran this coming Wednesday:

A Discussion with Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions
and State Repression

When: Wednesday, May 16 at 7 pm – 9 pm
Where: 365 Fifth Ave. CUNY Graduate Center, Segal Theater, First
Floor.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics

Havaar* is a coalition of Iranians, Iranian-Americans, and allies
formed in response to the U.S. government’s escalating attacks on Iran
and to the Iranian government’s ongoing repression of people’s
progressive movements (http://havaar.org).

At a time when crippling sanctions and threats of war bear down on
people in Iran, there is an urgent need for people in the United
States to organize against these policies advanced in our name. As
global solidarity between people in the United States and other parts
of the world gains new momentum, how can we support grassroots
struggles in Iran that oppose both outside intervention and domestic
authoritarianism?

Join us for a discussion about how to rebuild an anti-war movement
that is centered around people-to-people solidarity.

Plus video testimonies from activists in Iran and around the world.

*Havaar means “cry of emergency” in English.

Speakers:

Ali Abdi is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University. He was
engaged in the student movement and women’s rights movement in Iran
for five years, and participated in post-2009 presidential election
protests in Iran. The Iranian democratic movement, globally known as
the Green Movement, has informed his activism since then.

Arang Keshavarzian is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and
Islamic Studies at New York University. He is currently on the
editorial board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies
and was on the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and
Information Project (www.merip.org) from 2005 to 2011. His book,
Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace, was
published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

Bitta Mostofi is a nonprofit, immigrant rights attorney. She has also
worked as a civil rights attorney and served on the board of directors
of the Council on American Islamic Relations. Bitta has participated
in anti-war and anti-sanctions campaigns, and was a co-coordinator for
the Voices in the Wilderness; Iraq Peace Team from 2002-2003. In
recent years Bitta has co-founded and worked with Where is my Vote,
New York, which formed in the after math of the highly disputed 2009
Iranian presidential elections. WIMV-NY strives to raise the level of
international solidarity with the citizens of Iran in their movement
towards social justice and democratic change and to speak out against
the Iranian state’s human rights violations.

Manijeh Nasrabadi is an American Studies Ph.D. student in the
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her
essays and articles have appeared in Comparative Studies of the South
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Social Text online,About Face (Seal
Press, 2008), Hyphen Magazine, Tehran Bureau, Callaloo and
vidaweb.org. She is a founding member of Raha: Iranian Feminist
Collective in New York City.

Moderator:

Maia Ramnath organizes with Adalah-NY, South Asia Solidarity
Initiative, and the Occupy Wall Street-Global Justice working group.
She is on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and is the
author of two recent books: Haj to Utopia and Decolonizing Anarchism.
She is currently an adjunct history instructor at NYU.

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