Code Pink Hayward Speaker Event Invaded

On Friday, November 19, code pink Hayward Hosted their first speaker's event at the West Minister Hills Presbyterian Church. It featured Barbara Lubin as the founder of Middle East Children's Alliance. With an introductory by Sameena Faheem of American Muslim Voice. This was to be a peaceful event featuring a talk and slideshow by Barbara consisting of her recent visit to Palestine refugee camps and her work building play centers for children and bringing food and needed personal articles to the children in the besieged refugee camps.

People began filtering in and taking their seats. All peaceful and companionly. Drinking hot cider and nibbling on cookies Out of this atmosphere, a group of 6-7 people were seen grouping outside and discussing what later turned out to be their strategy of disruption. As we began the program, one of these men, a man who identified himself as Jack Kessler, began passing out flyers printed on pink paper to simulate Code pink literature. these flyers were filled with slanderous lies concerning Barbara Lubin and her group. This man also began filling the church boxes that were set up to donate food to poor families on thanksgiving with this same slanderous writing.

Our group, CodePink Hayward, found it nearly impossible to get these people to sit quietly in their seats til question and answer time. They continued to jump out of their seats and scream at Barbara and disrupt the event. When we tried to get them to leave, they refused, saying it was their right. They continued to try and force their racist hate-filled flyers onto our tables. And this went from bad to worse.

At one point Barbara tried to answer their statements on their flyer and again, hate and racists epitapths were flying out of the mouths of these people from Dafka and Protest Warrior.

As the audience began getting restless, and the Minister of the church tried to get rid of the hate mongers, I took the microphone and tried to calm people and the first words that came to my mind were, we were seeing Zionism in the flesh and the reason the Palestinians are being slaughtered and the peace is a long way off in Israel/Palestine. Interesting enough, what ensued from this was that the audience gained a new personal understanding of what hate can show itself and they saw just how hate-filled some of these zionist groups can be. I think the disruption actually backfired to some extent on the disruptive groups, though we never did get to see the slideshow. We do plan to have Barbara back and we will see that show. and this time Code Pink will be more ready and prepared for the inclusion of this hate-filled racist group.