News and Media

For interviews and all other media inquiries, please call our office at 212.228.0450, or contact us by email at wrl [at] warresisters.org or via our Contact page.

Letter to House Committee on Appropriations: Cut UASI funding!

As our communities mourn the lives lost in the mass shooting at Pulse queer club's Latinx night this weekend, we affirm our struggle for a safety beyond hate and militarism. As politicians and ideologues of various stripes manipulate this tragedy, we remember the refrain: "our grief is not a cry for war." We refuse to allow the deaths of those in Orlando to justify increased police presence in our communities across the country. Today, WRL and AFSC, joined by thirty-two other civil liberties, religious, and peace and social justice groups called on the House Appropriations Committee to maintain the President’s cut to Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) funding as a “step in the right direction.”

Media Advisory: Groups Decry Notorious Islamophobe to Address NY State SWAT Teams This Week

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For Immediate Release

April 26, 2016

Contact:

Ali Issa, War Resisters League, ali32123 [at] gmail.com, (718)310-9968

Ursula Rozum, Syracuse Peace Council ursula [at] peacecouncil.net, (315) 414-7720

COMMUNITY GROUPS FROM ACROSS NY STATE HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE TO OPPOSE MILITARIZATION OF POLICE AND SYRACUSE PD PARTICIPATION IN VERONA SWAT EXPO

Groups decry extreme anti-Muslim views featured as keynote at New York Tactical Officers Association Conference this week

 

On MLK Day: A Special Message from Arun Kundnani

Arun Kundnani

On this MLK day, let us recall Dr. Martin Luther King's deepest legacy. He understood that denouncing the violent extremism of young, angry men in the ghettos could not be done without hypocrisy unless one also condemned the far greater violence of the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. When governments decide political problems can be solved through violence, it is no surprise their citizens reach the same conclusion.

Massive Protest Wave in Iraq Challenges Sectarianism

WRL's Ali Issa on the protest upsurge in Iraq: "Since a new wave of protest in Iraq — the largest in decades — has forced the Iraqi government to finally begin acknowledging the fundamental problems with the now 12-year-old quota system, Iraqis across sectors and at the grassroots are striving to chart a new political course. It’s also time for the world at large to see Iraqis in a new way. Not as simply Sunni, Shi’ite or Kurd, Gulf-backed or Iran-backed, terrorist or victim. Iraqis are asking us to do much better than that."

Stop Urban Shield 2015!

WHAT IS THE STOP URBAN SHIELD COALITION?

Stop Urban Shield is a broad coalition of grassroots community and social justice organizations primarily based in the Bay Area but with partnering community groups across the nation who have come together united against Urban Shield. Urban Shield, a SWAT team training and weapons expo that brings together local, regional, and international police-military units to collaborate on and profit from new forms of surveillance, state repression, and state violence.

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