A call for more in Egypt #gfm  

(Codepink will be wize I have reason to think)

More activists should come to Egypt.

Mubark should let 1,300 through
before they are 13,000
before they are 30,000
before...

Up the ante; create facts on the ground

Let civilization be truely born in Egypt
That we are our brothers keeper

It is Cairo, not Copenhagen where humanity may triumph

Here, it's Seattle meets Baghdad

via twitpic.com  (Audio: how we got the Palestine flag on the pyramids?)

----

On 31 December 2009:

----

----

First anniversary of the Israeli massacre of Gaza and three years under an ongoing siege [pdf].

Brought to you by the Gaza Freedom March.

[Note: This is a part of the main post: List of Things to Do to Support the Gaza Freedom March. Check the main post regularly for updates and share it widely.]

Marchers are planning massive actions on Thursday December 31. We need to inform the world and protect them from the Egyptian police's harassment. We will try to send as many reports of the March to major American news corporations. The fact that American citizens are in the streets of Cairo on a hunger strike and are potentially harassed by Egyptian police has to come out. It will tremendously help the Marchers and the cause. Please email all news corporations listed below. The Marchers are on a hunger strike in the street and paying thousands of dollars. You need only spend 15 minutes for Gaza!

This is a suggested text for the message you will be sending to the news corporations below. Feel free to use it, edit it, or add yours:

Over a thousand activist, including an 85 year old holocause survivor and hundreds of Americans, Europeans, Africans and Asians are in Cairo right now on a hunger strike in the Gaza Freedm March.

Cairo is preventing the demonstrators from reaching Gaza to break the siege, but demonstrators are taking to the streets to protest. For more info see http://gazafreedommarch.org You can follow live news from the ground on Twitter at http://justicentric.posterous.com/how-to-follow-the-gaza-freedom-march-breaking

1. Make a report on CNN iReport. Check the one I made titled American Citizens on Hunger Strike in Cairo to Free Gaza. (It takes a while to upload. Don't worry. CNN will see it and that's the point.) Optionally, but not necessarily, use photos and videos. Find photos and videos at the Live-Blog and you can use photos from GFM and Best of GFM albums on flickr. This is a platform for the people to publish news, so use it, and it will also get the attention of CNN because they check and verify every story. The more people report, the better.

2. Do the same thing on MSNBC.

3. And Foxnews.

4. And BBC.

Comment below or tweet me to recommend links.

Just received the update below from CODEPINK. Some links might not work. All links are available at the List of things to do to Support the Gaza Freedom March.

December 30, 2009

Dear Friend,

The Gaza Freedom March continues-in Cairo, we hope in Gaza, and around the world.  Because of all your emails and the determination of the almost 1,400 people who came to Cairo to be a part of the March, including 300 French nationals who have been camped out in front of their embassy for three nights, we secured a meeting with Madame Mubarak, the president´s wife. Madame Mubarak arranged for 100 marchers to enter Gaza to deliver the humanitarian aid we had brought with us, under the umbrella of her organization The Red Crescent. This was considered a success until we began the difficult task of figuring out which 100 of the 1,400 would go.

To make matters more complicated, the Foreign Minister, who had not wanted ANY of us to be allowed in and was angry he had been overruled by Mrs. Mubarak, decided to fan the flames by saying in a press conference that the 100 seats were for the "good people"; and the rest of us were bad "hooligans" who were being left behind. Some of the country representatives declined their seats, and some delegations decided they would prefer not to send anyone if the whole group was not allowed to go. Those who boarded the buses towards Rafah included journalists who had come to report on the conditions in Gaza, Palestinians who would be reunited with family they had not seen in years, and some members of the team who were committed to delivering the aid that had been collected.

One of the desired results of the march was to focus world attention on the continuing and devastating effects of the blockade on Gaza. The outpouring of support from around the world for the Palestinians in Gaza has been amazing. Twenty-two marchers began a hunger strike in Cairo, including 85-year-old Hedy Epstein, a Holocaust survivor, who has been interviewed by journalists from around the world. This morning´s New York Times piece on the march and the hunger strike was a huge success in getting the story of Gaza to a wider audience, and reflected the passion of those who had traveled so far to be a part of this historic movement.

The hunger strikers ask that sometime during the period marking the Operation Cast Lead invasion anniversary--December 27-January 18--you join them in remembrance by skipping a meal, or fasting for a day or a week. Sign up here.

And please be a part of the international solidarity movement for the Palestinians of Gaza by doing what you can to spread the story, tweet or Facebook the NY Times story and keep up with the ever changing tides of the march on the PINKtank.

You can find up to the minute information on our Twitter page. Follow us on twitter and march with us virtually!

Solidarity actions for the Gaza Freedom March began taking place December 27th to mark the one year assault on Gaza, with more actions scheduled through January 1, 2010. The massive mobilization includes candlelight vigils, concerts, processions, marches, demonstrations, art installations, house parties and movie screenings all over the world. View solidarity actions worldwide and visit our flickr slide show.

Not attending a March or Solidarity Action? Join us in Solidarity Online.

The Gaza Freedom March site is being updated almost hourly, so check it out, share the photos, videos and articles with your friends! www.gazafreedommarch.org.

"The ONLY recognizable feature of HOPE is ACTION"-- so ACT today and support CODEPINK with a donation and get your Grace Paley t-shirt, designed by Phillip Niemeyer in our store!

So here's a toast to our power and our passion -- we have our work cut out for us in 2010!

Medea Benjamin and the CODEPINK Team
(Dana, Emily, Farida, Gael, Gayle, Janet, Jodie, Kitty, Marina, Nancy, Paris, Rae, Suzanne, and Whitney)

You can click on Live-Blogging Gaza Freedom March Breaking of the Siege of Gaza (just click the page and refresh to update).

And you can follow these best practices to follow the unfolding events of the Gaza Freedom March today:

1. Check the updated list of things to do to support the Gaza Freedom March.
2. Follow #GFM on Twitter (the page updates itself automatically).
3. Follow the Gaza Freedom Marchers Twitter list.
4. Check these live-blogging blogs: http://aliabunimah.posterous.com/ , http://husseini.posterous.com , http://palestine.ctsastl.org/ , http://imeu.net/news/article0018127.shtml and (h/t @misslolgirl) http://misslolgirl2.wordpress.com. (You should regularly read the Mondoweiss blog for the Israel/Palestine news generally.)
5. Follow the relevant Facebook group in your region. They are listed in the bottom of the Gaza Freedom March official website. They send good local updates.

Comment below or tweet me if you want to recommend links.

We made it, thank God! Nadine has a very well served post on the story of the success of the #Gaza trending campaign. Hundreds of twitter users commemorated the anniversary of the Gaza massacre earlier this year by trending #Gaza on twitter.

This is #Gaza in the past 24 hours:

And this is #Gaza in the past week!

And this is #Gaza, after five hours of hard work ranking third on Twitter trend list:

Such campaigns are really about the number of users participating. Twitter, thankfully, made it very difficult to use robots or scripts to automate the process of promotion.

The campaign brought together hundreds of users, generated its own official video (below), official Twitter profile background (also below) and official Twitition!

The campaign wasn't without difficulties. The Israeli army is known to be active on the web. They now have official divisions for Facebook and Twitter! Some Zionists tried to spam our #Gaza tag by posting disinformation, but this had very minimal impact and they probably understood that this will only help us in even more promotion of the word Gaza and this is certainly not to their advantage. A new tactic they started right before the campaign is placing the campaigners in lists that have misleading names. You should regularly check the lists you are in and report for spamming and block any such attempts.

Now, was the campaign a success? Depends, of course, on the goals of the campaign. What we had in mind was raising awareness of the situation in Gaza and the fact that over a thousand activist, including holocaust survivors, members of parliaments, Nobel peace prize winners, students and others are in Egypt right now going on a hunger strike to pressure the Egyptian government (a puppet of Israeli and U.S. interests) to let them in the largest prison in the world [pdf] that is Gaza. In the mean time, there is the Viva Palestina people led by British MP George Galloway also on a hunger strike for being denied entry into Gaza. But of course, most of all, we want to lift the siege on Gaza. It has been three years since the siege started and we cannot take it anymore and we will not! There is so much momentum for the movement to lift siege on Gaza right now and we are determined to end this ongoing genocide of 1.5 million people.

So, have we raised awareness? I would say yes. And here are my reasons:

• First of all, we trended #Gaza! If you don't follow what that means, it basically means that at least hundreds of thousands of people saw the word Gaza yesterday. You know how much it costs to pay Google or Twitter to put an ad for you for a period of time on their homepage? I don't know myself :) but I assume it's a lot. These business empires are monopolizing the Internet market with tens of millions of users and advertising is the backbone of their business model. We had #Gaza trending on Twitter's homepage for over seven hours! (Campaigners noted, as Nadine points out, that #Gaza never showed up on Twitter's homepage for people who are not signed in despite the fact that it ranked the third at peak time. No big deal in my opinion since people, if they are not signed in all the time already, they visit this page only to sign in. But it's a question to ponder why it did not show up at all despite the fact that there are sections for weekly, daily and hourly trends there. Politics? Well. We know how close the U.S. government to Twitter and the role they took in promoting #IranElection. #Gaza is not as interesting to them, I assume, as #IranElection. Still, no evidence I have, so, I can only speculate. [Update from Nadine: I was actually corrected about this by @Stand4Liberty who sent me a screenshot (below) of #Gaza appearing on the sign-in page briefly when we were top-trending. Did twitter block #Gaza from getting to #1 on purpose? Maybe, maybe not. I really don’t know. I do, however, think it is pointless to waste our time wondering if it did. We still trended for > 10 hours!])

• Within these hours, I personally saw tens of tweets asking "What is Gaza?" People did not even know what it IS, a place, a band, an event... And we told them, and they followed us and followed #Gaza. Many others had wondered Why is Gaza trending? This is all in addition to the hundreds who joined in and/or simply watched as people usually do on Twitter. Those people read news pieces, human rights reports, visited NGO websites, saw tons of pictures and videos, knew about Gaza Freedom March, etc etc. What kind of a tv ad can give you all that?!

(download)

Click here to download:

Activists_commemorate_the_anni.zip (158 KB)

• I had a couple of accounts working from. I use HootSuite, which is the best Twitter client. You can work with several accounts, schedule tweets, feed rss feeds to accounts, and track shortened links. In the tweets I sent, about half were shortened by myself on HootSuite. Those links I shortened received more than 10,000 clicks in the 7 hour trending period. As I said, that did not include retweets, and the latter are probably the majority of what I sent, and I am but one of the hundreds of the campaigners. Here is an image of only one of these accounts making over 2800 clicks around this period.

• One of my posts that I was glad was retweeted widely, titled List of things to do to support the Gaza Freedom March, jumped in number of view from around 50 to 6500 views in these 7 hours (now over 6700). I wish I can get stats from sites like http://GazaFreedomMarch.org. I am sure they have been bombarded by many more clicks in this period.
• The campaign is generating a plethora of blog posts on the story of the trending and the campaign.

Looking at this, I can say confidently that our campaign had been more successful than many of the street protests that were planned yesterday. I've seen many of these protests gathering a hundred or two people and the accompanying pro-Zionist rallies had almost as many people. This is very unusual. We usually outnumber them at least 10 to 1, but it was probably the holidays, in which people are more inclined to twitter than go protest! Not to belittle street demonstrations, which are more effective on several other fronts and are the only possible means of pressure in many cases, but in terms of raising awareness of the situation in Gaza, and for yesterday, we were much more effective and globally outreaching.

I realize though this is not enough. This was my most retweeted tweet during the campaign:

(the number of retweets in the photo only counts retweets submitted by the new Twitter "Retweet" button. We didn't use that because we learned it doesn't count in trending)

There are some goals that I did not really have in mind when I started working on this, but now I can see it's no less important than raising awareness and certainly a part of it. People passionate for the cause of Palestine found each other through this campaign. Now we have close to 500 in the core team, and we continue to organize on facebook and other mediums for future action. And we met each other. As Nadine tweeted once, if anything, it is been fantastic to meet such extraordinary group of people. Hopefully, we will form a core action network for Palestine whose voice will be heard. The next few days should be very exciting. We are hoping the hunger strike of the Gaza delegations will reverberate around the world and will create some pressure to finally lift the genocidal siege of Gaza. And we hope will be part of it.

One thing we did not do, and we can probably do in the future, is some concentration on media outlets to pressure them to cover the events. Something like #CNNFail hashtag that had gotten CNN to cover the events and to cover the coverage of them and to have to respond as well! Of course, we don't have colonial interests on our side in the fight against Zionist oppression, but maybe the escalation in Egypt will provide an emergency event to rally around, something that we did not have yesterday.

Congratulations fellow brothers and sisters.

Once again, check the list of actions to support the Gaza Freedom March and join the campaign.

This is a live-blog post. Check back regularly for updates.

[Update #9: 07:22 AM GMT, January Dec 02:] Go on a hunger strike/fast! Gaza Freedom March issued a press release vowing to continue the hunger strike they started Sunday and calling for mass participation around the world. Click here to sign up and find tips and tricks for the hunger strike/fast.

[Update #8: 03:07 PM GMT, Thursday Dec 31:] Please start by doing the following:

1. Contact the media (Update #7 and Update #5 below).

2. Attend a demonstration in front of an Egyptian embassy today (Update #6).

3. call your representative and ask why they are not protecting your fellow citizens from harassment in Cairo.

Use this video at http://justicentric.posterous.com/video-egyptian-security-beating-gaza-freedom and the photo at http://justicentric.posterous.com/photo-marcher-hurt-in-confrontation-with-poli Use material from the tag Egyptian Police Brutality with Gaza Freedom March Delegations.

.

[Update #7: 10:55 AM GMT, Thursday Dec 31:] A very handy list of media contacts. Email as many as you can. Link to the Live Blog (http://justicentric.posterous.com/tag/liveblogofgazafreedommarch) if you like. (Thanks to @delovelylou)

[Update #6: 10:08 AM GMT, Thursday Dec 31:] Go to the nearest Egyptian embassy for picketing today! From Jews sans frontieres.

[Update #5: 5:08 AM GMT, Thursday Dec 31:] I prepared a list of actions to to contact news corporations to pressure them to cover Thursday massive action in Cairo. Please take a moment to contact them all immediately for the success and the protection of the Gaza Freedom Marchers.]

[Update #4: 1:20 AM GMT, Thursday Dec 31: If you are in the United States, then Cheer or Jeer Your Representative on the Moran/Inglis Letter.]

[Update #3: 12:00 AM GMT, Thursday Dec 31: Sign-up with Gaza Freedom March organizers to support the fast that began on December 27!]

[Update #2: 6:06 AM GMT, Wednesday Dec 30: NYTimes covered the story! But WaPo didn't and this is still all we can do to help the March. It just means it works! Please continue petitioning below.]

[Update #1: Please start by filling this simple form. It will automatically email the NYTimes & Washington Post asking them why they are not covering the Gaza Freedom March.]

----

Here is a list of things to do to support the Gaza Freedom March in the next few days. We are looking into 4 to 5 days of work until December 31st and new year.

1. Petition the Egyptian government to allow entry to the march. This is the most important step. Everything else builds up for it. Keep this in mind while you tweet and campaign. If you don't do this, there no point of anything else. Also, if you can make a call as well as email, this is even better. Now share the link widely!
2. Join the campaign to trend #GAZA this Sunday. This is a commitment. That includes tweeting the hashtag #GAZA as many as you can on Sunday for 4 hours: 9am to 1pm Eastern Time (convert to your time). [Update: Campaign succeeded! Please follow actions below to join the campaign and participate in future events. If you don't have a Twitter account, check @nmoawad's Twitter crach course to help you kick in.]

Use a #GAZA Twibbon; join ACT, Don't Mourn group on facebook; use the Gaza Freedom March logo as your profile image, (and optionally use the #Gaza Twitter profile background kindly made by @faissl) among other things. Full instructions for Sunday campaign on Nadine's blog.

Message @nmoawad who is organizing the campaign to sign you up. Those who signed thus far are listed at http://tweepml.org/Tweeting-for-Gaza/

4. Follow #Gaza (obviously), #GFM (the tag for Gaza Freedom March) and, also, follow the list of twitterers attending the march. Check the post titled How to Follow the Gaza Freedom Marc Breaking the Siege of Gaza Now

Needless to say, share this post and/or other links widely. Comment below or tweet me at @justicentric to recommend actions.