The Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture WSPN

By Dr. Ada Aharoni

VISION

“It is never too late for the world to be what it might have been”

While most televisions are chiefly framed from the point of view and perspectives of men and with an agenda set by men, the “Women’s International Television Network and Satellite for Peace Culture-WSPN,” will be framed by women and it will have an agenda set by women. Women frame things differently than men do, and they are enclined to stress more the human element and peace. Women share universal values: love of the family and love of our children is common to all women, as well as the values of caring and sharing. These are the values and ethics that will govern the frame of reference and perspectives for choosing the issues for the agenda and the programs of the WSPN. They will all be relevant to the sustenance and flourishing of humankind and to the building of a world beyond war.

While many television networks, government agencies, universities, and civil society organizations devote considerable resources to the study of conflict, violence and war, there are relatively few peace programs on television dedicated to a systematic, sustained plan of action to provide meaningful and resourceful cultural programs to educate people, students, youth and children, teachers and leaders, in the principles and human values of peace.

There are likewise almost no television peace programs from the point of view of women. Society loses a great resource by not using the voices and qualities of women equally. Generations repeat the mistakes of former generations and conflict, violence, wars, and the recent disastrous phenomena of suicide bombings - become permanent facets of human societies. Most Televisions choose to constantly air homicide and murder films that have a negative and destructive influence on society, instead of programming and airing exciting films about our own lives and about how we can solve our conflicts and create a world beyond war. The WSPN will aim at doing that, and it will function as preventive medicine to the possibility of more horrendous terrorist attacks like that of September 11.

The main purpose of the WSPN and its founding organization: “Iflac Pave Peace” - The International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace, as well as its sister organizations: “Gather The Women” and “The Foundation for A Healing Among Nations,” - is to develop and implement various programs on peace news, women’s views, dialogues, personal stories, literature, poetry, music, dance, songs, films – in the frame of developing and powerfully airing cultural peace education programs. These will be available in all parts of the world and for all segments of human society, with the aid of a powerful Satellite.

Through in-depth, systematic and sustained programs of Culture and Education for Peace, and pluralistic international multicultural Forums for Literature and Culture programs, the paving of a global village beyond war, will be facilitated. Generations of women, children, and new leaders, will be equipped with the necessary values, insights and skills to decrease the occurrence of conflicts, and to prevent their descent into violence and war. Women and men leaders, as well as every citizen, will be able to absorb values and ideas from the WSPN, and to dedicate their talents and energies to the creation of a sustained and progressive culture of peace toward the building of a world beyond war.

PRINCIPLES AND GOALS

The International Television Network WSPN: The Women’s Satellite for peace Culture, is an independent, not-for-profit foundation, founded by IFLAC PAVE PEACE. The Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors and receives counsel from an International Advisory Board comprised of outstanding individuals and leaders from the academic, social and philanthropic segments of society. WSPN will coordinate its activities with its sister organizations such as “A HEALING AMONG NATIONS FOUNDATION,” and “GATHER THE WOMEN.”

The women of the world, from all walks of life and from all parts of our global village, will be linked by the Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture (WSPN). We will invite women to demonstrate their initiatives and courage to join with millions of others throughout our global village, to build a World Beyond War and Violence, and to celebrate women's true worth and power. Through our various exciting and influential programs we will express and implement shared concern for our human family, and we will initiate, create and support actions from women organizations that will enable humanity to live together in a balanced, harmonious and peaceful world.

Women create life, and women are 52% of the world. We have the capacity to generate creative solutions and to resolve conflicts in a way that can benefit all life on the planet. Our Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture, will facilitate that, as well as a rich exchange of cultural values, spiritual heritage, history, literature, and personal stories, that will create bridges of understanding among women, nations and civilizations. Together we women will contribute new dimensions of our humanity to a new collective wisdom and frame of values.

PROGRAMS

The Programs of the “Women’s Satellite for Peace Network” (WSPN), will attempt to transform the world, from a violent planet to a peaceful planet, and to make it a better and safer place for all of us. The programs aired will concentrate on Peace News, locally and globally, and show global peace culture progress through various exciting peace films, interviews, roundtables, dialogues, personal stories, entertainment, and youth and children’s programs. The high-standard and highly professional coverage will clearly demonstrate that we are all part of one humanity, and that to preserve our planet in these dangerous nuclear-bombs-times, we have to radically change our thinking concerning wars and violence.

The major aim and challenge of the WSPN Peace Programs will be to educate every citizen, every leader, and every new generation of students and children to become peacemakers, and to devote their talents, capacities and energies towards the creation of a civilization of well-being and harmony, based on a culture of peace. This requires a fully powerful network and satellite that can reach women and men all over the globe, including citizens of the third world, and every citizen, youth and child in our global village. We will translate books by major writers and poets that promote multiculturalism, pluralism and peace culture, and we will interview writers, poets and artists and make their works and peace messages accessible to the whole world.

The WSPN Programs will also be made available on the Internet, and a vast network of Internet Clubs will be built in third world countries, with access to the Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture, and to all its various resources and programs.

In addition, we will air a “Peace Culture University of the Air,” that will develop a systematic and sustained program of study on the principles of peace. Among various other subjects, it will provide the study of the lives, thoughts and examples of great peace leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Luther King, Anwar Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin, and the various remarkable and outstanding women peace leaders and thinkers, throughout history. The integration of the principles of the Peace Leaders into the daily lessons of the university of WSPN the Air, on various subjects, including: the sociology of culture, literature, art, history, psychology, and science. We will also establish inter-related programs of “Regional Culture for Peace” units, that will address the problems and issues of various conflicted regions such as the Middle East, and they will examine in depth specific conflicts, such as the acute Israeli – Palestinian Conflict, which has been with us for more than half a century.

We will moreover establish “Global Peace Culture” programs that will attempt to develop a global identity and consciousness of the individual, of groups, and of nations, stressing our responsibility to global humankind and to our planet. These programs will particularly cover those regions where the ravages of war, terrorism, and racial prejudice, have created conditions of insecurity and conflict in communities.

Among the programs for children, we will include the PEACE TRAIN and PEACE SATELLITE Project, which is a project run in seventeen countries, where children exchange peace greetings drawn on trains or satellites to children across conflicted borders, as for instance South and North Korea, and Israel and Palestine. We will air beautiful films for children such as those of Shirley Temple and Margaret O’Brien.

WOMEN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

“Women Leadership for Peace Culture” will be one of the intensive training programs on the WSPN aimed at equipping women in all segments of society - government, civic, business, NGOs, professional institutions, work places and religious organizations, with the knowledge and skills for successful peace-centered leadership, regionally and in the emerging global society.

Women Leadership for Peace Culture Programs will focus on building the capacity of women leaders so that they will be empowered to develop suitable strategies for creating a culture of peace in their respective communities, institutions and organizations. In particular, the program will:

1. Equip participants with the principles of the equality of women and men.

2. Provide the conceptual understanding of an enlightened and progressive peace-based leadership formulated according to the principle of unity in diversity.

3. It will be based on the practice and ethics of democracy and characterized by inter-ethnic harmony and cooperation, as well as regard for the human rights of all citizens.

4. The Program will provide practical training in the basic skills needed to create violence-free communities, including participatory, democratic decision-making.

5. Methods of conflict resolution will be used and applied.

6. It will teach the necessary skills for peace leadership, so that participants will be able to develop concrete strategies for the creation of a culture of peace.

7. Participants will acquire the required skills for diffusing the program ideals into the public consciousness through the WSPN.

FUNDING

One of the major questions we have been asked is: “How will the Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture” be funded?

Funding will be solicited from individuals, foundations, corporations, and NGO’s, as well as from the UN, UNESCO, the WORLD BANK, and other major institutions. We will explain that the creation of the WSPN is crucial to the whole world, as it will function as preventive medicine, to avoid having another September 11 and other similar terrorist disasters.

Among the individuals we hope our Fund Raiser will approach, are: Bill Gates, Richard Gere and Jane Fonda, as well as other major figures who have shown support for cultural peace education. We will also apply to major networks to sponsor some of our programs.

Another frequently asked question is: How can I help?

1. Individuals can help by writing to their Senators and Congress representatives, the UN, UNESCO, and the WORLD BANK, about the urgency to create the WSPN, and asking them for their sponsorship, help and participation.

2. It will also be helpful if participants can send this WSPN Foundation Vision and Description to others who share our commitment to global peace and to the building of a world beyond war.

3. Individuals and corporations can help by making tax-deductible donations and encouraging associates to do the same, ear-marking them: “For the WSPN” .

4. We need the practical help of people who are versed in the Technology of Television and Satellites, and who can offer their voluntary services in all aspects of setting up this International Television Network for Peace Culture.

5. We need a capable Secretary for coordinating all the efforts and activities, and for sending out letters to various Institutions, and running an email list of all WSPN participants and interested members.

6. We need people who are ready to organize fund-raising dinners and events for the WSPN. (I will perhaps be in Dullas, Texas in January 2004, and perhaps again in March 2004, for the second part of “A Healing Among Nations Foundation” Program: “The Women’s Tour for Global Understanding”, organized by its director, Bonnie Mansford. After the Tour, I would be glad to speak and present artistic “Women’s Peace Poetry” at fund-raising events and dinners for the launching of the WSPN. For those interested, please contact Donna Collins, and Bonnie Mansford for details.

7. And most of all we need a capable and effective fund-raiser, as well as a

professional PR person.

WE CAN DO IT!

If we all join hands, both women and men, we can indeed create a powerful and effective WSPN that can totally ban war - both the practice and the whole concept and paraphernalia of war - from our lives and from our planet. Wars and violence are symptoms of our culture, and we will look at them critically and powerfully change the belligerent lens to a peace culture one. The Women’s Satellite for Peace Network, will be a reaction to the mess we have made of our planet, and we will all help, both women and men, to clean the mess. In doing so, we will use various new modes and structures. Humor will be one of our tools. It will be a way to strip the glorification of violence, murder and homicide, and to ridicule their association with the sensational and sexism. Our WSPN will pulse with reason, hope, and the vast celebration of peaceful and caring womanhood and manhood, working together for the creation of a better world.

For those who doubt that global women - with the help of men who believe in the possibility of a world beyond war - can create and run a WSPN, let us consider for example, the Al – Jazeera television. A few years ago it was difficult to imagine that a small new Arabic channel would lead news agenda, stir the world and throw serious challenges to media monopoly. Today, Al-Jazeera, a Qatar based independent television channel, stimulates and creates controversies in and out of the Arab world. By the end of this year Al-Jazeera in English will be provided to English speakers in the US, Europe and elsewhere with their own version of reporting, and sometimes one-sided views about the world's most turbulent region: the Middle East.

Al-Jazeera first came to the living rooms of non-Arab viewers in 2001. During the Afghan war, when western media did not have access to the ground, Al-Jazeera scooped the world with its exclusive war footage and interviews with Taliban leaders. For the first time CNN and BBC broadcasted live its footage and became dependant to a foreign news channel. With airing the statements of Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda colleagues, to this day, they constantly anger the US and the free world. Secretary of State Colin Powell personally called the Emir of Qatar to restrain Al-Jazeera from its 'inflammatory' and biased programs, but it did not help. The National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice arranged a meeting with five major American TV news organizers and persuaded them to limit their use of Bin Laden's videos. It was the first time that the US networks had agreed to a joint arrangement to limit their prospective news coverage.

During the Iraq war Al-Jazeera showed gruesome and indecent footage of dead American soldiers and civilians, which unfortunately, only added to its notoriety. The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, denounced the station, and the New York Stock Exchange expelled its reporters for 'irresponsible' and biased war coverage. Despite all those warnings, according to Deputy Defence Secreatry of the US, Paul Wolfowitz, Al-Jazeera continues to function as a propaganda outlet that often perpetuates biased positions. It keeps exaggerating anti -US activities by Saddam Hussein’s so- called loyalists, and broadcasting terrorist al-Qaeda rhetoric, and they continue showing one-sided graphic images of Palestinian civilian sufferings. Israeli suffering by fanatic extreme Islamic suicide bombers that attack and cruelly kill hundreds of innocent people and children in buses and restaurants - are never shown.

In spite of their lack of professional objectivity and one-sidedness, Al-Jazeera has become a powerful reality, and no major international TV station can afford to ignore it. CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, BBC, German ZDF and NHK of Japan signed agreements with Al-Jazeera and they co-operate with it. Although it was known to the western world only in 2001, from the very beginning of its establishment in 1996 it became a center of attention and a powerful global influence.

The WSPN: the Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture, wil air another tune – that of peace. It will counteract violence-oriented reporting and it will air “Peace News”, instead of mainly violent news, and it will show that global and regional Peace Progress is “newsworthy”. It will frame peace perspectives and global and national peace culture progress objectively and with a high standard of professionalism. It will also air personal peace stories of prominent women leaders, authors and poets of the various regions, as well as interviews of women peace leaders from the entire world, and the stories of citizens from conflicted areas that yearn for peace. Unlike some other televisions, the WSPN will cover news and stories from the women’s perspectives, and it will mainly have a women’s agenda, and give voice to women’s sufferings and their demeaning second class status in the Middle East and elsewhere around the globe. It will also cover women’s creativeness and joy of sharing and caring for their families and their world.

The brave 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Shirin Ebadi, of Iran, has already succeeded to dismantle some of the debasing customs, rules and laws, governing women’s lives in her country. We will strengthen her in her fight for gender equality, and in the dismantling of the “burkas” over minds, hearts, eyes and bodies. We will also invite her to kindly agree to Head our Honorary List of the WSPN. Together, we will all be empowered to heal our ailing planet.

We have to follow the example of the brave Scandinavian women, who have today more than 45% of women leaders in every key position, including in the various governments of their respective countries. This participation of women in running the various countries of Scandinavia, has had a very positive influence on those countries, and today their standard of living is thought to be one of the highest in the world. If we follow their example, the greatest revolution of the beginning of the third millennium – will indeed be the “Peace Culture Revolution.”

The WSPN will powerfully weave the voices of peaceful women and men together, and we will thus double our strengths through the WSPN television network, that will grow and blossom. It will be built on a value pattern of: sharing, wisdom, caring and love, for the benefit of all humankind and for the creation of a better world beyond war and violence.

PEACE POEM

I was invited to recite my following poem: “Peace Is A Woman And A Mother,” at the Closing Ceremony of the “Gather The Women Congress,” and I was deeply touched by the response of the participants. The intense peace-yearning, which I absorbed from the participants, inspired me while I recited the poem, and it created a mysterious and powerful mutual wave of spiritual hope in the air, which bonded all of us. It moved me to see that so many of the women participants had tears in their eyes when they heard the peace poem. One of them held a box of Kleenex tissues in her hand, and she generously handed them out to all that needed them. I knew for sure then, that I was not flying the Satellite vision alone; I had all my brave sisters with me, and millions more out there in our global village who abhor war and violence, and who yearn with all their hearts and minds for a world beyond war. I warmly thank you dear sisters all over the world - for your deep belief in the WSPN. Together we will save our planet and build a better future for our generation and for future ones.

Peace Is A Woman and a Mother
 How do you know
 peace is a woman?
 I know, for
 I met her yesterday
 on my winding way
 to the world's fare.
 She had such a sorrowful face
 just like a golden flower faded
 before her prime.
 
  I asked her why
 she was so sad?
 She told me her baby
 was killed in Auschwitz,
 her daughter in Hiroshima
 and her sons in Vietnam, Ireland,  Israel, Palestine,Lebanon,
 Pakistan and India 
 Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya.
 
 All the rest of her children,
 she said, are on the nuclear
 black-list of the dead ,
 all the rest, unless 
 the whole world understands --
 that peace is a woman.
 
 A thousand candles then lit
 in her starry eyes, and I saw --
 Peace is indeed a pregnant woman,
  Peace is a mother,
 Hugging her baby Satelllite.

This poem is from the Book: YOU AND I CAN CHANGE THE WORLD by Ada Aharoni (available through amazon.com, as well as my Homepage indicated below).

In peace and love,

Dr. Ada Aharoni is the Founder and Director of the WSPN: The Women’s Satellite for Peace Culture. She is also the Founder and President of IFLAC: The International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace. You are warmly invited to visit her following Homepage: www.ada.up.co.il

THE WSPN ADVISORY BOARD

The Women's Satellite

For Peace Network

====================================================

Dr. Ada Aharoni: Founder and Director (Haifa, Israel and Paris, France)

Kathlyn Schaaf: Representative of Women of Action and Vision (California, US)

Bonnie Mansdorf: A Healing Among Nations Foundation (New York, US)

Sandy Gaser: Media Representative (California, US)

Dr. Sonia Gaemi: Apandana Satellite Network (Iran and US)

Dr. Katrin Michael: Coordinator of Women from the Middle East (Mosul, Iraq)

Yvonne Walter: Legal Coordinator (San Francisco, US)

Brenda Chaddock: Women Leaders Development (Vancouver, British Columbia,Canada)

Ibtisam Mahameed: Palestinian Delegate (Furadis Village, Israel)

Dr. Sara Zamir: Education Counsellor (Ness Tsiona, Israel)

Donna Collins: Exec. Director WSPN, Women Radio/TV Show (Dallas, Texas)

Celine Leduc: Secretary (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Bruce Yamini: Treasurer (Dallas, Texas)

Soheila Vahdati: Journalist (Teheran, Iran)

Joanne Tawfilis: Exec. Director The Art Miles Mural Project (Vienna, Austria)

Dr. Kaarina Kailo: Chair of Women's Studies and Multiculturalism University of Oulu (Finland)

Marilyn Nyborg: Co-chairwoman WOVA board member: (Grass Valley, California)

Dr. Chaim Aharoni: Steering Committee and Science Adviser (Haifa, Israel)