{"id":1587,"date":"2013-05-24T12:21:43","date_gmt":"2013-05-24T18:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=1587"},"modified":"2013-05-24T12:22:25","modified_gmt":"2013-05-24T18:22:25","slug":"medea-benjamin-the-woman-who-heckled-obama-is-not-sorry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/medea-benjamin-the-woman-who-heckled-obama-is-not-sorry\/","title":{"rendered":"Medea Benjamin, the Woman Who Heckled Obama, Is Not Sorry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Medea Benjamin has spent a lifetime confronting powerful people, so she was a bit baffled when Obama called her a \u2018young lady.\u2019 She talks to Caroline Linton about interrupting the president\u2019s speech on Thursday\u2014and what she would have said if she hadn\u2019t been kicked out.<\/h3>\n

by\u00a0Caroline Linton<\/a>, The Daily Beast
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

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Medea Benjamin<\/a>\u00a0wasn\u2019t even sure she was going to get into the building on Thursday, let alone hear President Obama say she is a \u201cwoman worth listening to.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The 60-year-old had been given a pass by a friend to the president\u2019s counterterrorism speech at the National Defense University, in which he was expected to address major new reforms in his foreign-policy strategy. A well-known antiwar activist and frequent heckler of powerful people, she wasn\u2019t sure she\u2019d get past security.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIf he had indeed made significant policy changes, I wasn\u2019t going to say anything,\u201d Benjamin, the founder of\u00a0Code Pink<\/a>\u00a0told The Daily Beast on Thursday evening. \u201cI would have preferred that option, but given that he didn\u2019t make those kind of changes I was looking for, I was glad to be given the opportunity to speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSpeak out\u201d she certainly did. As the president\u2019s address pivoted from drones, which he vowed to reduce the use of, to\u00a0the U.S. prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay<\/a>, Benjamin stood up and began shouting unsolicited questions about the hunger strikes there, interrupting the speech and begging Obama to shut the prison down. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you sit down,\u201d the president replied, \u201cand I will tell you exactly what I\u2019m going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Benjamin didn\u2019t want to sit down. After Obama said Gitmo detainees must be cleared to go to other countries, she shouted at him to \u201crelease them today.\u201d This time, Obama went even further off script. \u201cPart of free speech is you being able to speak, but you also listening and me being able to speak,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me some slack, because it\u2019s worth being passionate about.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Not much later, Benjamin was removed from the auditorium. The Guant\u00e1namo heckler had made her point.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was funny that President Obama called me a young lady because I\u2019m older than he is,\u201d Benjamin said in an interview after the kerfuffle. \u201cI grew up in the days of the Vietnam War, and recognized at an early age that we as citizens have to do more to stop our government from getting in overseas interventions that were unjust and lead to the deaths of so many of our soldiers as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Benjamin said she was glad to be able to to speak, and that she wasn\u2019t \u201cbeaten up and tortured, or thrown in prison.\u201d But she said she had hoped she wouldn\u2019t have to speak up at all, that the president would have announced in his address that said he was shutting down Guant\u00e1namo immediately.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So who is Medea Benjamin\u2014and why should we listen to her, as Obama said? First of all, Medea was not the name she was given at birth, but one that she took \u201cearly in life,\u201d as she says. She says she wanted to help \u201credeem\u201d the name, which is associated with a Greek myth in which a mother kills her own two children. Benjamin, however, had read another version, one in which Medea was simply misunderstood. She herself is a mother of two daughters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Benjamin is also a co-founder of Code Pink, a women-initiated grassroots organization working toward social justice and ending the overseas wars. She ran for the California Senate in 2000 as the Green Party candidate. In 2005, she was one of 1,000 women from 140 countries nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She also was honored in 2010 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a U.S. interfaith peace organization, with the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize. She previously worked as an economist and a nutritionist with the World Health Organization. She is the author of eight books, including 2010\u2019s\u00a0Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/em>All of those are lovely achievements, of course, but Benjamin is perhaps best known in Washington as someone who speaks her mind, even when she\u2019s not invited to do so. Most recently, in December, shortly after the Newtown shootings, Benjaminmanaged to interrupt a press conference by National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre<\/a>, carrying a sign declaring \u201cNRA Blood on Your Hands.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Called a serial protester by some, Benjamin also was a scourge of the Bush administration as well. In 2002, she protested as then\u2013secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified on Capitol Hill about Iraq, and she was removed from the House gallery in 2006 when she interrupted a speech by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. At the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012, she held up signs calling former secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a \u201cwar criminal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2007, she was part of a delegation that marched to the gate at the Cuban site of Guant\u00e1namo prison, a trip she will be making again soon with Code Pink. Benjamin said the organization is also planning a trip to Yemen, to meet with the families of some of the prisoners of Guant\u00e1namo, and one of her colleagues is also on a hunger strike to protest the detention facility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As for Thursday\u2019s interruption, Benjamin was not ruffled at all by being thrown out of the president\u2019s speech. If she had the chance to finish, she says she would have inquired about why the U.S. keeps overseas bases in countries like Saudi Arabia, which she says are making the country \u201cless safe.\u201d And she also would have \u201cgiven a shoutout\u201d to Bradley Manning, the detained former soldier accused of sending classified military intelligence to WikiLeaks. \u201cIt would have been nice to thank him in that kind of venue,\u201d Benjamin said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Medea Benjamin has spent a lifetime confronting powerful people, so she was a bit baffled when Obama called her a \u2018young lady.\u2019 She talks to Caroline Linton about interrupting the president\u2019s speech on Thursday\u2014and what she would have said if she hadn\u2019t been kicked out. by\u00a0Caroline Linton, The Daily Beast click here for original article […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/images1.jpeg?fit=305%2C165&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1590,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions\/1590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}