Medea Benjamin is one of America’s best-known 21st-century activists. Co-founder of CODEPINK and the fair trade advocacy group Global Exchange, she is the author of Drone Warfare (OR Books, 2012) and has played an active role in the Green Party. A frequent contributor to Alternet, she has a Master’s Degree in both public health and economics. In 2012, she was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation’s Peace Prize; she is also recipient of the 2014 Gandhi Peace Award and the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She is mother of two children and currently lives in Washington, D.C.

From the introduction:

. . . . I have seen, firsthand, the deadly effects of U.S. foreign policies. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq destroyed the lives of millions, including many of my dear friends, and unleashed the sectarian hatred that later gave birth to the Islamic State. I recall a conversation with my Iraqi colleague Yanar Mohammad, daughter of a Shiite father and Sunni mother, and founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. When I asked her what was the most notable legacy of the U.S. invasion of her country, she gave the chilling response: “We, Sunnis and Shia, learned to hate each other.”

In another part of the Middle East, U.S. military support for Israel has wreaked havoc on the lives of Palestinians and aroused the ire of people throughout the region. Continuous U.S. military interventions—from drone warfare in Yemen to overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya to funneling an endless stream of weapons into the region—have unleashed new levels of violence.

But the United States is not the only nation whose massive footprint has been trampling on the lives of people in the Middle East. The other nation is Saudi Arabia, an oppressive monarchy that denies human rights to its own people and exports extremism around the world. It also happens to be the closest U.S. ally in the Arab world.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I met intolerant and violent young men in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were trained to hate Westerners in Saudi schools. In 2001, I saw my own nation convulsed by an attack on September 11 that was perpetrated mostly by Saudis. It’s not hard to connect the dots between the spread of the Saudi intolerant ideology of Wahhabism, the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and the attacks in New York, Paris, Brussels, and San Bernadino.

Medea Benjamin is one of America’s best-known 21st-century activists. Co-founder of CODEPINK and the fair trade advocacy group Global Exchange, she is the author of Drone Warfare (OR Books, 2012) and has played an active role in the Green Party. A frequent contributor to Alternet, she has a Master’s Degree in both public health and economics. In 2012, she was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation’s Peace Prize; she is also recipient of the 2014 Gandhi Peace Award and the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She is mother of two children and currently lives in Washington, D.C.

From the introduction:

. . . . I have seen, firsthand, the deadly effects of U.S. foreign policies. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq destroyed the lives of millions, including many of my dear friends, and unleashed the sectarian hatred that later gave birth to the Islamic State. I recall a conversation with my Iraqi colleague Yanar Mohammad, daughter of a Shiite father and Sunni mother, and founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. When I asked her what was the most notable legacy of the U.S. invasion of her country, she gave the chilling response: “We, Sunnis and Shia, learned to hate each other.”

In another part of the Middle East, U.S. military support for Israel has wreaked havoc on the lives of Palestinians and aroused the ire of people throughout the region. Continuous U.S. military interventions—from drone warfare in Yemen to overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya to funneling an endless stream of weapons into the region—have unleashed new levels of violence.

But the United States is not the only nation whose massive footprint has been trampling on the lives of people in the Middle East. The other nation is Saudi Arabia, an oppressive monarchy that denies human rights to its own people and exports extremism around the world. It also happens to be the closest U.S. ally in the Arab world.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I met intolerant and violent young men in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were trained to hate Westerners in Saudi schools. In 2001, I saw my own nation convulsed by an attack on September 11 that was perpetrated mostly by Saudis. It’s not hard to connect the dots between the spread of the Saudi intolerant ideology of Wahhabism, the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and the attacks in New York, Paris, Brussels, and San Bernadino.