The traditional holiday season was cut short for the activists who produce and distribute Green Left Weekly - the Israeli government's latest genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza made certain of that.
We scrambled to help organise emergency protests around the country and the editorial staff set to work producing a special Gaza solidarity edition of GLW that came out last week.
Thanks to comrade Soubhi Iskander, the editor of The Flame (the Arabic supplement of GLW), the special edition was published in Arabic and English.
The response to the special edition was fantastic. A group of GLW supporters took the issue hot off the press out to Sydney suburbs where there are large Middle Eastern communities. They went like hot cakes.
The same thing has happened at various Gaza solidarity rallies.
It the midst of all this, the GLW Fighting Fund was launched at a function at the Marrickville studios of another alternative media project, Actively Radical TV.
$83,610 was pledged by GLW supporters that night and, since then a further $13,140 in Fighting Fund pledges have come in. This brings the total pledged so far to $96,750.
Our Fighting Fund target for 2009 is $250,000 — the same as last year.
However, last year we only managed to raise about 90% of the target. We got to just under $227,000, with the help of some generous late donations, including $5000 from the Victorian branch of the Electrical Trade Union (ETU).
This union has also decided to make an annual donation to the
Fighting Fund and have their proud support published in GLW. Thank you comrades.
$227,000 was a pretty good effort in 2008 but we need to do better this year and meet or, better still, beat our target.
You can help us do this by joining with the other friends of GLW and making a pledge for 2009 now. You don't have to pay all at once, you can pay off your pledge in instalments over the course of the year.
Direct deposits to the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund can be made to: Greenleft, Commonwealth Bank, BSB 062-006, Account No. 901992. Alternatively, send a cheque or money order to PO Box 515, Broadway NSW 2007, phone it through on the toll-free line at 1800 634 206 (within Australia), or donate online at http://www.greenleft.org.au/fogl.htm