Acclaimed War Casualties Exhibit to Be Displayed at Butler
Monday, April 09, 2012
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), in cooperation with the PO102 Introduction to Peace Studies class in Butler University’s Peace Studies Program, will honor fallen U.S. military personnel and Afghan and Iraqi civilians with its traveling exhibition: Eyes Wide Open: The Cost of War to Indiana, which will be on display at Butler’s campus mall from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 16-18.
On Monday and Tuesday, at 11:50 a.m., there will be a reading of the names of all the casualties and on Wednesday there will be a multi-faith prayer vigil at noon.
Eyes Wide Open: The Cost of War to Indiana focuses on the specific costs of war to the state of Indiana. The exhibit includes 191 pairs of empty boots representing fallen servicemen and women from Indiana, and a visual representation of the civilian casualties. This exhibit is part of AFSC’s national Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War network.
AFSC, an international social justice organization, created Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War to illustrate the lives lost in the war in Iraq. It first opened in Chicago's Federal Plaza with just over 500 pairs of boots in January 2004. The national exhibit was last displayed on Memorial Day weekend 2007 with over 3,400 pairs of boots. This was the last time that the entire death toll was represented in one location. Since then the exhibition has been divided into state displays and traveled throughout the nation to smaller cities and towns. All the state exhibits combined now include almost 4,000 pairs of combat boots representing U.S. military casualties, along with a memorial to the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have been killed in the conflict.
In addition to the exhibit, Butler is proud to welcome Raed Jarrar on Tuesday, April 17, at 8 p.m. in the Butler Pharmacy Building, Room 103. Raed Jarrar is the executive director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Washington, D.C., office of the Delahunt Group International. Born in Baghdad to an Iraqi mother and a Jordanian-Palestinian father, Jarrar grew up in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq, and immigrated to the United States in 2005. He received his bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Baghdad, and his master's degree in architecture, with a specialty in post-war reconstruction in Iraq, from the University of Jordan.
Since 2003, Mr. Jarrar has worked closely in building bilateral relationships between the United States and Iraq. He founded a USAID-funded organization that implemented hundreds of reconstruction projects around Iraq and worked with Iraqi leaders representing the full range of factions in the Iraqi political spectrum, facilitating discussions and meetings between Iraqi officials and their US and international counterparts. As one of the first bloggers in the MENA region, he has participated in many Internet and new media conferences and provided first hand trainings to hundreds of activists in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and other countries around the world. Jarrar is also a frequent guest on national and international media outlets as an analyst of the Middle East in both Arabic and English. In his presentation “Iraq 20 Years After: Missing the Arab Spring” he will be talking about the future of Iraq.
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