Kathy Kelly opened the Wheels of Justice Tour in South Kedzie Hall with a display of passion as she spoke of the young Lebanese woman whose pants fell off because she hadn't had food in days.
The passion surfaced again when she spoke of the young man who drove her through bombed areas and found three cluster bombs in his Lebanese garden.
Kelly and other presenters on the Wheels of Justice Tour seek to address environmental degradation, foreign policy and humanitarian issues in Iraq, Palestine and Israel, said Kelly, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.
About 25 people from the Lansing area came to hear the three speakers on MSU's campus Monday.
Before the event, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstien said she just wants to change the world.
With the Wheels of Justice Tour, she hopes she can do just that.
Epstien was born in Germany before World War II. Shortly after the Holocaust began, Epstien's parents sent her to England as part of a children's transport program in hopes the rest of her family would soon follow.
But on Oct. 22, 1940, her parents were taken to concentration Camp de Gurs, in France. Although Epstien continued to receive letters from her mother, she never saw her parents again. The last letter Epstien ever received from her parents was a postcard dated Sept. 4, 1942. It read " … Sending you a final goodbye."
"I am a Jewish Holocaust survivor. I know what it's like to be persecuted," said the 82-year-old Epstien.
The group participates in nonviolent protests and calls for governments and citizens to recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Epstien joined the tour two years ago to address the injustices pressed upon Palestinians. She returned to the tour Friday after a fourth trip to Palestine in August.
"The last trip I went on was called a 'Congressional Accompaniment' tour, but it really turned out to be a congressional abandonment tour, because there weren't any congressional members who went," Epstien said.
But Avi Davidoff, an international relations junior and representative of the Jewish Student Union of ASMSU, has a different opinion. According to Davidoff, Israel is now in a situation where they must protect themselves.
"When Israel became a state, the Arabs of Palestine gathered together to try to push the Jews into the sea," Davidoff said. "The Palestinians are not living in the best conditions, but they are given money and they use it for terrorism."
Kelly hopes the tour will bring students, even ones with differing opinions, into the debate.
"We present at a lot of universities," Kelly said. "We have to remind the university community how reliant we are on their skills — their ability to learn foreign languages, to learn about the environment, to learn about foreign policy."
Kelly left home Sept. 10 to join the tour. Before that, she made 26 trips to Iraq, each time bringing medical supplies in direct violation of economic sanctions as part of the Iraq Peace Team.
"We always told the state department exactly what we were doing when we took the supplies," Kelly said. And awareness is the most important thing, Epstien said.
"The Palestinian people always ask me (to) go back to the U.S., tell the American people what it's like here because the American media doesn't portray it correctly. The American public just doesn't know.
"I can't change the world," Epstien added. "But I do what I can to help."
