Medea Benjamin: Well, I sort of had the -- in that kind of
venue it's very interesting, because in other venues the audience is less
disciplined, and the audience will start doing things like chanting, "USA!
USA!" just to silence you, or the audience will stand up to block you. And in unfortunate cases, audience members s
will start playing their own security and start grabbing you, and in some
cases, even hitting you.
Rob Kall: That's
scary!
Medea Benjamin: Yeah, yeah!
Certainly in some instances we have been hit by audience members. The law enforcement people tend to be more
professional: they're not going to come in and bop you. But the person sitting next to you sometimes
just has a gut reaction: "I hate what this person is doing, and I'm going to
hit 'em, or shove my hand over their mouth!"
Luckily, it was a military audience, and they are quite
disciplined. They clapped to try to
drown me out, but they weren't about to do any of the other things. So that was positive.
Also, I think the fact that the President started
interacting with me immediately gave me the ability to say to all of these
security people, "Wait! The President is
actually talking to me! He hasn't asked
me to be pulled out," and that's when I went into the ongoing discussion with
the people around me (while I was trying to speak to the President) of, "Don't
touch me, you're hurting me. Don't touch
me, I'll scream! Don't touch me. You're going to cause a scene, and you'll
regret it. Don't touch me. The President is actually listening to what I
am saying, and I have to hear him." So
all of those things were going on behind the scenes.
In the meantime, there was this woman; the woman
who, actually, in the end was one of the ones who was pulling me out, who kept
showing me some kind of badge or something, and saying, "I'm the Army -(I can't
remember what it was), and you will be under arrest if you don't come out
immediately." She kept saying that, and
I wasn't moving, so I certainly did assume when they took me out that I was
going to be arrested, but that wasn't the case.
Rob Kall: That's
good to hear. What happened after they
took you out? And as you were being
taking out, did you keep speaking, it looked like you were -- and I've seen you
do this before -- you use every moment that you're in the audience, right, to
keep the message going?
Medea Benjamin: Yes, I think that when I got out most of what
I wanted to say is when I was being pulled out of there, because I had a chance
then to say, "Will you tell the Muslim people they're lives are as precious as
ours? Will you apologize to the families
of the innocent people that have been killed?
Will you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA? I love my country and the rule of law, you're
a constitutional lawyer, you must obey the rile of law." I mean, I got out a lot of things before I
got out of there. So yes, use every
second that you have.
Rob Kall: Is there a
way that you've learned to interact with these people once they start moving
you? Anything you say to them, any way
to walk, or any way to resist, or not resist?
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