 So we can get started. We have 46 of us on the line. I'm sure others will be joining us. I asked that you please mute yourself unless we're having a conversation and I want to welcome you all. I'm Marcy Winograd and I am the coordinator. I'll volunteer with Code 10 Congress. Very proud to work with you. And I wanted to introduce our other co-hosts or have our other co-hosts so Hania take it away. Thank you. Thank you Marcy. My name is Hania Jodat Barnes and I am the president co-founder of Muslim Delegates and Allies. And it's always an honor to be here especially tonight with discussing such a critical country, one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. So thank you to all of our allies for being here and our guests, honorable speakers who will be joining us and sharing their wisdom with us shortly. But Marcy, are we waiting for Madhya? No, I'm just wondering about Nadia. Is she joining us? She will be joining us shortly, absolutely, absolutely. So we'll have her. And so while we wait for, I can perhaps go through the agenda if we could share the agenda in the chat while we still are admitting people. Yeah, so the agenda we're going to do some updates and then we'll get into our guests presentations. Dr. Aisha Juman and Hassan Al-Khaid will have a question and answer period and we'll then follow that up with a capital calling party. I wanted to share my impressions of the hearings. We had a lot of hearings today. I don't know how many were able to catch some of them. I saw probably an hour and a half of the Haines hearing this morning. And some of the takeaways that I left with were that if this is a tough, tough Senate, Mark Warner, the Democratic Senator from Virginia, who will soon be chairing the committee, was very anti-China. You know, we have to be competitive. The Republicans were all alarmed about China, Iran, Venezuela, and I kept thinking, boy, they are to the right of Biden and this is going to be tough. Still, there were some good questions asked. There was not the kind of follow-up questioning that I would have liked to have seen, but there were some questions asked. Cornyn asked her about her work with Palantir, which is the data mining company. No, excuse me. He asked her about her work with West Exec, which is the lobbying, what we call, the self-strategic advisers. Blinken and Fornoy and Haydnall were on the payroll there. Whether she was a principal or was she a consultant, if she were a principal, which is what she was listed as, then she would know their client list and she said she was not a principal. Technically, she just worked for them once a month and no much. They asked her, had you ever worked for any company on the band list that was involved with the Chinese military industrial complex? She said no. She had done some advising for the French company. Heinrich, the senator from Mexico, asked her if she would agree with the conclusion of the committee that torture had been ineffective and she skirted that and said she understood it was unlawful and that there were better techniques. She did not say she agreed with that conclusion, which I thought was a concern. There was a question put to her about whistleblowers. Would you agree to share with the committee complaints filed by, for example, CIA whistleblowers and she said she would agree to share credible complaints? Kind of wondering about that. What else? Very hawkish committee overall, I thought. Ron Wyden asked her some questions about the hacking of CIA computers during the Senate torture investigation when CIA agents hacked the computers and breached the firewall between the executive and the legislative branch. Are you Marcy? Marcy? Are you Marcy? And you're reading a lot of chats. People are all asking you to turn up your volume, if you would please. Okay. Yeah. I don't know why this volume is low. Okay. I'm going to speak louder. Is that better? Much better. Okay. She was asked if she agreed that, well, she was asked for a response. It was open-ended to the hacking of the Senate computers. During the torture investigation. And she said she agreed with Brennan, I guess it was the CIA director at the time. She agreed with his apology. There was no, there was never, I didn't see a question put to her point blank. Why did you overrule the inspector general and fail to discipline these hackers? Why did you redact the report from 6,000 pages to 500? I never heard those questions. I didn't listen to the whole hearing. I had to go to work, but I didn't hear that. So that was my takeaway. We have a very hawkish Senate Intelligence Committee. And so it will be our role to challenge their hawkishness. That's what I came away with. Anyone else want to share impressions of the committee hearings? Just so everyone is aware, we do have about 86 participants on the call. If you could use the raise your hand button. That would be great if you have any questions. One other thing that she said during the hearings, Haynes, Ron Wyden asked if she would share the CIA report on the Khashoggi murder. Their conclusion, would she share it? And she said she would. And he seemed to elated at that. He said he'd been trying to get it from the Trump administration had been stonewalled. But I didn't hear anyone ask if she would share the original 6,000 page torture report. I do see two hands up here. I do see Omer Abid. And I also see James Carpenter's hands. If you could keep her comments to perhaps maybe less than 30 seconds, that would be great. Yeah, this is James Carpenter. Just want to know when will the hearing be concluded and does they have to be confirmed by the full Senate? So when should we stop complaining about this nomination? I think we should continue until she is absolutely confirmed. I read online that they didn't think she would be confirmed tomorrow. It's clear she will be approved by this committee. They made that very clear at the outset. And I anticipate she will be approved by the full Senate. But I think we should continue until she is. And I think even though they intend to confirm her, that it's important that we raise these issues so they are always in the background. I was able to use some of the interview that we did with John Kiriakou on Haynes. And I tweeted that. And it's gotten about 10,000 views and was included in a report from Al Jazeera on the hearings. So it's out there. And Omer, if you can unmute yourself, please. Oh yeah, hi. I just wanted to mention that it would be just something to put on our back of our minds that it would be good to put pressure on the Congress to release that 5,000-page report because obviously it would be great if the CIA, if they released it, but I doubt they will release it. So it would be nice if we just put on the back of our minds while there's a Democratic administration to try to do that. I remember that there was something about that report like just like hardly any, I don't know, just like a couple places or one place has it. And I remember Senator Feinstein, she had it. And then I think I remember something about Obama's library or something. Omer, as far as I know, that report has not been released, not even to the committee as far as I know. I think it was a 6,000-page report conducted over a five-year period. And it was instead redacted so that it was just a summary. Yeah, it was a 500-page summary that was released and that is available online. And if you email me, marciatcodepink.org, I'll be glad to send you that link. Well, Marcy, it does look like we do have Sister Nadia here also on the call who is also the co-founder and chairwoman of the advisory board of Muslim Delegates and Allies. Sister Nadia, if you could please unmute yourself and say a few words and then perhaps we could introduce our honorable guest. Well, thank you so much for everybody for joining us today with Code Pink. I wanted to thank you on behalf of Muslim Delegates and Allies Coalition. I also wanted to thank the American Muslim Democratic Caucus and other partner organizations for providing constant support for these efforts. I think it's really important that we really spread the word of these events. And so in the future, really appreciate if you can bring at least three or four more people to this because this movement is really fueled by people and the people power that we have is what gives us the power. Absolutely. Thank you. And I was just talking to a friend about this last night. You know, by and large, our population is not paying close attention to foreign policy to legislation to demilitarize. So our voices can be that much more amplified because we are really filling in the void here. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so what a better, you know, topic to really lead to our conversation with Dr. Jomon, who's it's an absolute honor to be here and you're in your presence. And I will hand this over to Nadia for the quick introduction. So Nadia, please take it away. Okay. Thank you so much, Hania. So first, I wanted to mention as well that just recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had designated that that the Houthis as a foreign terror group and a move that the United Nations says is going to block aid and other aid and relief to help against the famine on a scale that has not been seen for over 40 years. Yemenis are crowding into markets and shops to stockpile whatever they can afford. And families are very terrified that there is no food or other supplies available. And so we're going to have a question and answer session. And we're also going to host our Capitol Hill calling party to urge our representatives at support the removal of Trump's designation of this group in Yemen as terrorists and to restore USAID to Yemen. And so first, I would like to introduce Dr. Aisha Jomon, who is a Yemeni-American epidemiologist and the president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. It's really an honor to introduce her. Dr. Jomon has over 30 years of experience in public health, including viral vaccine preventable diseases, cervical and breast cancer research, surveillance, maternal, child health and nutrition, primary health care and woman in development. With first hand knowledge of conditions on the ground, she's going to talk about the dire consequences of the U.S. support for the Saudi UAE assault on Yemen. Dr. Jomon. Honored to be here and thank you very much to be for the invitation to speak about Yemen, because, as Marzi said, unfortunately, people who have a lot of money and power have been siding with the Saudi on the aggression on the Yemen people. So I'll talk a little bit about the humanitarian aspect of the war on Yemen. But before that, I always like to start talking about Yemen in a different way. I like to talk about Sana'a city. Sana'a is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. It's a Nesco heritage site. It's one of the most beautiful places anybody can visit. So I want you to think of Yemen also in terms of culture, history and beauty. So going from there, I'll start talking about the humanitarian crisis. All my resources are from the UN and from the U.S. and UK sources. And the reason for that is I want to be as objective as possible, because this is something that is very close to my heart. I have family in Yemen. And so it's very challenging for me to talk about this as an objective person, because I know of people who've been killed, maimed and died due to the aggression on Yemen. So based on UN reports, there are 24 million of the 30 million people who live in Yemen are in need of some assistance. Of these 14 million people need assistance now. There are about 4 million people in Yemen who are internally displaced. A lot of the media attention that comes about wars comes from people who are displaced or refugees. Because Yemen is under a blockade and all points of entry into Yemen are controlled by the Saudis and the UAE, Yemenis have no way of getting out of Yemen. So the displaced people, 4 million of them are in Yemen. Also because of the blockade and the destruction of the food sources, every food source in Yemen had been targeted by the Saudi airstrikes. Yemen is facing the largest humanitarian crisis in terms of food insecurity. There are 16.2 million people in Yemen who are at an emergency or higher level or food insecurity. And that is basically all of Yemen, except one state in Yemen that is Hadramud, where it is at the stress level. Basically what that means, a lot of these people, if they don't get 25% who are in the emergency stage, if they don't get immediate assistance, they're going to die from hunger. So if we look at also of what, you know, the destruction of health services, 50% of Yemeni health services and health centers have been destroyed. In addition to that, there are also diversion of fuel that gets into Yemen into Jeddah port. And some of the fuel ships stay there up to 256 days. And then Yemenis have to pay fines for holding these ships because they're not able to do business. So because of that, and again, the destruction of health services, destruction of water services, destruction of electricity, we've also had a range of other infectious diseases that are spreading in Yemen. We have waterborne diseases that are affecting most of the people in the central lands of Yemen. And we also have vector-borne diseases like dengue, for example, and chikungonia and malaria that affect most of the coastal areas of Yemen. And if we put these two together, we realize that almost all of Yemen is impacted by this. So I'm giving you examples of that cholera, which we have over two million cases of cholera in Yemen in the 21st century. It's actually a shame on us as human beings and on humanity that we have an outbreak at this level and this magnitude, and we're not able to control it. If we look at dengue fever as well, for example, this year in 2020, there were over 600,000 dengue fever cases in Yemen. This is horrific because Yemen has already all the four seater types of dengue fever, which means any new cases are going to be more hemorrhagic in presentation and higher depth is going to happen because of that. If we look at severe acute respiratory infections, we are in the same place as well where we have a large number of cases. Yemen has the largest fatality rate from COVID-19 at 30%. This with a health system that has been destroyed. The theory, for example, that affects mostly children and is vaccine preventable. Yemen has not had the theory outbreak since 1980. However, in 2018, we started seeing the theory outbreak that has been raging until 2020. So these are some of the issues that the population is suffering from. However, the fear of hunger is the one that most people are concerned about. There was a survey that was done in Yemen about their concern about COVID-19. The respondents told us in the survey that they are more concerned about increasing food prices and loss of income than they are about becoming sick with COVID-19. We were told through the people who distributed food aid to Yemeni in need from many families that they would rather die of COVID-19 than die of hunger because that is a more severe death. In all of that, we also have seen because of the blockade and the war, we have seen a huge depreciation of the Yemeni real compared to the U.S. dollars. Of course, for any important Yemen, you need the U.S. dollars. The situation with the depreciation is actually worse in the areas under the Saudi Emirati controls than under the Sana'a government. For example, in December of 2020, the rate of exchange in the areas under the Saudi and Emirati was 840 per dollar compared to 600 in the Houthi controlled areas. If we look at the people, there was also USAID cut aids for Yemen. What concerns me when USAID cuts aid to Yemen is they also bully other countries into reducing aid to Yemen. They have been a huge cut in Yemen since USAID decided to cut aid. For example, in December 2019, there were 15.6 million people receiving aid from UN agencies. By April of 2020, only 9.5 million were receiving aid. If we look also at the terms of programs, the UN had 41 programs in Yemen that they were supporting. Unfortunately, because of the aid cuts, that 31 of these programs were cut. Yesterday, I also heard that UN agencies that used to support health centers with fuel that they also are going to start cutting fuel to the health centers, which is a guaranteed way of shutting what is remaining of the functioning health centers in Yemen because fuel crisis is huge in Yemen. Between June of last year to the end of 2020, only about 1% to 2% of what Yemen needs in fuel got into Yemen. There were a lot of issues with the cuts. Also, there is a Washington Post article that said at Yemen hospital racked by U.S. funding cuts, children are dying from hunger. Emergency relief coordinator retraced that Yemen is being starved while the Security Councils echoes calls for action. This is very important because a lot of the aid agencies in Yemen are very reluctant to speak up freely about the issues in Yemen. This is a man-made crisis. This is a political decision to stop the people of Yemen. This is not a natural disaster that we could not foresee. For example, in 2017, when Jan Eagleman from NRC visited Yemen, he came back and said there is a biblical proportion of famine in Yemen. At that point in time, there were 7 million people who were experiencing famine. That's in 2017. By 2020, that number is 16.2 million. Of course, everybody has heard about the designation of Houthi by the outgoing Trump administration. It went into effect today. That will have also a huge impact on the Yemeni population in terms of reduced funding for the humanitarian response. It will halt the work of many international agencies. All the financial services, whether we're sending money for aid or sending money for families, those are going to be affected because banks would refuse to transfer funds to Yemen. I know from the Yemen relief work that we do, every time we send money to Yemen, we face a lot of challenges. Multiple times, they have returned the money because banks refuse to take it. Right now, we only have one route, and that is to transfer in euros through a bank in Germany. I'm not sure if we're going to be able to continue to send money to Yemen for that. However, there were some licenses, so I'm grateful for those licenses, but that's not enough. We really need this to be reversed. According to former diplomats who had worked in Yemen and the region, the Houthis do not meet the criteria for this designation. We also know that it's going to impact an already very fragile population and increase hunger and death in Yemen and put the majority of people at full-fledged famine. As you've heard, every agency that's working in Yemen have come against this decision. I just want to read a few of them to you. A refugee international called this reckless and destructive. Mercy Corps called this deeply concerned about the harmful effect. NRC called this will hamstring the ability of aid agencies to respond counterproductive and dangerous Oxfam America and pure diplomatic vandalism rescue organization. So I'll stop here, and I hope to answer questions that you may have. Thank you. Well, something to really quickly point out, Dr. Aisha, based upon what you were saying, according to UNICEF, there are more than 24 billion people, which make up some 80 percent of the population are now starving in this crisis, and 12 million of those are children. And hospitals are starving for gloves, let alone oxygen during coronavirus. So, Mercy. Thank you so much, doctor. We're now going to go to our other guest, Hassan El-Tayid, who's the lobbyist with the Friends Committee on National Legislation. And we're so proud and honored to have both of you with us. And if you can, give us some background on this conflict as well as what we can do going forward in the obstacles and the actions we can take. Thank you. Well, thank you all so much for joining and inviting Aisha and I. We're honored to be here. And we love CodePink. When I first got to D.C., the lobby to end support for the Yemen War, I crashed on the CodePink couch with Paki for about four weeks. We watched Democracy Now quite a bit. And I would just, you know, go from the CodePink house to lobby every door in Congress that I could. And that was in 2018, around the first Yemen war powers push. So, yeah, so let's talk. I mean, Yemen, like Aisha laid out, is in a really desperate situation and we're at a real crossroads. There's a lot of bad stuff, but there's some good stuff that, and I want to kind of put it together and sort of figure out what we can do about it. I'm going to briefly touch on the origins of the war, but kind of just move us along. So just so people have context. Yemen has a very complex history and Aisha, you know, she can correct me if I'm wrong on anything. But, you know, the gist of it is in 2011, there was an Arab Spring uprising that ousted President Saleh in a nonviolent way. And they installed Vice President Hadi to be the interim leader as they moved to a more representative form of government. There was tensions. There was a real feeling that, you know, there was corruption and the needs weren't being met. And the Houthis, you know, rose up and ousted then President Hadi with actually the ex-President Saleh and together they started, they captured Sana. Hadi fled to Riyadh and asked for support from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Muhammad bin Salman. Then the Defense Minister put together the Saudi-led coalition to start a full-scale aerial campaign and blockade on the country of Yemen in an effort to reinstall Hadi as the, you know, the primary government in the country. The Obama administration was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal at the time. They were feeling pretty vulnerable and they went ahead and supported the military of Saudi Arabia and supported the Saudi-led coalition in the form of mid-air refueling aerial support with logistics. They gave spare parts transfers, which are really important for these coalition airstrikes, logistical support, targeting assistance. And with that support, Saudi Arabia just started bombing civilians. I mean, that's pretty much what's been going on. You know, I think well over 50% of the casualties right now from these airstrikes are, in fact, you know, innocent Yemenis. And the blockade, which Aisha mentioned, is just really choking off the ability of the country to import and export commercial goods, turning their ability to import humanitarian assistance. And 16 million people are living on the brink of famine. Now, we've seen Congress push back in a large part because of the work of groups like CodePink and, you know, just really, you know, speaking truth to power and working on, you know, the grassroots lobbying effort. And together we did something pretty powerful. We ended up passing for the first time in U.S. history a war powers resolution to cut off support for the Saudi-led coalition war on Yemen. And that was in 2019, April 2019. Unfortunately, Trump vetoed that resolution. And but Congress forced more votes and, you know, has done an incredible, you know, effort to try to push back on the Saudi-led coalition in that time. We've seen a real coalition forum on the Hill that's made up of Republicans and Democrats. We've got Biden to basically say that he wants to end support for the war. And so I think there's a lot to be hopeful for. Now, here are the potential pitfalls. In the lame duck, Trump rammed through about $23 billion of weapon sales to the UAE. There was a vote to block that. Didn't get the amount of votes we needed. Almost every Democrat voted to block the weapons deal, except for two, Kelly and Sinema from Arizona. Every single Republican, except for Rand Paul, voted to supply the UAE with these weapons. Also in the lame duck, the Trump administration is trying to push another $800 million of weapons to Saudi Arabia. Now, there are, I believe, your call campaign tonight. I gave a script to Medea and Danica about these joint resolutions of disapproval to block the Saudi weapons sales. I think that's a great ask of members right now to do that. I mean, we know that Biden's been saying the right thing. If anybody watched the nomination hearings of Blinken and Austin, I did, because I'm kind of a nerd and I just sat in front of C-SPAN for a good chunk of my day. And they were saying largely the right things on this issue, but we need to put a lot of pressure on them, especially on the UAE sales. Because while I've heard Biden be good on Saudi, the UAE piece, I haven't really heard them mention that. And there's going to be a strong effort and strong push to support the UAE because of the Abraham Accords, because they've normalized their relationship with Israel. So there's going to be a reluctance to try to cut off the weapons, because it was largely looked at that those were quid pro quo. We'd give them the weapons they would normalize. But we can't let that happen. They're a huge driver of the violence in Yemen. They transfer these weapons to al-Qaeda affiliates. They're trying to annex parts of Yemen. And they've been a real obstruction of the peace process. And working through 90,000 proxies in Yemen. So we can't forget about the damaging role the UAE has played. One last thing I'll mention. There's so many things to mention, but I don't want to overwhelm anybody. The FTO designation happened on January 12th. Secretary Pompeo, one of his final moves, this disastrous decision to label the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. And what that means is organizations like Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, Aishah's Amazing Org, and other organizations risk criminal liability if they do any transactions or communicate at all with the Houthis. And they control, they're governing territory with 80% of the population. This is unprecedented that they would try to do an FTO designation on a population that's this big. They're the de facto government, not just a rag tag group. So I think that's deeply problematic. So the good thing is that members are speaking out. Chairman Meeks from the House Armed Services Committee, he took over for angle after angle got beat by Jamal Bowman. So now Democratic Representative Rep Meeks, who is a little better, not as good as Castro on a lot of the issues, but it's pretty good on some issues, especially Iran. But he led a letter in the House calling for reversal of the FTO designation early in the Biden administration. So that's positive. So that's good. We've had a few Republicans, including Senator Young, who's issued a statement pushing back. Just so folks have it, I've been keeping track of everybody that has put out a statement. I'm just going to drop it in the chat. And if your member is not on there, you should give them a call. Another thing I'll drop in the chat is a letter that FCML and Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation supported calling on Biden to reverse on day one, because I think that's critical. Now, on top of cutting off humanitarian aid, the FTO designation will also prevent peace talks from actually happening. I mean, it's going to be very difficult for a special envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, to be able to conduct any sort of dialogue between the Hadi government, the STC, the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, all the different partners, all the different warring parties right now. So I think that's really critical that we reverse this. Jake Sullivan, Biden's National Security Advisor, has said he wants to reverse, so that's a good sign. But they need to be hearing from us. This has to be not day one, hour one, minute one, second one. This could be a disaster for millions of Yemenis, and it could tip Yemen into a famine, as Mark Lowcock has warned and Aisha has spoke to. So I think those are great action items. The last thing I'll mention is Rokana is considering introducing another Yemen war powers resolution. I don't know how I got the controls, but I've been admitting people to this talk. I hope they're cool. One of the co-hosts has signed that sign. Okay, cool. I'm like, let that guy in, let that guy in. Hopefully, I'm not letting in everyone's family here, so I'll are welcome. That's how I feel. Unless you're Secretary Pompeo, then you ain't part of my family. Is that too soon? Okay. It's soon to be ex-Secretary Pompeo. But yeah, Rokana wants to introduce a Yemen war powers resolution. And he's saying that he will to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition war in Yemen. We've already passed another version. We're trying to do it again. And I think it's so critical that we do this because we got to figure out how to not get into future wars. And strengthening the Yemen war powers resolution of the War Powers Act in 1973 is going to give us the tool to end unauthorized wars in the future. And if we get Biden to sign, he'll be the first president in history to sign a WPR. And that is just so powerful. One for preventing future, you know, wars. And I also think it's going to help diplomacy on ending the Yemen war in particular, because it'll show the war in parties that it's not just Biden, but it's bipartisan, bicameral majorities in Congress that want to end the war. And that's a lot more leverage than just one person doing it with executive order. And we also have the added benefit that in four years, Trump 2.0 can't take it away from us. You know, it'll be a signed law. So that is why it's so important that we get this through. With that, I'll open it up to any questions and happy to chat more. Thank you so much. And before I forget, how can, both of you could put in the chat how people can reach you if they have further questions. Hania and Nadia are going to take the questions and stack. Sure. Absolutely. There was a very important question that came up, because nowadays it's very hard to really trust organizations. But Pat asks, which charity organizations are the most trusted for Yemen health? If you could guide us, Dr. Jaman and Hassan, that would be wonderful. Can I speak on behalf of Aisha and her amazing work? Aisha leads one of the best humanitarian organizations I've ever seen in action. They work with Yemenis on the ground in Yemen. They use Yemen source products and goods, and it's led by somewhat of incredible integrity and honesty and clear-eyed vision, which is Aisha. I think if anything we can do to support Aisha and her important work is so huge. And they go into parts of Yemen that a lot of the other humanitarian orgs don't go to. They go to the rural areas where internally displaced Yemenis are found and work to provide food baskets, medical relief, and I can't say enough. I think Yemenfoundation.org, kicking a few bucks. I know I've kicked in a few bucks, and I'll let Aisha keep going, but I just wanted to speak on her behalf, because it might be kind of awkward if she's trying to do that for herself. I'm grateful for the support. Thank you. We are a volunteer organization, both here and in Yemen, and as Hassan said, we work with people in the field, so we work in inaccessible areas. A lot of people don't realize that Yemen has the highest mountains in the Middle East. So with that means we have a lot of scattered population that live in very difficult areas. And because we work with individuals in these areas, it's very easy for us to reach the neediest, because it doesn't cost us travel to these areas. We also don't need security, because a lot of the international agencies need security to travel within Yemen, and we don't need permits to be working these areas, because again, we're working with locals. They're all volunteers, and we're also volunteers here, so we've been able to reach quite a lot of people with whatever we get. 100% of the donations go to support people need. Our next question, and thank you Hassan for, I'm so impressed, I have to say Hassan, you spoke so eloquently for a couple of minutes. You admitted people to this Zoom call. That's a talent, so thank you. That's a huge talent. I think the point of duty as a co-host of this event is to miss out. This is normally a female-led event, but hey Hassan, we will welcome you to be one of our co-hosts for the future, so. Now, Sister Nadia, I did post the other question for you, if you could ask it, that'd be great. From Mike Levy. The question we have from Mike Levy is, can U.S. agency or U.S. aid agency enact immediate effective carve-out for humanitarian organizations to enable aid while we work to end the terrorist designation, or might that work against us also, so that's the question. Aisha, would you like to take it first? Yeah, so there's reasons why that's problematic is because prior to the designations, commercial shippers have already been reluctant to import to Yemen given the high risk of delays and risks of violence and the extra costs, so these designations only increase this level of risk for commercial entities and put in further places the vital work of humanitarian peace builders at risk. Even if these humanitarian exemptions are allowed, these financial institutions are likely to find the risk to be too high and resulting in them scaling down the humanitarian assistance, so I think we got to really push for reversing on day one and getting that over the finish line because it's just too risky. There's just so much risk involved, and this is on top of a Saudi coalition blockade on Yemen on all ports of entry into the country, so it's like squeezed, you know, OJ that's been squeezed again. It's just like, Yemen's just been squeezed so much, and we've, yeah, so I think just calling for that. What I see the administration might do is they might actually put a pause on the FTO designation and then just review internally and then work to reverse, so that's another potential option where you don't let it go through, you just hit the pause button. There's a bunch of different ideas, but we just have to keep being loud and keep getting members to speak out, and that's going to raise the urgency for the administration. If your member is not on the list of folks that have spoken out yet, make sure that they are on that list and we're tracking it. I want to add a little bit here, so today they also they had some licenses for people like us to continue the work, but still that doesn't mean that we're not at risk of liability. I also want to talk a little bit more about the blockade that hasn't talked about. For example, I've been trying for a whole year to get leukemia medicine that's donated to Yemen Relief by Novartis to get to Yemen. I have not been able to get to Yemen. That impact of the blockade on Yemen. We tried to send water filters to Yemen. Shipments that was donated to us took eight months to get in because of diversion. The second time we could not find a single company, shipping company in the US that agreed to take the water filters to Yemen. We had to ship to South Africa, and then from South Africa it was shipped to Yemen. It cost us four times what would have cost us if we were able to ship to Yemen. I cannot go to Yemen to visit my parents without getting the Saudi approval for me, a Yemeni American. I can't visit my parents without the stamp of the Saudi that yes, I can enter into Yemen. When I go to Yemen, I'm always afraid because there is only one airport that's allowed under their control. I'm always afraid that they're going to snatch me at the airport and I will disappear because they've done that to so many people. And I think the only reason they haven't done that because I'm not outspoken about the role in the war on Yemen is because I have a US passport. So that's what we have to go through because of the blockade. Marcy, your question is very critical actually and then we'll go to Mark's question. Thank you. Two things I wanted to say. I think it's important that we hold Haines' feet to the fire and ensure that she releases that report on the CIA investigation into the Khashoggi murder. I think that will help with political will to cut off these weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. On the UAE, to what degree is there support in your estimation, both of you, in Congress to cut off the weapons sales to the UAE? Good question. I agree with you on the report on Jamal Khashoggi. That's going to be helpful. On the UAE, let's look at what happened. In the FY 2020, we got through the house resolutions to cut off weapons sales to Saudi and the UAE. In that same year, we had joint resolutions and disapproval to block weapons to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. But since what happened is the UAE signed a piece of cord, a quote-unquote peace deal with Israel. That has gained a lot of favor in DC. Now, there are still issues. We ended up getting 46 Democratic senators to block the weapons sales. But unfortunately, a lot of them were making points of, well, we support the UAE, we support the peace deal, we don't support the way these weapons are being pushed through without this informal process of review that typically the administration and administration would afford Congress. And so that review period didn't happen, and they were just trying to ram through this $23 billion weapons deal. So even though we got 46 Democratic senators to block it, I'm not even sure that exists. But it doesn't mean that has to stay that way. What we have to do is really reach out to our members. I think anybody here from Arizona really needs to put the pressure on Sinema and Kelly. I'm working with some activists out there to place some op-eds. I've got a lobby visit later on this week with Senator Kelly's office. We're trying to put some pressure on Senator Sinema as well. So those two key members can shift this conversation one way or the other. Are they going to go more in favor of supporting weapon sales or are they going to put this in the bucket that we have to cut off support for the Saudi coalition? And that's part of it. One last thing I will say is that we're working on trying to flip the script instead of having joint resolutions of disapproval. So the onus is on Congress to get a super majority 67 votes to be able to block any weapon to make it resolutions of approval. Therefore putting the onus on the administration to at least make the case so enough members, even a simple majority of members can authorize. So that's another fix. I do see a couple of fans up here, but I do also have Alan Minsky, the executive director of PDA. If you could unmute yourself, Alan, that'd be great. Thank you so much and thank you for the tremendous presentation. Again, it's a type of circumstances. I'm the executive director of Professor of Democrats of America and I see Dan O'Neill typing away and I don't know if Dan can hear me. But Dan is our state coordinator in Arizona. I suppose somewhat to our shame at the moment. There we go. He just wrote in the chat. If there's any one state in the country that is the most outstanding state within Professor Democrats of America right now, the gold standard is Arizona. And we've got great connections across Arizona and we're available to work with you for both senators. A little bit to our shame. Kristen Sinema was once on the advisory board of PDA Arizona. Her politics have been moving very far to the right. That was back before they started moving to the right. So we actually have some personal relations with Sinema and I think less so with Kelly. But Dan, if you want to give it a thumbs up, it'd be really great if we can help you out on that, Hasan. Absolutely. Anything that we can do here in Arizona, we will be putting as much pressure on Kelly and Sinema as possible. We're doing it anyway on about six or seven other fronts. So they're on the top of our list. So we'll add this to it. So Hasan, just send me, I just put a little note. Send me some talking points and whatever we can do we will do. Okay. Dan, that's terrific. I suggest you primary them. Well, we're trying to get Marcy Linnigrad to move from California to Arizona so we can do that. Okay. And you asked for talking points. I dropped in an NGO letter that FCNL signed on this UAE weapons sale talking about all the things that the UAE are doing in Yemen that makes it so we shouldn't be selling weapons to them anymore about the transfers and all that. And you can basically, I think there's a way that they can kind of correct the record a bit here by supporting the Yemen war powers, by being better in the future. So definitely use the points in that letter and urge that they become co-sponsor of the new Yemen war powers resolution that we were going to see coming up soon. Hasan, can you send that to me? I'm going to put my email in the chat. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I did put the letter already in the chat. Thank you, Dan. Sister Nadia, go ahead with me. So the next question we have is about CBC. The question was from Mark and what he wanted to hear if anyone knows Ohio representative Betty's stance on Yemen. One thing we got going for us is that every single Democrat has already voted to end support for the Yemen war and it's primarily, you know, the makeup of the congressional Black Caucus. We have more work to do, I think getting rep meeks to, you know, to continue to be good and to keep forcing the question. But I am, you know, I'm not really worried with the CBC on this on this issue. We do have a couple more questions, but we are coming closer to six and we don't want to miss out on the call to action solid. Sister Rima and brother Omer asked their questions. We will have room for two more written questions that have come up and we will go to call to action. With Marcy's permission, that is. I will yield to the call of action because I think it's more important. Thank you. I just wanted to make the comment that I don't see any of the California delegation on that ladder. You know, I got California in my heart. I lived there for a long time. I was born in Sacramento and lived in the Bay Area, but I live in D.C. now, so I guess that doesn't count. Brother Abid, 30 seconds or less for your question, please. Regarding the call to action, is there any way or is it too late to put in something really quickly about calling for an immediate reversal of that foreign terrorist organization or to put in immediate reversal or immediate pause if it's strategic to put that in, if it's easier for the Biden administration to do that? And then to also just mention the point that, you know, the whole thing about giving waivers and licenses, this is obviously needed, but it still will prevent, you know, like you said, the banks make them more hesitant and make them scale down stuff and also it will prevent, you know, financial remunerate, whatever their word is, remunerations. When people send money to their relatives and family, you know, it will block that and block other economic things. So I was just wondering, yeah. Marcy, I don't see a reason why. We can certainly add that. Hasan, it should be a pause or a reversal that we're asking our own senators to support. So yeah, that's a good question. I think it's fine to add that. We were just trying to make it simple and, you know, just have the H.J. Rez 15 and H.J. Rez 16 when I wrote this call to action. I think calling on your member to make a public statement urging Biden to reverse on day one should be the ask. Terrific. Well, at that, I think that we should move into our capital calling party. And I want to thank you, Hasan. Thank you, Dr. Jamon, for joining us tonight. It's been illuminating and motivating. And I've already tweeted to Joe Biden and Anthony Blank and my good friends to please reverse this designation on day one hour one and release the aid. So I think you both, I believe you both posted, if not in the chat, please do so how people can get in touch with you. And again, thank you so much. And now we're going to move into our capital calling party. We have 102 people on the line or on the Zoom. And I urge you to stay with us. Let's go over the action alert together. And people had mentioned, can we add to it? Absolutely. I think first let's go ahead and do what Hasan suggested, call the capital switchboard, ask for your own Congress members office, and leave a message asking them to co-sponsor and vote in favor of H.J. Rez 15 and H.J. Rez 16 to stop. Just lost my chat. There we go. There's the script. I mean, it's a long script for a phone call, but you can certainly use the first paragraph. And then after that, to email this paragraph or these few paragraphs to your Congress member. Once you do that, please call your two state senators using the Capitol Hill switchboard to urge them to oppose the FTO designation so that aid can be released. How's that sound? Great. Can you move that up so I can take a picture of it, please? Well, my suggestion, Marcy, would be to perhaps keep this on the screen, the script screen so everyone can now. But is that the whole script? That ends up a little bit higher. So if you can start it well. I think maybe shrink it a little bit, like make the size once smaller, or just the display. And somebody say, please, what FTO stands for? Foreign terrorist organization. That's what Pompeo has termed the Houthis in Yemen, which means that aid, it will be completely blocked. Could you move it up? We still can't see it. All I can see is the first paragraph. Even just those two paragraphs, that's enough. You got it. I'm going to start calling. Marcy, could you add that thing in about the FTO at the bottom? I think that's something that we're going to ask the senators to do, Hasan, if you're still with us. Yeah, I think it could be for anybody. But just saying that you want your member, in addition, I would like you to make a public statement calling on President-elect Biden to reverse the FTO designation on day one. What we're saying is whoever has access to this Google document is add that in there. So we don't have to remember it or think twice about it. Yeah, that's why I was repeating it in case someone wanted to jot that down. I'm happy to repeat that if folks need me to. Yeah, Hasan, if you repeat that, what I will do is write it down and then we can perhaps put that in a Google document. Well, actually Marcy, I see, who's editing the document? It's me. Oh, great. Okay. Hasan, should we repeat that one more time, please? Um, I urge Congressman Blank to make a public statement calling on President Biden to reverse the FTO designation on day one. Has to be clearer than that. It has to be the FTO designation on the Houthis. Sure. I mean, I thought that was implied because we're talking about Yemen through the whole rest of the script, but I agree that point. Is it Congressperson or Senator? I thought you said Senator. Your calling would be, it applies to both. Whoever you're calling, you can just change the congressman from congressman to Senator. The reversal must be done by the president. Is that correct? Or the Secretary of State or Congress, as far as I understand. Yeah, you could say, you know, calling on the Biden administration to reverse the FTO designation on the Houthis day one. But I think it's, you know, I think that's, that's pretty good here. And, you know, it's, I guess, yeah, I think this is great. So the, we really should call the representatives because HR 15 and 16 is a house bill, right? It's not in the Senate. Yeah, that's, that's right. So if you're calling your rep, I'll go, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, if you're calling your rep, I think this is the. Stop calling it our house rep, asking them to cosponsor this legislation and then to publicly urge Biden and Blinken to immediately remove that FTO designation. And I guess when you go to the Senate, because they don't really have a chance to cosponsor HJ res 15, maybe just urging them to, to call on Biden to reverse the FTO could work, you know, or urging that they, they work to block weapon sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without necessarily doing a number or. So anybody talking, I can't hear anything. Talking because we're calling and we're writing and people are on mute. Sorry, put yourself on mute. Everybody should be on mute. Thank you. So Senator Feinstein's mailbox is full and I'm hoping that that's because we have bombarded her with messages. And yeah, I don't know if you can hear me, but I can't hear the meeting anymore. Um, that's a good thing. Actually, Rema, I can hear you. I think everyone's really busy making calls. I got no, I can't hear you. No, I can. Great. Hello. Was there a question? Okay. What is your question? Was there a question? I think maybe at this point we could just move into the chat. How are people doing? Has everybody been able to make calls or at least send an email? Was there a question? We can hear you. Oh, okay. I just wanted to ask you, is there a way you could either post the letter on the website or else in the chat? Because I can't enlarge it enough. I mean, I know I can speak to the issue fine. But if we're supposed to use the letter for some kind of template, it's really small and it can't be enlarged on the screen. I've got the Zoom opened as wide as I can. So I'm just asking if that's a possibility. Maybe you can move it into the chat. Yeah, she's doing that right now. I'm just going to say if you're not on our Google group, in our Google group, and you'd like to be, because I can- Hi, Daryl. Hi, Pam. Hi, Amanda. Please tell me. Yes. Bruce? Bruce? Bruce? I got a clarification on some information. The agreements are just about finished. But what is her title? Ruth? I can email the script to you if you'd like. Oh, that would be wonderful. Do you want me to give you my email right now? I have it, Ruth. I'll go ahead and send it right now. Okay. Do you have- is it the Ruth Fates Strauss MD1? Marcy? Did you have a Google- Ruth, did you get the last one when I- I've got one that pops up whenever I put your name in. Let me just check. Myla, I was just going to say that we have this Google group, and we are already in it. And I can send this letter out over the Google group as the action that we took tonight. If you are not in the Google group and you would like to be, just email me marcymarcy at codepink.org. Right now, we have the Google group on moderation, which means that I have to approve everything that goes out, because we had a lot of traffic going back and forth. It was like, you know, not necessarily relevant to everybody. And we didn't want to- we didn't want to annoy people. We wanted to streamline things. So if you want to join, we would love to have you on board. You know, we've been doing this for about 20 minutes. I think most of us have at least made a phone call or sent an email. And I really- I want to thank all of you who stayed. How many- how many are still with us? Can you see? I can't see. Yeah, we actually have about 33 participants including our honor speaker, Dr. Jomon. So- Terrific. So what we'll do right now is we'll say goodnight. And again, I'll send this letter out over the- over the Google group and so that everybody can have it. Please share it with friends. Get others to follow up as well. And next week, we will be discussing Iran. Yes, I'm excited about- Do you guys want to say Hania or Nadia? No, I'm just- I'm very excited about our next call that I invite everyone to please participate. At least bring a couple of people with you on these calls and get as many organizations involved. These are calls that we put together to plan a call of action around. So they're impactful, they're powerful and they truly make a change. So we would love to see you all. And sister Nadia, it's a little bit later. All right. So at that, I want to thank our guests again, Dr. Jomon. Thank you so much for all the work that you do and for joining us tonight. And thank Hassan. I want to thank Hassan. It was excellent to hear his assessment of Congress and where we're at, what we need to do. And again, appreciate all of your participation. I hope to see you next Tuesday night. Same time, same Zoom link. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all very much. And if you want to save the chat, just click on the box at the lower end of your chat box. This phone does not take unidentified calls. Save chat. So we'll stay a little bit for people who have a hard time saving it. We'll stick around for a few minutes. That way I can enjoy Sheila's cat. Well, there's Nadia. Nadia, you want to say good night? That cat was socks. Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. I really, it was really great. And I really thank you, Marcy. And thank you, Code Pink. Thank you, Hania. It's really, they actually feel good about this. Thank you, Nadia. I hope you will call code with us as we go forward. Thank you, Hania. Always terrific to work with my sisters. Thank you. Thank you. And you make all of this happen, Marcy. So it's really a great honor. And thank you, Mary. Yes, Mary. Absolutely. Without you, none of this would be possible. All right. Good night. Time pleasure. Bye, Brother Abid. Bye, Weema. Bye, everyone. Bye, Dr. Sanderborn.