Thursday, Jan. 18, at 7 pm: "Fear vs Hope" with Reza Jalali in the Levenson Community Meeting Room of the Portsmouth Public Library, 175 Parrott Ave. Portsmouth, NH. A part of Martin Luther King, Jr celebrations, this talk addresses the current environment in which administration-sponsored fear-mongering and mistrust seem to rule our daily lives. Reza will speak about how as a nation we were misled us to go to a war in Iraq, made to tolerate the use of medieval torture as a tool to fight the "War on Terror" and finally the insane notion which has made the world a more dangerous place by dividing the international community into the two camps of "us" and "them". The talk provides historical parallels between now and the period of civil rights movement when Dr. King made his famous anti-war speech at the Riverside Church in 1967. Reza Jalali, a resident of Portland, Maine is a nationally known human rights and refugee activist. Since starting the Maine Kurdish Relief Fund to help Kurdish refugees fleeing the First Gulf War, he served as a board member of Amnesty International USA and also a founder of the Ethnic Minority Coalition. This event is being jointly sponsored by Seacoast Peace Response and Amnesty International Chapter 550. For more information contact Amy Antonucci at amyla44@juno.com, phone 750-7506.