Anti-war activist Medea Benjamin

Anti-war activist Medea Benjamin was born in 1952 as Susie Benjamin. As a self-described "nice Jewish girl from Long Island," Benjamin received her degree from Tufts University. While at Tufts she changed her name to Medea for the Greek mythological character.

Benjamin then went on to Columbia for a master’s in public health, and economics, with additional study at the New School for Social Research.

While living in Castro’s Cuba with her husband, a coach for Cuba’s national basketball team, Benjamin was deported after she wrote an anti-government article in the government-run newspaper.

She moved to San Francisco in 1983 to work for Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy.

In 1988 Benjamin co-founded Global Exchange with Kevin Danaher. The organization devotes its resources and manpower to a variety of leftist causes with an anti-war, anti-capitalist agenda.

Benjamin endorsed a national conference, "Perspectives for Democracy and Socialism in the 90s." held in Berkeley in 1992, and hosted by the Committees of Correspondence.

Protests in 1999 in Seattle caused millions of dollars in property damage by rampaging anti-globalization activists who burned cars, smashed windows and generally sowed disorder in a failed attempt to shut down the conference of the World Trade Organization. She considered the failed attempt a “battle cry.”

In 2000 Benjamin ran, unsuccessfully, as the Green Party's U.S. Senate candidate in California. That year she also spoke at the 18th annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York.

She views America's war on terror a form of terrorism and asserts that President Bush "responded to the violent attack of 9/11 with the notion of perpetual war.”

Benjamin led a group to Afghanistan to meet people whose relatives had perished in the U.S. bombing campaign there.

"We must insist that governments stop taking innocent lives in the name of seeking justice for the loss of other innocent lives," she said.

In November 2002, Benjamin co-founded--along with Jodie Evans, Diane Wilson, and radical Wiccan activist, Starhawk, the anti-war group Code Pink for Peace.

Also in 2002, Benjamin exhorted Americans to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world, from dependence on Middle Eastern oil to policy regarding Israel."

In 2003 Benjamin was a signatory to the widely publicized Not in Our Name (NION) anti-war statement.

The statement asserts the U.S. war on terror poses "grave dangers to the people of the world in the form of war and repression, loosed by the Bush Administration in a spirit of revenge."

In April 2003, Benjamin wrote that "military spending robs our schools, hospitals and housing programs," and stressed the importance of "making common cause with immigrant and ethnic groups that have found themselves under attack in the wake of September 11, further eroding our civil liberties."

In 2004 Benjamin co-founded United for Peace and Justice, and the organization Iraq Occupation Watch, whose express mission is to encourage widespread desertion by "conscientious objectors" in the U.S. military.

In 2004, Benjamin announced that Global Exchange, Code Pink, and Families for Peace would donate a combined $600,000 in medical supplies and cash to the families of the terrorist insurgents fighting American troops in Fallujah, Iraq.

In March 2006, Benjamin and other members of Code Pink brought a delegation of six Iraqi Muslim women to the United Nations in New York and to the Capitol in Washington, DC, where they lobbied senators and congressional representatives, met with the leaders of NGOs and think tanks, and delivered a petition (with more than 100,000 signatures from people around the world) calling for an end to the Iraq War.

In November 2006, Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan together traveled to South Korea on a mission designed to publicly condemn a U.S. government plan for expanding an American military base near Seoul. The Benjamin/Sheehan visit was strongly supported by pro-North Korean groups, hard-Left student movements and labor organizations, and Communist sympathizers.

In January 2007, Benjamin and Sheehan jointly traveled to Cuba to publicly call for the closing of America’s Guantanamo Bay detention center there.

According to Benjamin, the economic policies of Venezuela's communist President Hugo Chavez have placed his country at "the center of a new, progressive model of socioeconomic development that is shaping Latin America’s future."

"There are few countries," she says, "where everyday people actually receive the benefits of cooperation with multinationals: a redistribution of oil profit, a guarantee for healthcare written into the constitution, and record-breaking achievements in education. ... Venezuela has embarked upon some of the most innovative regional programs that Latin America has ever seen."

"When most Americans hear of human rights abuses, they likely think of atrocities in some far-off country in a forgotten corner of the globe," says Benjamin.

"Abuses against individuals' basic rights occur regularly here in the United States. Our money-saturated political system hardly deserves the title democracy. ”

In June 2009, Benjamin and Code Pink headed a 66-person delegation to Gaza, where Hamas officials handed Benjamin a letter to deliver to the U.S. embassy in Cairo, on the occasion of President Barack Obama's visit to Egypt.

Hamas called on Obama to use his influence to help the Palestinian people in their struggle against alleged Israeli abuses. Benjamin subsequently penned an article in the Huffington Post praising them for what she called their commitment to "mutual respect and adherence to international law."

Benjamin added, “The letter represents a significant development in an effort by Hamas to present a new face to the Western world on behalf of a Palestinian population that has been victimized by Israeli attacks."

In February 2012 Benjamin gave voice to her underlying awareness of the fact that to openly acknowledge her socialist/communist ideals would be politically dangerous to the cause: “We have such a reactionary population and such a lack of a broad spectrum of dialogue that even talking about socialism in the context of the United States marginalizes you to such an extent that your voice is barely heard.” In the same interview, she said that “capitalism has generated a system in which corporations have a voice that drowns out the voice of the majority of the people.”

Benjamin is currently married to Kevin Danaher. She has authored eight books, including Bridging the Global Gap, The Peace Corps and More, Stop the Next War Now, Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism, and Don't Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.