@StefSimanowitz wrote about Eric in 2013. Here Eric speaks about standing up for journalist

Stefan Simanowitz on Twitter on 19.3.13...thread
In 2003, as Baghdad shuddered under the onslaught that was operation "shock and awe", 75yrold Eric Levy from Camden was huddled with a dozen other peace campaigners in an air raid shelter at Dura oil refinery in southern Baghdad./

The group found themselves in Iraq at the time of the Allied invasion after travelling there from London by double-decker bus. They called themselves the "human shields" and set off with the intention of protecting Iraqi civilians from Allied bombs.

If you're over 20, or were a precociously politically aware five-year-old in 2003, you might remember the human shields leaving for Iraq in a frenzy of media coverage. “The idea behind the movement was to use the racist way in which Western lives are valued /

more than Iraqi lives to either stop the invasion or – failing that – protect crucial civilian infrastructure sites,” Levy recalls ten years on. “We may not have achieved the first objective, but none of the sites where the shields were staying were bombed.”/

Who wants to know what it's like to go on the record with a reporter? Pull up a chair. I'll tell you.

I should clarify that I've done this a grand total of 1 time and with only one journalist. :-) I can speak to my experience and what helped.

"Going on the record" generally means you're taking some sort of risk. I knew this. I thought it over for a very long time. I hoped someone else would go on the record. I kept waiting for that person to show up. And one day I realized, hmmmm..... maybe I should be that person.

I knew of @bobsmietana because I had seen his work. He's passionate about religion reporting. He loves the "God beat". If you have a story to tell and it involves something related to a faith community, you want someone who understands that faith.

In addition, @bobsmietana lives in the Nashville area. (That's widely known now. Sorry, Bob). He understands Middle TN. It has a rare air of it's own when it comes to religion reporting.

AUGUST WILL ALWAYS COME BEFORE DECEMBER

Journalism, for all its bells and whistles, shiny business models, is fundamentally built on honour. 
None of the big offices, fancy equipment will matter, if the humans are not humane.

That it was only in December you saw a call made since August, only because I amplified its contents, shows you exactly the problem, that a call has to exist, since August.

No one has to have to leave the system, and unwittingly seek a voice online, if the humans within the system had honour. 
 
Humans make the system. 
Where a system somehow leaves a person with no choice but to cry out online, only the humans indicted can make it right.

If humans who profess to be humane did just that, and insisted for more choices for each other, then there would have been no August. 
That I chose to point this out how and when I did, after several private efforts, is my prerogative, as Bobby Brown sang it.

That you choose to interpret it however assuages your bias and demigods, is your prerogative. What can never change, is that August came before December, and August brought December.