November 2005 Archives

The UK News Telegraph is confirming what many of us in the peace movement have been worrying about all day: that at least some of the four westerners abducted in iraq over the weekend were members of the Christian peacemakers Teams

A British anti-war activist abducted in iraq was investigating human rights abuses with a group called the Christian peacemakers Team when he was held.

Norman Kember, 74, the only publicly-named abductee, is a former secretary of the Baptist peace Fellowship in England and a board member of the English Fellowship of Reconciliation. He's been an outspoken opponent of the war in iraq. In the April/May 2005 edition of FOR's newsletter (pdf) he talked about challenging himself to do more:

Now personally it has always worried me that I am a ‘cheap’ peacemaker (by analogy with Bonhoeffer’s
concept of ‘cheap’ grace). Being a CO in Britain,talking, writing, demonstrating about peace is in no
way taking risks like young service men in iraq. I look for excuses why I should not become involved with
CPT or EAPPI. Perhaps the readers will supply mewithwith some?

Here at Nonviolence.org, I'm occassionally chatised for being more concerned about western victims of violence (indeed, how many iraqis were abducted or killed this weekend alone?). It's a fair charge and an important reminder. But perhaps it is only human nature to worry about those you know. I've probably met Norman in passing at one or another international peace gathering; I might well know the three unidentified abductees. I suspect a peace movement veteran like Kember would be the first to tell me that pacifists shouldn't sit contentedly in middle-class comfy armchairs simply souting slogans or dashing off emails (Quaker Johan Maurer, wrote an impassioned blog post about this just last week). Part of the reason folks put themselves on the lines for organizations like Christian peacemakers Teams is that they want to do their peace witness among those facing the violence. When the victims aren't just "them, over there" but to "us, and our friends, over there" it becomes more real. This is what the families of the American military casualties have been telling us. Now, with Kember and the three others missing, our worry is made more real. For better or worse, the peace movement is scanning the headlines from iraq with even more worry tonight.

Our prayers are with Kember, as they are with all the missing and all the victims of this horrible war.

I've moved Nonviolence.org onto a new server this week. There were some glitches but I think everything's back to normal now. For those keeping track, this makes the fourth server in Nonviolence.org's ten year history. Please let me know if problems remain and please considering contributing today to help defray the $50/month cost of this site. Thanks!
Martin Kelley, Nonviolence.org

The Pentagon has just admitted that it used white phosphorous as incendary chemical weapon in it's attacks against insurgents in Falluja last November. It has vigorous denied repeated eyewitness accounts until this week's announcment. The weapon use was captured by an Italian documentary team.

• U.S. admits using phosphorus as weapon in iraq, 11/16
• US defends use of white phosphorus weapons in iraq, Reuters, 11/16
• UK used white phosphorus in iraq, BBC
• US forces used 'chemical weapon' in iraq, The Independent

A U.S. State Department release from last December categorically denied the use of illegal weapons in Falluja. It has been amended this week:

Finally, some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used "outlawed" phosphorous shells in Fallujah. Phosphorous shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.

[November 10, 2005 note: We have learned that some of the information we were provided in the above paragraph is incorrect. White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, "The Fight for Fallujah," in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, "as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes …." The article states that U.S. forces used white phosphorous rounds to flush out enemy fighters so that they could then be killed with high explosive rounds.]

More on the history of white phosphorous as a weapon can be found on Wikipedia's white phsophorus entry. The BBC has also compiled a fact sheet on phosphorous. Eighty countries have signed Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which bans its use as an incendaiary weapon against civilitan populations. The United States has refused to sign the treaty and is officially exempt.

According to some news accounts, while "white phos" is a chemical and a weapon (that burns flesh in a quite gruesome way), it is not technically considered a "chemical weapon." Such Orwellian distinctions seem a little too esoteric for us here at Nonviolence.org.

Shortly after the Bush Administration took office, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of secret meetings in the White House that have guided America's energy policy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of participants at the "task force" meetings. All we've known for sure is who wasn't invited: enironmentalists and anyone else who might bring a perspective critical of America's dependence on fossil fuels.

We've long suspected that Cheney's special guests were top oil company executives and that these consultants largely wrote the energy guidelines that came out of the meeting. The policy strong favor the economic interests of "Big Oil" over environmental or national security concerns. The oil companies have repeatedly denied being at the meetings: Just last week, oil industry officials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees that their employees had been part of Cheney's energy task force.

Liar liar, pants on fire.

The Washington Post has obtained a White House document that executives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Investigations are in order. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said "The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force." This issue is important not only to Washington Beltway insiders but to all of us. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing quagmire in iraq are fueled by American energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dictating our energy policy we will continue to have these wars and climate tragedies. People will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

Sometimes my Quaker Ranter posts dry up for awhile. I console myself that I'm doing enough giving out the daily reading list of Quaker posts, reading through my new old Quaker book collection (Samuel Bownas just visited the meeting I'm attending most frequently these days!) and working my new advancement and outreach job--oh, and of course there's also the family! But you could also just follow my train of thought by looking over my shoulder at comments made at other sites. Over the last few days the Quaker blogosphere has had a number of interesting posts. Here's a cobble-together of posts and comments that have spoken to me about the inherent Quaker snare of confusing our "Quaker faith" for God.

Over on Kwakersaur, David M shares some renewal queries for his yearly meeting. Nancy A detected a "sense an overall fatigue" in them and Beppe agreed, asking if the seemingly-simple answers to these sorts of queries require that we first have the much harder-to-come-by "understanding [of] who we are."

One of the queries goes "What does our Quaker faith ask us to DO?" Eeeyyaa-aa-yaaaaawwwn. My favorite Quaker committee-meeting trick of late consists of replace all the "we"-like phrases with God. How about "What does God ask us to DO?" (Just a quick testimony: I love David's work and I value his wonderful online ministry. Any time he wants to come down to Philly to tend to our flock with talk of Quaker renewal, he's welcome!! I'm sure everyone on the Consultation and Renewal Working Group is deeper than the queries would indicate and suspect that this is an example of the Quaker corporate dumbing-down tendency that's practically our modus operandi.)

All this ties into a great post from AJ Schwanz, Can I Say I’m Emerging If I Haven’t Emerged or Quaker If I Haven’t Quaked?,. Here's a taste:

Part of me has thought of shedding my Quaker pin. How can I use it?: have I ever quaked with the power of God? Shedding my differentiation label certainly would support the idea that “there’s really only one church, but lots of meeting places.” Particularly in this town where the Quaker college is perceived as pretty insular, would I have different interactions with folks if I simply said “I’m a follower of Christ” rather than a “Friend”? What would I miss out on? What would be gained?

Paul L implicitly addresses the question of shedding the Quaker pin in his review of Punshon's Reasons for Hope, where he asks if "Quakers have a unique niche to fill in the Christian and broader social landscape."

Are we Quaker because it's comfortable, because our friends are, because the buildings are cool and the social hour coffee hot? Or the opposite: are we Friends because we really liked Barclay's Apology but couldn't care less for the messyness of flesh-and-blood religious community? Another Quaker blogger recently sent me a private email in which he confided: "My main question of late to Quakers is: what is so remarkable about Quakers? I sometimes have to be a pain-in-the-ass in order to ask these questions." That seems like both a good question and a important meeting role.

There’s something about living both within a community and outside it. The real deal isn’t in any of our human institutions, theories or notions yet it is through these that we live out our faith. Christ as transcendent everythingness and Christ as a particular guy in a particular place speaking a particular language and living a particular life. The pull between the eternal and peculiar is the very essence of the human condition. The same voice that spoke to the prophets and apostles speaks to us today, if only we have ears to hear. How can we learn to lessen the volume on our own self-kudos long enough to hear the divine whisperer?