New neofascist conspiracy targets Quakers

October 24, 2018

I won’t link to the rightwing Dai­ly Caller web­site on prin­ci­ple but in a week in which some of their favorite tar­gets are being served with explo­sives (the homes of the Oba­mas, Clin­tons, and George Soros have been tar­get­ed with IEDs), an opin­ion piece by Raheem Kas­sam, a Bre­it­bart alum and assis­tant to UKIP leader Nigel Farage, tries to cook up a Quak­er conspiracy.

It’s hog­wash top to bot­tom, thin­ly con­nect­ed dots meant to look like an evil plot. Appar­ent­ly some peo­ple who were involved in Casa de los Ami­gos in Mex­i­co City lat­er donat­ed to Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paigns and Casa lat­er rent­ed office space to a migrant rights orga­ni­za­tion in 2012 and… well, that’s pret­ty much it. Proof that the “inter­na­tion­al Quak­er move­ment” is the orga­niz­ers of the refugee car­a­vans aimed at the “destruc­tion of U.S. borders.”

The lan­guage is florid in the man­ner of rightwing con­spir­a­cies. They specif­i­cal­ly call out Brigid Moix, a for­mer Casa de los Ami­gos direc­tor and well-respected Quak­er peace advo­cate who Friends Jour­nal pub­lished just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote some­thing rather obvi­ous about immi­gra­tion that sounds like some­thing rather obvi­ous oth­er peo­ple have since wrote about immi­gra­tion. Oh and the one guy is now a Mex­i­can ambas­sador to Greece. And some­one was on a con­fer­ence call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seri­ous­ly, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coher­ent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after anoth­er bridg­ing togeth­er ran­dom­ly Googled triv­ia, all care­less­ly run togeth­er because the author obvi­ous­ly assumes Dai­ly Caller read­ers don’t read past the headline.

This would all be laugh­ably obtuse in its over­reach except that these con­spir­a­cies are get­ting less and less fun­ny every day. The AFSC reg­u­lar­ly gets con­spir­a­cy webs spun around its work in Pales­tine but I haven’t seen much try­ing to tie Friends to the bian­nu­al con­spir­a­cies around immi­gra­tion. Hope­ful­ly it will fade away and Kas­sam will find some oth­er bogey­man. The only stitch of truth can be found in the com­ments. There, buried near the bot­tom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:

Photons Don’t Phail

May 10, 2018

A few weeks ago I wrote about a New Eng­land Friends meet­ing that was work­ing to share the elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed by its solar pan­els with its neigh­bors. In response, one of our long­time blog­ging Friends Doug Ben­nett, now of Maine’s Durham Meet­ing and for­mer­ly pres­i­dent of some col­lege some­where, wrote me about lyrics that its for­mer pas­tor Doug Gwyn (this guy) wrote. I love both of these Dougs so of course I’ll share the link with you all, includ­ing this first stan­za of “Pho­tons Don’t Fail Us Now”:

it would be fool­ish to vote on the nature of a photon
as Quak­ers we sim­ply approve
you can argue to the grave it’s a par­ti­cle or wave
we just want to let it hit our roof

“Pho­tons Don’t Fail Us Now,” Song Lyrics by Doug Gwyn

Norval Reece interviewed on MLK Jr anniversary

April 5, 2018

To mark the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the death of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., a Philadel­phia TV sta­tion inter­viewed Quak­er Nor­val Reece: Bucks Coun­ty Quak­er, Civ­il Rights Activist Reflects On Time With MLK

Reece is a proud Quak­er and believes it’s his Quak­er roots that sent him to Dr. King’s side. “I was raised to believe all peo­ple are equal, are born equal, cre­at­ed equal,” he said. Reece met King in 1967 at the old Robert Mor­ris Hotel in Philadel­phia. He spent sev­er­al hours with the civ­il rights icon. Reece says that night he, King and a few oth­ers planned a pover­ty march for the fol­low­ing spring, but King nev­er made it.

Nor­val was an activist with AFSC back in his youth, served as a Penn­syl­va­nia sec­re­tary of com­merce, and became a cable tele­vi­sion entre­pre­neur. He’s pret­ty ubiq­ui­tous in Quak­er cir­cles these days, link­ing the activist and entre­pre­neur­ial in inter­est­ing ways. My favorite part of the video is when they casu­al­ly redis­play a pic­ture they had blurred out near the begin­ning (the one in the pre­view) and don’t both­er nam­ing the guy walk­ing just ahead of him.

“Have you ever felt like the fall guy?”

July 18, 2003

In strange and sad news, the man who was prob­a­bly the unnamed “senior offi­cial” who first told the BBC that Britain “sexed up” its Iraq weapons dossier has turned up dead in the woods near his home. Dr. David Kel­ly gave evi­dence to the UK for­eign affairs com­mit­tee just days ago, where he asked the com­mit­tee “Have you ever felt like the fall guy?” One mem­ber of the com­mit­tee told the Guardian that “We thought he’d been put up quite delib­er­ate­ly to dis­tract us from the case of the gov­ern­men­t’s case for war.

David Kel­ly has been described as a “soft spo­ken” man not used to the pub­lic glare he’s been under. Reports haven’t even giv­en the cause of death, so con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries will have to be put on hold. It’s quite pos­si­ble that this faith­ful civ­il ser­vant and sci­en­tist final­ly cracked under the pres­sure of the media onslaught and took his life. It is a tragedy for his family.