mld Posts

Strangely enough, the Philadelphia Inquirer has published a front-page article on leadership in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Friends frustrate some of their flock, Quakers bogged down by process, two leaders say. To me it comes off as an extended whine from the former PhYM General Secretary Thomas Jeavons. His critiques around Philadelphia Quaker culture are well-made (and well known among those who have seen his much-forwarded emails) but he doesn't seem as insightful about his own failings as a leader, primarily his inability to forge consensus and build trust. He frequently came off as too ready to bypass rightly-ordered decision-making processes in the name of strong leadership. The more this happened, the more distrust the body felt toward him and the more intractible and politicized the situation became. He was the wrong leader for the wrong time. How is this worthy of the front-page newspaper status?

The offices of Friends General Conference are across the street from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which is this week hosting a biotech convention. The streets outside are hosting a bit of a counter-convention led by a group named BioDemocracy 2005. Here are some shots from a melee outside our front door a few minutes ago.

Update: apparently one of the police officers at the center of this scuffle suffered a heart attack and has since died. I'm not even sure how to comment on that. From my vantage point it certainly seemed like the police officers were using undue violence. But while I was ten feet away I don't know who threw the first punch and what exactly happened in that sea of bodies. Whatever happened, it's quite appropriate to hold him and his family in our prayers.

Protesters and police scuffle at the Biodemocracy Rally in Philadelphia. The well-dressed (and hatted) people are the civil affairs police officers. Apparently one of them suffered a heart attack in the meele and had to be evacuated on stretcher. See the full photo set here.

Update: The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that one of the police officers at the center of this scuffle has died of an apparent heart attack

The Baby Theo blog got a mention in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, It's almost as good as being there, by Kathy Boccella. They missed out on a huge ratings bonanza by not picking Theo for their pictures. Stranger was that two interviews produced only one off-topic substantive line: "Martin Kelly [sic] experienced the worst of it when someone threatened his infant son on his Baby Theo Web page."

Above: Theo on learning he wasn't going to be the featured baby photo in the Inquirer piece... Real photo caption: This weekend Julie Theo and I took a mini vacation to the Pennsylvania coal regions (can you say "geeks"?) One of the stops was the beautifully restored Tamaqua train station where Theo's great great grandfather, the first Martin John Kelley, worked as a Reading Railroad conductor. We woke the little guy up from a car nap to see the station and snap this picture, cruel parents that we are.

The Baby Theo site has been a lot of fun and it's had great comments and emails of support. It's really a shame that the article only used it to strike that tired old refrain about the possible danger lurking on the internet.

The threat had nothing to do with Theo or with the baby blog. I've run a prominent antiwar website through two wars now, and in the nine years of its existence I've amassed quite a collection of abusive emails. I try not to take them too seriously: most come from soldiers or from the families of soliders, people desparately afraid of the future and surely torn by the acts they're being asked to commit. The internet provides the psychological distance for otherwise good people to demonize the "commie Saddam-loving peacenik coward." You could get mad at a President that actively misleads the country into war but it's easier to turn your anger on some schmuck who runs an antiwar website in his spare time. Sending threatening emails is itself cowardly and anti-democratic, of course, and as I've written on Nonviolence.org, it's terribly inappropriate for "military personnel to use government computers to threaten the free speech" of a dissenting American citizen. But it happens. And because it happens and because South Jersey has its share of pro-war hotheads, you won't see our specific town mentioned anywhere on the site. When I asked the Inquirer reporter if they could not mention our town, she asked why, which led to the threatening emails, which led to the question whether Theo specifically had been threatened.

And yes, there was a retired Lieutenant Colonel who sent a particularly creepy set of emails (more on him below). The first email didn't mention Theo. It was just one of those everyday emails wishing that my family would be gang-raped, tortured and executed in front of me. I usually ignore these but responded to him, upon which I received a second email explaining that he was making a point with his threat ("You, your organization and others like you represent the 'flabby soft white underbelly' of our Nation. This is the tissue of an animal that is the target of predators." Etc., etc., blah, blah, blah). This time he searched the Nonviolence.org site more thoroughly and specifically mentioned Theo in his what-if scenario. This was one email out of the thousands I receive every month. It was an inappropriate rhetorical argument against a political/religious stance I've taken as a public witness. It was not a credible threat to my son.

Still, precaution is in order. I mentioned this story to the Inquirer reporter only to explain why I didn't want the town listed. When I talked about the blog, I talked about old friends and distant relatives keeping up with us and sharing our joys via the website. I talked about how the act of putting together entries helped Julie & I see Theo's changes. I told Kathy how it was fun that friends who we had met via the internet were able to see something beyond the Quaker essays or political essays. None of that made it through to the article, which is a shame. A request to not publish our home town became a sensationalist cautionary tale that is now being repeated as a reason not to blog. How stupid.

The cautionary lesson is only applicable for those who both run a baby blog and a heavily used political website. When your website tops 50,000 visitors a day, you might want to switch to a P.O. Box. End of lesson.

Fortunately with the internet we don't have to rely on the filter of a mainstream press reporters. Visitors from the Inquirer article have been looking around the site and presumably seeing it's not all about internet dangers. Since the Inquirer article went up I've had twice as many visits from Google as I have from Philly.com. Viva the web!

---

More:

For those interested, the freaky retired Lieutenant Colonel is the chief executive officer of a private aviation company based in Florida, with contracts in three African nations that just happen to be of particular interest to the U.S. State Department. Although the company is named after him, his full name has been carefully excised from his website. I don't suspect that he really is retired from U.S.-sponsored military service, if you know what I mean... Here's your tax dollars at work.

A few newspaper websites have republished up the Inky article and two blogging news sites have picked up on it:

• Yet Another Baby Blogging story uncovers danger - but it's not true ran in BloggingBaby.com: "When someone threatened his son on his Baby Theo Web page, he took the site down; but left up a pic on his home page. Well, that is, according to the article, which somehow managed to not check its facts (maybe, ummm--go to the link you included in your article?) and discover that, in fact, Baby Theo's page is alive and well. We're glad, Theo's a cutie."

• Baby bloggers ran in Netfamilynews. "The $64,000 question(s) is: Is this a shift of thinking and behavior or, basically, a mistake?.. Martin Kelly, whose baby was threatened by someone who visited his baby page, would lean toward the mistake side of the question." (No I wouldn't, as I explained to the webmaster later)

The U.S. media is giving all-out coverage to video stills of an American named Nicholas Berg, who was decapitated by iraqi insurgents (the original video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American"). Barely mentioned is that Berg was arrested by U.S.-backed iraq police forces and detained without charge by iraqi police from around 24 March to 6 April, after being stopped at a checkpoint in Mosul. UPDATE: According to The Guardian and other sources, Berg was originally arrested by the iraqi police but actually held for the thirteen days by U.S. military personnel.

Yes, folks, stop looking for the video and start asking how Berg got into the hands of his executioners. His own family said the U.S. military was at least partially responsible for his imprisonment. On April 5, they filed a federal suit claiming that Mr. Berg was being held illegally by the United States military in iraq:

The Bergs last heard from their son April 9, when he told his parents he would come home by way of Jordan. Suzanne Berg said that the family had been trying for weeks to learn where their son was, but that federal officials had not been helpful. Philadelphia Inquirer

In what is becoming the motif of the iraq Occupation, agents with the F.B.I. claim that the iraqi police acted independently by arresting Berg in the first place. The police are yet another tier of the blame-and-denial game being played by the Pentagon and Bush Administration. The U.S. controls (or should control) the contractors and iraqi police and needs to take responsibility for what their minions are doing in iraq.

My heart goes out to the family of Nicholas Berg. He's from a Philadelphia suburb near the one I grew up in. He took classes at two colleges in my old neighborhood and I could easily have passed him cutting through the campuses. I can totally empathize with his desire to see the world and maybe make it a better place by helping to rebuild iraq.

There are questions that must be answered and the U.S. media had better start asking them:

When did the U.S.-backed iraqi police release Berg?

Who did they release him to?

Where has Berg been for the last month?

Who are the men who decapitated Berg and who were they working for?

Who released the execution video (even hawkish blogger Andrew Sullivan can't find the site, even Aljazeera doesn't say where it is) and who added the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi caption?

Some of the websites questioning the Berg story are clearly those of wingnut conspiracy types. With that warning, here are some interesting links and threads:

• Is Berg Story a Fraud? on the Nonviolence.org board.
• Doctor declares Berg video a fake. I myself wondered why the stills of the captors holding his head looked so clean-looking. The democraticunderground forum has other interesting discussions, including ones looking at the captor's body language and researching the video codecs the web video was recorded with (apparently very up-to-date, it was made by pros, perhaps purposefully kept fuzzy).
• iraq militants claim al-Zarqawi is dead
• Fishy Circumstances and Flawed Timelines Surround American's Beheading. Lots of links here.

For what it's worth, I was contacted my a major American news organization Thursday morning. The researcher said they were asking many of the same questions and she asked if I had uncovered anything interesting. If any of my readers know of other resources, send me an email and I'll post it here and pass it along to this news source.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer’s kid section, the answer to the burning question “What needs fixing and who should fix it?”:http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/daily/8244804.htm?1c Along with some kinda dopey answers (the toilet, the lightbulb) is this from my favorite second grader, my nephew Tristan:

bq. What humans have made of the world. Other animals just live their lives, and we bring them to zoos, pollute their habitat, and do other awful things. We should just live like the other animals do.

Journalist Mark I. Pinsky talks about the "state of the religious left":www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/7644649.htm : bq. Left-wing religious efforts at political mobilization - where they exist - seem puny, aged and marginalized. After decades of riding popular social movements such as civil rights, the left splintered and now seems unable to regroup. Conversely, the GOP has co-opted the support of religious voters by focusing their attention on cultural and lifestyle issues - such as gay marriage. Article found from a link on "The Right Christians":http://www.therightchristians.org/ site, which has more commentary on the subject and a proposal to mimic the Dean Campaign internet organizing to rebuild a progressive Christian left.