Mel Gibson’s movie _The Passion of Christ_ is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down to feel-good cliches. Can the debate on this movie help us return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort?
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ new york city
Insuring Violence Never ends
August 22, 2003
“Bill Hobbs”:http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106139209827725521 challenged Nonviolence.org about the recent lack of condemnations of Palestinian violence. It’s a fair critique and a good question. For the record, Nonviolence.org agrees with you that bombing buses is wrong. Hamas should be condemned, thank you. Of course, Israelis building in the occupied territories is also wrong and should also be condemned. The zealots in the conflict there demand that everyone take sides, but to be pacifist means never taking the side of evil and always demanding that the third way of nonviolence be found.
The Israelis and Palestinians have so much in common. Both are a historically-persecuted people with contested claim to the land. The war between them has been largely funded and egged on by outside parties who seem to have a vested interest in the violence continuing ad infinitum. Both sides chronicle every bus bombed and bullet fired, using the outrage to rally the faithful to fresh atrocities. Blogs like Bill Hobbs’ and organizations like the International Solidarity Movement help insure that the bombings will never stop. Caught in the middle are a lot of naive kids: suicide bombers, soldiers, and activists who think just one more act of over-the-top bravery will stop the violence.
The war in Israel and Palestine will only stop when enough Israelis and Palestinians declare themselves traitors to the chants of nationalistic jingoism. We are all Israelis, we are all Palestinians. There but for the grace of God go all of us: our houses bulldozed, our loved ones killed on the way to work.
Once upon a time we in America could think that we were immune to it all; the idea that we’re all Israelis and Palestinians seemed a rhetorical stretch. But I was one of the millions who spent the night of 9/11/01 calling New York friends to see if they were safe (I was on my honeymoon and was so shaken that one of my calls was to an ex-girlfriend’s parents; my wife gracefully forgave me). On that day, we Americans were delivered the message that we too are complicit. We too must also declare ourselves traitors to our country’s war mythologies and start being honest about our historic complicity with war. As a people, Americans weren’t innocent victims at either Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center towers (though as individuals we were, which is the point of nonviolent outrage of nationalistic violence). every blog post commemorating a victimhood, whether in New York City or Tel Aviv, supports the cause of war. I will not condemn every act of violence but I will condemn the cause of violence and I will expose the mythologies of war.
Constituting Mediocrity: the new National Constitution Center
July 25, 2003
It’s obvious that the Center is just a holding pen for big bus trips. It’s not as much a museum or national shrine as it is a highway rest stop. On your left’s the super-sized cafeteria, on your right the store for crappy hats and t‑shirts. And for this we rip up Philadelphia?
Tough Time to Love War(Making)
January 23, 2003
This just isn’t a good time to be George W. Bush. United Nations inspectors combing Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have come up empty handed. Saddam Hussein has allowing them relatively unfettered access but all they’ve uncovered is a few unused shells.
Bush is nothing if not persistent when it comes to perceived world bad guys. Just yesterday he told an audience in St. Louis that Hussein is “a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons.” Despite the repeated use dangerous, the rest of the world is unconvinced. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder still talks about “peaceful solutions” and Germany and France is putting the brakes on war in the U.N. Security Council, waiting for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to turn up.
It must frustrate our president to see that all these years of military sanctions against Iraq have been working. All the evidence uncovered by the U.N. inspectors prove that we can “win without war,” as one current slogan goes, and that we have in fact been winning. We’ve kept Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military after the Gulf War. U.S. isolation of Iraq has been successful despite its numerous flaws. Saddam is not a threat.
Which brings us to real threats and to North Korea. President Bush and his team of war mongerers have been so busy looking at Iraq that they’ve given North Korea just sporadic attention. Recently-declassified reports show that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has known much more about North Korea’s nuclear bomb making over the last dozen years than anyone’s been admitting.
The C.I.A. has known that North Korea and Pakistan have been trading nuclear secrets. Pakistan has been showing its ally of convenience how to build the centrifuges that process weapons-grade uranium. North Korea in return has provided the missile technology that gives Pakistan the nuclear reach to destroy arch-rival India. Now that we know President Bush knew all about this history of what we might call “dangerous, dangerous” technology trade, why did he cozy up to Pakistan following September 11th? He so wanted wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that he normalized relations with a country far more dangerous. If a Pakistani or North Korean nuclear weapon goes off in New York City it will kill a whole lot more people than Osama bin Laden’s four hijacked airplanes. What happened on September 11th was terrible but it’s nothing compared to what a enemy with resources could do.
There are real threats to world peace, far more “dangerous, dangerous” than Iraq. The United States needs to drop its president’s obsessions and look squarely at the world and who we’re allied with. And when we reset our policies we wqcan use Iraq as our model. For as the U.N. inspectors have proven, we can create peace through diplomacy and we can isolate troublemakers through smart sanctions.
What a tough lesson for U.S. leaders bent on war.
Stopping the Next War Now: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror
October 7, 2001
Originally published at Nonviolence.org
The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.
The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.
The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.
The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.
The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.
There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.
And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.
And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.