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:

There will always be conflict. It’s easy to get distracted by fires. It helps to be a calming presence in these situations to keep the organization focused and keep your colleagues at peace.

— Colin Saxton [Source]

Margaret [Scattergood] was far more skeptical of CIA and considered the organization’s mission to be in violation of her pacifist beliefs. She used her trust fund to financially contribute to antiwar causes. She lobbied Congress to cut the US Intelligence and military budgets. In the 1980s Margaret opened her home to Sandinistas from Nicaragua, while CIA supported the opposition.

Inviting Sandinistas to her home in the middle of the CIA headquarters compound is easily the most kickass Quaker stories I’ve heard in awhile. Chuck Fager also shared some of this story in a nice remembrance in a 1987 Friends Journal shortly after she died; apparently the land purchases in the 1940s weren’t quite so neighborly as the CIA public relations team seem to make out.

I interviewed her by phone from my back porch on a snowy day and very much enjoyed conversation. I’m fascinated by the challenges of an organization like AFSC—one that has to balance strong roots in a religious tradition while largely working outside of it. How do you balancing the conflicting identities? It’s not unlike the challenge of a Friends school like Ramallah’s.

I was also particularly moved by the genuine enthusiasm in her voice as she talked about engaging in honest conversations with people with whom we have strong disagreements. In this polarized age, it’s tempting to try to stay in the safety our bubbles. Joyce seems to thrive stepping out of that comfort zone:

I think we’ve learned from this last U.S. election that we need to listen more. This can often be a challenge for people who are very passionate about the positions they take. Sometimes the passion is so overwhelming that it sort of overrides that willingness to listen to other narratives. This is something that we really need to work much harder on. Truth is always incomplete. We always have to look for other truths. We need to break through some of these boundaries that we’ve put around ourselves and seek a wider spectrum of perspectives.

I think AFSC will be in good hands with Ajlouny.

An interview with Joyce Ajlouny — Friends Journal

Meet AFSC’s incoming general secretary.

Friends Journal

I had the pleasure of an author chat with Jeff Perkins, executive director of Friends Fiduciary Corporation, the organization that provides financial services to Quaker meetings and is on the forefront of socially responsible investment. We talked about the kind of activism that happens on investor conference calls. Jeff’s article, Main Street Activism and Wall Street Advocacy: Strange Bedfellows?, appears in the June/July issue of Friends Journal.

When diocesan officials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sentence and nod their heads approvingly. The conspiracy is real.

But I don’t want to talk about Catholicism again. Let’s talk Quakers instead, why not? I should be in some meeting for worship right now anyway. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbringing after eleven years with us because she wanted a religious community that shared a basic faith and that wasn’t afraid to talk about that faith as a corporate “we.” It seems that Catholicism won’t be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the Eastern Orthodox church? For that matter should I be running off to the Mennonites? See though, the problem is that the same issues will face us wherever we try to go. It’s modernism, baby. No focused and authentic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the questions of course. Why would someone who dislikes Catholic culture and wants to dismantle its infrastructure become a priest and a career bureaucrat? For that matter why do so many people want to call themselves Quakers when they can’t stand basic Quaker theology? If I wanted lots of comments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ultimately the question is futile and beyond my figuring.

Another piece to this issue came in some questions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few others this past week in preparation for his upcoming presentation at Woodbrooke. He asked about how a particular Quaker institution did or did not represent or might or might not be able to contain the so-called “Convergent” Friends movement. I don’t want to bust on anyone so I won’t name the organization. Let’s just say that like pretty much all Quaker bureaucracies it’s inward-focused, shallow in its public statements, slow to take initiative and more or less irrelevant to any campaign to gather a great people. A more successful Quaker bureaucracy I could name seems to be doing well in fundraising but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more interested in donor-focused hype than long-term program implementation.

One enemy of the faith is bureaucracy. Real leadership has been replaced by consultants and fundraisers. Financial and staffing crises–real and created–are used to justify a watering down of the message. Programs are driven by donor money rather than clear need and when real work might require controversy, it’s tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quaker readers who think I’m talking about Quakers: no I’m talking about Catholics. Catholic readers who think I’m talking about Catholics: no, I’m talking about Quakers. My point is that these forces are tearing down religiosity all over. Some cheer this development on. I think it’s evil at work, the Tempter using our leader’s desires for position and respect and our the desires of our laity’s (for lack of a better word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I’m tired of thinking that maybe if I try one more Quaker meeting I’ll find the community where I can practice and deepen my faith as a Christian Friend. I’m stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feeling: Fox and the Peningtons and all the rest talked about isolation and about religious professionals who were in it for the career. I know from the blogosphere and from countless one-on-one conversations that there are a lot of us–a lot–who either drift away or stay in meetings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spiritual community for these outsider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our structures look like? If we let the generic churches go off to out-compete one other to see who can be the blandest, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

I guess this last paragraph is the new revised mission statement for the Quaker part of this blog. Okay kids, get a step stool, go to your meeting library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out volume one of “A portraiture of Quakerism: Taken from a view of the education and discipline, social manners, civil and political economy, religious principles and character, of the Society of Friends” by Thomas Clarkson. Yes the 1806 version, stop the grumbling. Get out the ribbed packing tape and put its cover back together–this isn’t the frigging Library of Congress and we’re actually going to read this thing. Don’t even waste your time checking it out in the meeting’s logbook: no one’s pulled it down off the shelf in fifty years and no one’s going to miss it now. Really stuck?, okay Google’s got it too. Class will start shortly.

I have two types of sources for Nonviolence.org. The first is mainstream news. I search through Google News, Technorati current events, then maybe the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post.

There are lots of interesting articles on the war in iraq, but there’s always a political spin somewhere, especially in timing. Most big news stories have broken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months later (e.g., Wilson’s CIA wife being exposed, which was first reported on Nonviolence.org on July 22 but became headlines in early October). These news cycles are driven by domestic party politics, and at times I feel all my links make Nonviolence.org sound like an apparatchik of the Democratic Party USA.

But it’s not just the tone that makes mainstream news articles a problem–it’s also the general subject matter. There’s a lot more to nonviolence than antiwar exposes, yet the news rarely covers anything about the culture of peace. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old newspaper slogan and you will never learn about the wider scope of nonviolence by reading the papers.

My second source is peace movement websites

And these are, by-and-large, uninteresting. Often they’re not updated frequently. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shallow. You’ll see the self-serving press release (“as a peace organization we protest war actions”) and you’ll see the exclamatory all-caps screed (“eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!”). These are fine as long as you’re already a member of said organization or already have decided you’re against the war, but there’s little persuasion or dialogue possible in this style of writing and organizing.

There are few people in the larger peace movement who regularly write pieces that are interesting to those outside our narrow circles. David McReynolds and Geov Parrish are two of those exceptions. It takes an ability to sometimes question your own group’s consensus and to acknowledge when nonviolence orthodoxy sometimes just doesn’t have an answer.

And what of peace bloggers? I really admire Joshua Micah Marshall, but he’s not a pacifist. There’s the excellent Gutless Pacifist (who’s led me to some very interesting websites over the last year), Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve, Stand Down/No War Blog, and a new one for me, The Picket Line. But most of us are all pointing to the same mainstream news articles, with the same Iraq War focus.

If the web had started in the early 1970s, there would have been lots of interesting publishing projects and blogs growing out the activist communities. Younger people today are using the internet to sponsor interesting gatherings and using sites like Meetup to build connections, but I don’t see communities built around peace the way they did in the early 1970s. There are few people building a life–hope, friends, work–around pacifism.

Has “pacifism” become ossified as its own in-group dogma of a certain generation of activists? What links can we build with current movements? How can we deepen and expand what we mean by nonviolence so that it relates to the world outside our tiny organizations?