palestine - Quaker Ranter

UK Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

Martin Kelley — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 17:57:33 +0000

British Friends become first church in UK to pull investments in companies profiting from the occupation of Palestine. From recording clerk Paul Parker:

As Quakers, we seek to live out our faith through everyday actions, including the choices we make about where to put our money. We believe strongly in the power of legitimate, nonviolent, democratic tools such as morally responsible investment to realise positive change in the world. We want to make sure our money and energies are instead put into places which support our commitments to peace, equality and justice.

As you’d might expect, there’s been backlash. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned Britain Yearly Meeting’s decision as a “biased and petulant act.”.

Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

Quakers in Britain has today become the first church in the UK to announce it will not invest…

Quakers

New neofascist conspiracy targets Quakers

Martin Kelley — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 22:45:19 +0000

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:

The real world’s competition this week is on the streets of Georgia

Martin Kelley — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:53:01 +0000

To American eyes the news of the escalating war in the Caucasus nation of Georgia almost reads as farce: a breakaway region of a breakaway region, tanks rolling to maintain control of… well, not that much really. We wonder how it could be in either Russia or Georgia’s interests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia’s de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fighting the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunting the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weariness as we realize just how familiar this all is. Tiny ethnic enclaves with centuries of animosities and well rehearsed stories of atrocities committed by the other set fighting by the breakdown of an empire that had uneasily united them in repression. Change a few details and we could be talking recent conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil billions and human trafficking add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fighting these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seriously: otherwise strong economies collapse under the chaos that these territorial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in marginal areas and all sides would be better off if the politicians stopped worrying about these contested territories and just focused on building a economy attractive to international trade.
Why hasn’t the world learned the mechanisms to end these conflicts before they erupt into open warfare? Where is the political will to end this class of war once and for all? Disease and terrorism are the invariable fruits of these conflicts and strike us all across national boundaries. The “international community” needs to be mean more than impressive choreography and a few thousand athletes in Beijing. This week’s real gold metal will go to the leaders that can transcend macho posturing and weak-willed apologizing and get those Russian tanks out of Georgia.

Lebanon and Syria

Martin Kelley — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 10:26:09 +0000

The resignation of the government is Lebanon is being hailed as a “boost for democracy” Reports describe Beirut as “a sea of excitement”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,1428151,00.html. ABC News and others are reporting that “Syria is about to announce its withdrawl from Lebanon”:http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=553479. How wonderful it would be if “Beirut could emerge”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beirut from its thirty years of chaos with the start of the “1975 civil war”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_Civil_War.
Even good change can cause turmoil. David Hirst, writing in the guardian, wonders whether the upheaval threatends to “destabilize Syria and turn it into another iraq”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,1430243,00.html: “After the example of elections, however flawed, in occupied iraq and Palestine, has come this new, unscheduled outbreak of popular self-assertion in a country [Lebanon] where a sister Arab state, not an alien occupier, is in charge.”
For the latest news, you can turn to the “Guardian’s special report on Syria and iraq”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/0,13031,928812,00.html. To jump in the fray, you can turn to the Nonviolence Board’s thread on the “resignation of the Lebanese government”:http://www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3297

Zunes on the Geneva Initiative

Martin Kelley — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 19:40:09 +0000

Stephen Zunes is a careful and balanced commentator on Mid east issues, someone I turn to help sort out conflicting claims. No where is this needed more than in the ever-changing relationship between Israel and Palestine, with its constant sucession of hopes born and shattered.
The “every Church a Peace Church” site has a good article from Zunes on the latest hope, the so-called “Geneva Initiative for peace between Israel and Palestine”:www.ecapc.org/newspage_detail.asp?control=849. Zunes gives the context of the proposed accord and then explains its major points. For example:
bq. In contrast to Washington’s insistence on focusing upon the thus far unsuccessful confidence-building measures described in the Roadmap, the architects of the Geneva Initiative went directly to the issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and developed a detailed outline for a permanent-status agreement.

Insuring Violence Never ends

Martin Kelley — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 14:36:32 +0000

“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.

Dick Cheney’s Rambo Complex

Martin Kelley — Tue, 12 Mar 2002 17:51:43 +0000

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is touring England this week, trying to find co-producers on Gulf War II, the sequel to the disappointing minor hit of 1991. You remember the original: it was briefly popular until Bill Clinton’s “Peace and Properity” broke all previous records for an unprecedented run.
In Gulf War II, Dick Cheney is playing Rambo. It’s twelve years later and he and his sidekick George Bush Jr. are going to re-fight the war against Iraq singlehandedly. No other countries will join them this time in their fight for justice.

Like all shot-em-up movies, this one needs a convincing villain. There’s no connection between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden but so what? They’re both shifty Arabs with facial hair. Throw in a spicy subplot if you want–“Dashing American pilots secretly held prisoner since 1991.” Americans barely notice plot and motivations. After 9/11 the White House is betting that the audience wants more war and retribution.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a Hollywood movie. Dick Cheney and the second President Bush are indeed trying to start a second war against Iraq. There’s no new provocation from Saddam Hussein. There’s no connection between him and Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 terrorist attacks. None of our allies from the first Gulf War want to join us in a second.

But Cheney and Bush want a fight anyway. It’s hard not to conclude this is some sort of “Rambo Complex.” The U.S. is led by two men fighting legacies that won’t let them put 1991 behind them. One is the son of the president accused of prematurely stopping the 1991 war before U.S. troops got to Baghdad. The other is the dying aide to both father and son, who has waited almost twelve years for a chance to prove he was right.

This week rumors of an American pilot supposedly held for eleven years have appeared out of nowhere. President Bush has been diverting attention to Saddam Hussein even while Osama bin Laden runs free. And Dick Cheney is indeed in England trying to drum up support for a new Gulf War.

While the Vice President is off wandering the margins of stage right, real tragedy and drama are holding the world’s attention center stage. Palestine and Israel are close to an all-out war. The mounting violence has worried important countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria so much that they’re proposing new peace plans. So much of the Mideast’s anger against the U.S. revolves around the Palestinian question. A war there could topple friendly Muslim governments and rip apart our current alliances.

This is where the world’s attention is focused. But President Bush and Cheney are ignoring the situation. They have not followed past Presidents’ lead in leading peace negotiations. American pressure and involvement is certainly needed to craft real peace between Palestine and Israel.

But Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world’s most pressing and intractable conflict. They’re dreaming of cinematic glory. It’s 2002 and two lone G.I.‘s are paratrooping into Iraq, knives clenched in teeth, machine guns at the ready. One dreams of avenging the cowardice and failure of his father. The other of winning just one more war before the curtains close in on him.