Quakers respond to terrorism

 24 November 2015

 

As Parliament prepares to debate next steps in Syria, Quakers in Britain have made this statement:

 

The attacks in Paris on 13 November were deeply shocking and our hearts continue to go out to those killed, injured, bereaved and traumatised.

 

It is human nature that the closer suffering comes to us, the more acutely we feel the pain and grief. But that experience should sensitise us to the suffering caused repeatedly by acts of war and violent crime in more distant places, including Beirut, Sinai, Bamako and Aleppo. It should strengthen our determination to build a safer world together.

 

Terrorism is a deliberate attempt to provoke fear, hatred, division and a state of war. War, especially war with the West - is what ISIS/Daesh wants. It confirms the image they project of the West as a colonialist 'crusader' power, which acts with impunity to impose its will overseas and especially against Muslims.

 

The military actions of Western nations recruit more people to the cause than they kill. Every bomb dropped is a recruitment poster for ISIS, a rallying point for the young, vulnerable and alienated. And every bomb dropped on Syrian cities drives yet more people to flee and seek refuge in safer countries.

 

Our political leaders seem determined that Britain should look strong on the world stage. Quakers in Britain believe our country should act with wisdom and far-sighted courage. A wisdom that rises above the temptation to respond to every problem with military might. A wisdom that looks back at our failures in Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan and learns from experience. The courage and strength - to think through the likely consequences of actions to find a long term, lasting solution.

 

The courageous response of ordinary people who refuse to give up their way of life and refuse to be driven by fear is one that politicians could learn from.

 

Although there are no quick or easy answers, there are things we can do, all of us together, which will defeat the terrorists more assuredly than military action. Quakers in Britain commit to playing our part in these actions.

 

We can quieten ourselves and listen to the truth from deep within us that speaks of love, mutual respect, humanity and peace.

 

We can and will refuse to be divided. By bridge-building among faiths and within our local communities we can challenge and rise above the ideologies of hate and actively love our neighbour.

 

By welcoming refugees, we can not only meet the acute needs of those individuals but also undercut the narrative of those who seek to create fear and mistrust.

 

And we can ask our political leaders to:  

• Treat terrorist acts as crimes, not acts of war
• Stop arming any of the parties fighting in Syria
• Observe international law and apply it equally to all parties
• Build cooperation among nations, strengthening those international institutions which contribute to peace
• Export peace rather than war, so that we can create the conditions the world needs to address its most serious problems, including climate change.  

 The statement concludes with this extract from a statement made by Quakers in Britain in 1943 (Quaker faith & practice 24.09):

 

 "True peace cannot be dictated, it can only be built in co-operation between all peoples. None of us, no nation, no citizen, is free from some responsibility for this."

 

 -Peace Movement Aotearoa

Rhetoric is no recipe for peace

Reactions to Paris and Mali have been militaristic rhetoric brought about by ignorance and refusal to understand the injustices of the Middle East.

Robert Fisk @indyvoices           Independent/UK           22 November, 2015

Eisenhower famously sent some brusque advice to Anthony Eden in 1956 when he decided that Britain’s deceitful war in Egypt should come to an end. “Whoa, boy!” were his words. And they should be repeated now to the politicians, historians and other nincompoops who regard themselves as the soothsayers of eternal war.

Each morning, I awake to find another Hollywood horror being concocted by our secret policemen or our public relations - inspired leaders. The Paris killings are now supposed to have “changed Paris for ever” or “changed France for ever”. I would accept that the collaboration of General Pétain with Nazi Germany changed France for ever – but the atrocities in Paris this month simply cannot be compared with the German occupation of 1940.

That most tiresome of French philosophers, Bernard-Henri Lévy, tells us that Isis are “Fascislamists”. Oddly, I don’t remember the same Mr Lévy telling us that the avowedly Christian Lebanese killers of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the Beirut Sabra-Shatila refugee camps of 1982 – Israel’s vicious Lebanese militia allies – were “Fascichristians”. This was a “terrorist” act with which I was all too familiar. With two journalist colleagues, I walked among the butchered and raped corpses of the dead. The American-armed and funded Israeli army watched the slaughter – and did nothing. Yet not a single Western politicians announced that this had “changed the Middle East for ever”. And if 1,700 innocents can be murdered in Beirut in 1982 without “world war” being declared, how can President François Hollande announce that France is “at war” after 130 innocents were massacred?

But let’s not allow modern history to get in the way of our desire for revenge. Take Mali and last week’s killings. The French “intervened” there in January 2013, after Islamists took over the north of Mali and prepared to advance on the capital, Bamako. “Field Marshal” Hollande, as he was satirised in the French press, sent in his lads to destroy the “terrorists”, who were imposing their revolting “Islamic” punishments on civilians, without mentioning that the violence was also part of a Tuareg-Malian government civil war. By the end of January, reports spoke of France’s Malian military allies killing civilians in a wave of ethnic reprisals. The French defence minister admitted that “urban guerrilla warfare” was “very complicated to manage”.

By September, the Islamists were murdering Malians who had co-operated with the French. Since France was already declaring victory against the “terrorists”, few paid attention to the spokesman for the very same Islamists when he announced that “our enemy is France, which works with the army of Mali, of Niger, of Senegal, of Guinea, of Togo, against Muslims … all these are our enemies and we are going to treat them like enemies.”

Which makes last week’s massacre in Bamako less incomprehensible. And for those who believe that European soldiers who go around African countries are not going to provoke revenge from those of Malian origin, note how we virtually ignored the background of the Isis killer of the French policewoman and of four French Jews at the Paris supermarket last January. Amedy Coulibaly was born in France to Malian Muslim parents.

And now let’s read this report on Mali from early 2013: that French “warplanes are continuing their attacks on suspected rebel camps, command posts, logistic bases and ‘terrorist vehicles’ in northern Mali. In recent days, officials said, they hit targets in the Timbuktu and Gao regions, including a dozen strikes in a 24-hour period ...” Replace Timbuktu and Gao with Raqqa and Idlib and this is the same soup we’re being served up today from Paris (and Moscow) about air assaults on Isis – and into which PR Dave himself now wishes to lead our miniature air force.

Our reaction? All rhetoric, of course, brought about by our ignorance, our refusal to understand the injustices of the Middle East, our idleness in addressing conflict with political plans and objectives. If we could apply the “whoa, boy” advice today, it must be with an entirely new approach to the cult mafia that exists in the Middle East. A world conference on the region, perhaps, along the lines of the 1945 San Francisco conference where statesmen created a United Nations that would (and did) prevent more world wars. And for refugees, an offer like the Nansen refugee passport for the millions of destitute and homeless after the 1914-18 war, accepted by 50 nations. Instead we blather on about the apocalypse, terrorist world wars and Ancient Rome. To our very own PR Dave, I can only repeat: “whoa, boy!” [Abridged]         

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/whoa-there-david-cameron-haste-and-rhetoric-is-no-recipe-for-peace-a6744271.html

Anglican Tensions

By Ian Harris                         Otago Daily Times                     Nov. 13, 2015

Sex and modernity have been undermining traditional forms of Christianity and the church for more than a century. That is not surprising, since those forms were forged in pre-secular cultures and societies. And judging by the latest initiative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the pressures on the worldwide Anglican Church are close to breaking point.

He has called a meeting of archbishops from the church’s 38 “provinces” around the world to jettison the notion of a united global Anglican Communion, and move forward as a looser association of independent national churches. They would be linked to the archbishop of Canterbury, but not necessarily to each other.

This follows 20 years of efforts to end bitter sniping between liberal and deeply conservative Anglicans, including a brave but ultimately futile attempt to formalise their relationship through a global Anglican Covenant. Instead of spending time and energy trying to paper over the cracks, Welby thinks churches of his heritage have more constructive things to get on with. So he is looking to cut the losses and salvage what he can.

There has to be a tinge of regret in this. Anglicans pride themselves on being a broad church, holding together fundamentalists and charismatics, evangelicals and liberals, those who emphasise their church’s Catholic tradition, others its Protestant energy. One insider observes rather smugly that “other traditions look to the Anglican Communion to learn from its ability to have good disagreements”.

Not any more. Divisions over sex and theology have become too abrasive to permit of mutual tolerance. So when in 2003 the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated a bishop who was not only homosexual but had a partner, the Communion erupted. Five years earlier the Lambeth Conference of bishops from around the world had rejected homosexual practice as incompatible with scripture. It is certainly incompatible with the culture of Palestine 3000 years ago, whose attitudes are reflected in six scattered biblical texts.

The latest 200 years of scholarship, however, offer churches a more informed understanding of scripture as the product of deep human experience and reflection rather than divine dictation. And science provides a more informed understanding of homosexuality as a regular and natural element of the sexual spectrum in every society. Churches are unwise to ignore either of these advances. 

Some, though, still do. In line with their cultural and theological convictions, the official Anglican bodies in Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda support their countries’ criminalisation of homosexuality. In 2008 they came together with others of like mind to form the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) – a broadside aimed at the erstwhile “broad church”.

The following year a handful of dioceses in the US and Canada protested at the homosexual bishop’s consecration by setting up a rival denomination, the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). Some dioceses in Africa, South America and Asia backed them, even offering to take under their wing parishes in America and England which held to the Lambeth line. 

Gafcon sees itself as standing for “truth” in opposition to “moral compromise, doctrinal error and the collapse of biblical witness in parts of the Anglican Communion”. So concerned are many bishops in the global south at liberal Anglicans in the West that 250 of them boycotted the Lambeth Conference in 2008. Fearing a repeat, Welby has postponed the next conference indefinitely.

Truth in religion is tricky, since all religions are ultimately the product of human ingenuity in response to experience. That means apprehension of truth varies. It is best regarded as provisional, rooted in tradition but always open to new knowledge and insights that ground it in the present. In a world where everything is constantly evolving, leading Anglicans have made a huge contribution to this process.

Conservatives who believe they have truth locked in once and for all must not be allowed to close that down – and Welby’s proposal to let the provinces “live in separate bedrooms”, as some describe it, may well lance the boil. Anglicanism will then continue much as it is now: basically federal, loosely linked, culturally and doctrinally diverse. More broadly, it’s a pity that the institution of the church, which exists to promote Christian faith, growth and freedom, can end up getting in the way of all three. Progress will then happen both in spite of and because of the institution. The impulse will always be there, especially on the boundaries, to adapt to current realities by drilling deeper to achieve what the church is essentially here to do – not to control, but to free.

Wake of ISIS Terror: Mourning, Lament, Discernment

By Jim Wallis                       Sojourners                   19 November 2015

If we count up the number of people killed or wounded in the ISIS Paris slaughter last weekend, and add all their families and friends, the level of human mourning is staggering. Then include the many other victims murdered in Beirut just days before, or the legions of those raped and killed in Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Egypt and Turkey — who never receive the same attention as Western victims — and we see human devastation that is utterly evil.

From a religious perspective, the hardest thing about confronting evil is the painful human tendency to only see it in others, in our enemies, and not see any on our side because of the blurred vision caused by the planks in our own eyes, to paraphrase the gospels. In discussing ISIS, we should clearly use the language of sin, the enormous sin of the ideological hate of ISIS finding its victims all over the world. 

But theologically, sin begets sin. So we cannot simply name sins of ISIS ad nauseum without also lamenting the sins of the West that they use as inexcusable justifications for horrific violence. Overcoming the growing terrorism we face requires addressing the grievances rather than repeating our missteps and mistakes.

To satisfy our thirsty oil economy, the West has literally created false nations and consistently supported brutal oligarchs and allowed them to crush their democratic critics – which gave rise to fundamentalist extremism. The U.S. overturned a democratically elected government in Iran and installed the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, which gave rise the Islamic regime that we now so hate. (See how many of your friends and neighbors even know the name Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Iranian president we overthrew because of oil.)The hypocrisy is endless: News of ISIS beheadings saturates the Western media, yet we ignore Saudi beheadings on the same day; we look the other way when funders from our oil allies in the Gulf states actually finance the terror we condemn; we, a nation of immigrants, allow fear to dominate our response to the refugee crisis. These are sins too. And sin begets sin.

How do you “destroy” or “eliminate” something like ISIS, words we now hear every day from our politicians? How do we keep our country safe? Can we do it by more massive American invasions of Middle Eastern countries? Can we really “fight to win and then leave,” as Jeb Bush and others are now calling for?

As David Cortright has said, “Military strikes from the West are exactly what the militants want, providing fodder for recruitment and justifying what is otherwise unjustifiable. Will we fall into that trap again?” Military victories have come quickly, but they don’t eliminate a growing ideology. Our invasions have actually exacerbated the instability and sectarian conflict that helped lead to ISIS as they gain more recruits for terror locally and now internationally. Temporary military victories in Iraq and Syria will not destroy or eliminate the continuing terrorism in the Middle East or in the West.

 Protecting millions of vulnerable and displaced people must be our urgent concern. Destroying the growing social media success of ISIS should also be a top priority, as should eliminating the resources and funding for terror, even if that leads us to our oil allies and banks. The best way to defeat bad religion is with good religion, and the better way to defeat religious fundamentalism is from within rather than trying to smash it from without. 

We must form a clear, direct, and unified global coalition – with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, NATO, the Arab League, and the international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF — to unify a strategy of comprehensive economic sanctions and isolation against ISIS. We should also include sanctions against any nations or funders that support ISIS, which would signal how serious we really are. 

A French journalist who was a hostage of ISIS for 10 months and got to know them well says this:

"My guess is that right now the chant among them will be ‘We are winning.’ They will be heartened by every sign of overreaction, of division, of fear, of racism, of xenophobia; they will be drawn to any examples of ugliness on social media. Central to their world view is the belief that communities cannot live together with Muslims, and every day their antennae will be tuned towards finding supporting evidence. The pictures from Germany of people welcoming migrants will have been particularly troubling to them. Cohesion, tolerance–it is not what they want to see…. there is much we can achieve in the aftermath of this atrocity, and the key is strong hearts and resilience, for that is what they fear. I know them: bombing they expect. What they fear is unity.” 

[Abridged]        

See more at: https://sojo.net/articles/wake-isis-terror-mourning-lament-iscernment#sthash.

Shoot-to-kill won’t make us safe from terror

The death of Jean Charles de Menezes shows how much can go wrong when fear and prejudice cloud armed officers’ judgments

By Gary Younge                  Guardian/UK                          18 November 2015

The descriptions varied. Officer Frank assumed he was “a white man”, but thought: “It would be worth somebody else having a look.” Officer Ivor believed he had “Mongolian eyes”; Officer Harry said he was “acting in a wary manner”; Commander Dick thought him “very, very jumpy”.

 But a consensus soon emerged: he was a jihadi about to blow up London’s tube. Within an hour the descriptions were unanimous. He was a dead man. The police had put seven bullets in his head. Within 24 hours a new consensus was taking hold. They had all been completely wrong. He was not off to spread terror through the capital, but to fix a broken fire alarm in Kilburn. He was not a terrorist, but a 27-year-old Brazilian electrician. His name was Jean Charles de Menezes.

Any shoot-to-kill policy inevitably rests on the presumption of guilt, often of a crime that has not yet taken place. In the most literal sense of the word, such policies are based on prejudice – a judgment made about who someone is and what they might do, prior to any evidence about either. Those presumptions do not come from nowhere. They are rooted in an array of received wisdoms – a constellation of probabilities, generalisations, bigotries, calculations, likelihoods, falsehoods, archetypes and stereotypes. Judgments are made through the crosshairs of a firearm. The verdict is always the same – death. There is no leave to appeal.

In the stampede to defend and extol western values – whatever they are – against the onslaught of barbarism, it should be recognised that the principles of freedom and equality have never applied to all in the west except in the most formal sense. The criminalisation of communities of colour (and the Irish in Britain) long preceded the war on terror and will, unfortunately, survive it.

Fascism is once again a mainstream ideology in Europe, and Muslims are among its principal targets. Knowing what the odds are for black and Muslim people to be stopped and searched, the ramifications of a “don’t stop, just shoot” policy do not bear thinking about. “Anyone may be a soldier in disguise, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber.” The young man with a backpack might be late for football. Once he's been shot, it’s too late to find out.

Those who might insist that racial sensitivity is a luxury we cannot afford at such critical times should realise that it is precisely the trust of black and Asian communities that is most needed to combat this particular fundamentalist scourge. Moreover, if unity against terror is genuinely what we are aiming for, it cannot be achieved by forcing some to live in terror of the state so that others can enjoy the illusion of security – we’re either all in this together or we’re not. Finally, the murder and humiliation of innocent people abroad at the hands of western forces is partly what has brought us to this point, helping to mobilise large numbers of disaffected Muslim youth. Being as callous and careless at home as we have been abroad will hurt, not help.

Police officers thought that De Menezes looked suspicious because he changed buses and looked fidgety, which is apparently how a well-trained terrorist would behave. It turned out he switched buses because the tube stop was closed, and was on edge because he was running late for work.

And when people are refracting their impressions through a lens of fear they rarely see straight. De Menezes was shot two weeks after jihadis had attacked tube trains and a bus in central London and a day after the failure of another plot. People were understandably jittery. Initial witness reports said that De Menezes was wearing a suspiciously large padded jacket on a hot day, had vaulted the ticket barriers.          [Abridged]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/shoot-to-kill-terror-fear-prejudice-jean-charles-de-menezes