Your WebWeaver can’t find words, so will share with you a very thoughtful statement from a friend, who is also a Friend (a Quaker, that is). Phil Steger is the director of Friends for a Non-Violent World, an organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has sent out this note.   [7-9-05]

Statement on Peace in the Face of Terror
by Phil Steger, Friends for a Non-Violent World
http://www.fnvw.org/

Grief, Mourning and British Courage


We mourn the deaths from yesterday’s terrorist attacks in London. We sympathize deeply with survivors’ sudden loss of loved ones, limbs, and the fleeting sense that they are safely removed from the violence wracking so much of the rest of the world. We repudiate utterly the stomach-turning and soul-offending violence of yesterday’s acts, which, whatever rhetoric or outrage my urge us believe, were not perpetrated by demons, vermin or beast, but by human beings.

At the same time, we stand awed and quieted by the incredible courage, composure and compassion of the English people who endured the chaos and pain of these attacks with a humanity and grace that are the greatest weapons against terror. And we recognize that the people of Great Britain now stand before a terrible choice. The same choice we faced as a nation three years ago.
At times of such raw hatred and terror, words of wisdom and warning should come cautiously, with deep humility and trepidation. Yet, if we are to be responsible, that is, ‘able to respond’, then we must speak the word we feel compelled to speak. We are resolved along one principle: these attacks must not be returned with military force.


Military Force Cannot Defeat Terrorism


Military retribution, even presuming one could find a geographical or strategic ‘source’ to attack, has no power whatever to protect our civilizations from terrorism. Nor can the policy of ‘regime change,’ which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, unremitting chaos and fear, and prime recruiting and training ground for terrorists in Iraq, do anything but accelerate our world toward total war. The way of violence and retribution leads only to final death. There is neither safety nor prestige in pursuing enemies down this path; these particular enemies least of all.

It is not yet certain who is responsible for yesterday’s attacks. Yet, a website and the opinion of experts provide reasonable evidence to hypothesize that they were planned and carried out by a European affiliate of al Qaida.

We can assume that whoever planned and orchestrated yesterday’s attacks are not mindless, directionless viruses who cause harm without meaning, as many are tempted to believe. This is the most dangerous, strategic misunderstanding of the disastrous "War on Terror." If we would safeguard our societies and the world from terrorism, then we must comprehend the goals and strategies of terrorists.


The Ends and Means of al-Qaida


Al Qaida, we know, consists of human beings who practice a narrow version of Islam. They have specific goals and have decided that the universal values of justice, compassion and peace, to which Islamic scriptures and teachings explicitly point, should not limit their actions. Therefore, they commit the unspeakably evil acts of directly targeting innocent, unarmed people whose identities they do not even know, and whom they therefore cannot even pretend to claim, let alone prove, are guilty of any crime for which they are being punished.

The tactical purpose of these attacks is obvious: to kill and maim as many innocent people as horribly as they can and to strip the survivors of any sense of safety or security. The problem is that we take the obviously evil and seemingly senseless nature of their tactics and assume that their strategy and goals are equally bereft of logic. But if we want to know how to protect our societies, save innocent lives and prevent a global war that ends in total annihilation, we must look more deeply into the nature of the terrorists’ strategy.

As they have made clear on their own websites and public communications, al Qaida and its affiliates pursue a simplified, perfect, utopian state of a specific kind of Islamic rule over the lands and regions of the Middle East. They read the history of their people as one of brutal and humiliating subjugation beneath the technological war machinery and the economic and bureaucratic efficiency of the secular West. Thus, in their own minds, which are the ones that matter when trying to understand who they are and how to resist their terrorism, they are fighting for their way of life, their beliefs and, ultimately, in their view, the eternal salvation not only of themselves, but of their descendents. As such, they are willing to risk all they have of life on this Earth and can and should not be expected to easily let go of their aims, or, so long as they prove effective, their means.


The Governing Logic of Guerrilla/ Terrorist War


The strategy which makes them believe that their means will be effective is this. They recognize that the West has both a technological, military, economic and bureaucratic advantage that they cannot match. They’ve watched colonized peoples fall one by one when they sought to meet the West’s vast superiority in organized violence with conventional military means. But they’ve also seen that colonized people have brought down Western colonizers by two means. The first, and the one that Al Qaida and its affiliates are now pursuing, is sustained guerrilla war.

Guerrilla war consists of violent attacks by small, concealed forces against soft targets in a better armed and larger force in order to provoke heavy-handed responses that invest their much more powerful opponent more deeply into territory that doesn’t belong to them. These retaliations kill and maim more and more innocent populations, the sympathies of whose survivors turn more and more against the colonizer and toward the guerrillas, whom they admire for their purity and total commitment to the cause.

The colonizer’s military commitments also lengthen the colonizer’s supply lines and flanks, making them more and more vulnerable to more numerous soft target attacks, and causing more and more pain and loss for the home populations whose taxes and families are fed into the military to sustain long-term, long-distance military deployments.

Eventually, the colonizer is driven economically and politically, if not morally, bankrupt and they are forced to withdraw. This comes at high cost to innocent people, to be sure, but the results for the guerrilla fighter are too dramatic to ignore. This is how the Viet Cong defeated the US in Vietnam, how al Qaida defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, and how Iraqis drove Britain out of Iraq eighty years ago. Henry Kissinger summed up this style of warfare in this way: "Guerrillas win by not losing. We lose by not winning."


The End of the War Against Terrorism


The logical result of this cycle of violence is a more deeply entrenched and mobile terrorist network succeeding in possessing and delivering nuclear weapons against the citizens of target states.

We cannot adequately imagine the suffering and destruction that this would cause, or the chain reaction of disaster it would trigger. The following seems as likely a scenario as anything else. The US, whose nuclear policy for the last half-century has been massive nuclear retaliation to nuclear attack, and whose current national security strategy is to treat the states where terrorists may be organizing as equivalent to terrorists themselves, can then be expected to unleash a nuclear holocaust throughout the Middle East, for it has already identified Iran and Syria as states harboring terrorists.

It might also be compelled by the logic of its own policy to nuclear strike Saudi Arabia, the world’s greatest supporter of terrorism, and Iraq, currently terrorism’s most fertile breeding ground. The US and global dependence upon oil makes this scenario both more destructive and less likely.

But there is another possibility for us than this.


Political Force: The Final Arbiter of Affairs


Terrorists don’t use violence because they believe that final power is military. If it did, then they would be self-defeating, since the nature of terrorism is to attack superior military powers. The terrorist uses violence because they know that final power is political; it is purely a matter of will.

The US will not defeat al Qaida through military retaliation. Nor will the UK. By all credible accounts (meaning those not given in White House press conferences and official statements), US military action, with British participation, lacking any political insights or solutions, has fed al Qaida the precious nourishment of prestige, chaos, suffering and violence it needs to thrive and grow.

The British Empire itself was toppled by an opponent who understood very well that political and not military power was the final arbiter of affairs. This opponent, however, also understood that the violence unleashed in guerrilla war devastated not only the humanitarian life of its people, but also any claim that the guerrillas were culturally or morally superior to their colonizers, since they adopted the basic means of the colonizer itself: violence against the innocent to break the will of the people to resist.


Nonviolence: Political Force Pure and Concentrated


The Empire’s ultimate opponent proceeded to experiment with the concentrated application of pure political power as the means to topple the imperial regime. In due time, they succeeded and brought the British Empire, upon which the sun previously had not set, to an end. The opponent? Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.

In defeating the British Empire, the nonviolent experiment of Gandhi and the INC not only liberated Indians, but England itself. In yielding to Gandhi’s superior political and moral force, Britain shed the costly burdens of trying to maintain, by bribery and brute force, an Empire that, in the age of democracy and respect for human rights, had lost whatever vestige of legitimacy it once possessed.

Great Britain since has matured, though its role in the world has grown smaller. There is a lesson in this for us. It is not just that we cannot hold onto the power that the Administration seems obsessed with projecting. It is more positive and liberating than this. We do not need to continue to burden our children with enormous debt, or send them around the world to kill and die in conflicts they cannot really understand, or sacrifice the health security, civil liberties and moral integrity of our home populations to staggeringly expensive projects of delivering death over long distances, all in order to defend ourselves or defeat our enemies. Indeed, none of these things can succeed in accomplishing these aims.


Nonviolent Belief Fighters: Peace and Freedom in the Face of War and Terror


Throughout the world, including Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Iran and Syria and North Korea, there are people as brave and compassionate as any we might find in our own stories of freedom and heroism. They are union organizers, like the Iraqi labor leaders who visited Minnesota last June. They are members of women’s associations, like the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association. They are leaders of and participants in peacemaking and reconciliation teams, like the Twin Cities’ own Sami Rasouli and the Muslim Peacemakers Team. They are just plain, old, ordinary individuals.

These are people who have, to borrow a phrase of Thomas Merton’s, a will to heal, to build, to forgive, to reconcile and to live that greater than that of suicide bombers to kill and to die, or even than our government’s will to dominate. They are willing to suffer for the sake of their beliefs in the dignity of their people and in the right and responsibility of their people to rule themselves. They demonstrate this fearlessness every day of their lives.

The US does not need to impose suffocating sanctions upon their countries, or invade them and destroy their regimes, occupy their lands, privatize their economies and design their governments in order for them to become peaceful and democratic. They will achieve these aims for themselves.

This is Gandhi’s lesson of liberation to the British and to the rest of us. If a people do not consent to a government, we cannot force one upon them. If they do not consent to occupation, we cannot keep one up. If, however, they set their wills upon freedom and self-determination, we cannot long stand in their way. The question for Britain, and for us, is: are freedom and self-determination what we truly intend for the peoples of the Middle East, for the Muslim and indeed the wider world? If it is, then the path is clear, though it remains dangerous.


Our Way Forward


We must get our militaries and covert operations out of their way, take our forced trade policies and free trade fundamentalism off the table, remove the weight of debt that bends their backs over, and contribute our money wisely – and under their direction – to the support of the programs and initiatives of reconciliation and civil society that they are already laboring under, unfunded, unnoticed, but also undefeated.

These are the fighters who can win the battle with terrorists for the hearts and minds of the world’s populations. As JFK once said, "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable." Conversely, by cooperating to make peaceful revolution possible, we pull the plug of power that energizes violent revolutions and guerrilla wars.

In addition, we must work with our allies to shore up international adherence, especially our own, to respect for human rights and the rule of law. We must cooperate internationally to disarm the nuclear stockpiles that already exist, including our own, and apply the leverage that such high ground provides to prevent any new state, nation or organization from developing and building them. We must cooperate internationally to defend our own people from the dynamics of mass destruction engulfing continents, hemispheres and the whole planet itself, dynamics in which our own population is totally vulnerable and against which all our armies are ultimately powerless: the widening maw of poverty and hunger, the spread of pandemic disease, catastrophic climate change and the depletion and pollution of the ecosystems that sustain life in this marvelous creation.


Britain’s Choice and Our Final Prayer


We must remain engaged with the peoples of the world, but as a partner, not an Empire. Tony Blair has gotten this part right as he convened the G8 and pushed President Bush especially on debt relief and humanitarian assistance. He got it tragically wrong in following Bush into Iraq.

Britons, and Londoners especially, opposed Blair’s decision, which embroiled them in a war they knew the ending to only too well. Their troops have died in Iraq in that war and yesterday they suffered their first casualties on their home soil in the war the invasion of Iraq widened.

Yesterday, Britons moved the hearts of the entire world, and not just with sympathy for their suffering. The world was struck with awe by the response of ordinary people and of emergency personnel to the chaos and pain around them. By all accounts, they were efficient, skillful, calm and humane. We pray that Britons’ national security response will exhibit these same qualities and be guided by this same, deep wisdom. In the meantime, let us stand quietly by our British brothers and sisters, and especially Londoners, as they decide what they will do next.

This essay sets forth a radical, nonviolent response to a radical act of violence.
Not everyone will agree that this is the best way.
But it seems worthy of serious consideration.
If you have thoughts, questions, concerns to be shared here,
please send a note!

The Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), sent a letter of condolence to the PC(USA)’s partner churches in England on July 7, as news reached the United States of a series of terrorist attacks in London that killed more than 50 people and left hundreds injured.

Kirkpatrick’s letter went to the United Reformed Church, the Church of England, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church of Scotland and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.  [7-9-05]

From Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase in his weblog, U-C: What I See
Click here to join his Yahoo Groups e-list
(Send a blank e-mail)

July 7, 2005 – Bombings in London

This morning I arose to spend the day with about sixty teenagers from the United States, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel, and Palestine. They are Jewish, Muslim and Christian, and they are all participants in a program sponsored by Auburn Seminary in New York called "Face to Face/Faith to Faith."

This project is among the most compelling things I’ve seen in my first year of travels as Moderator of the General Assembly.

When I woke up, it seemed like it would be a fairly easy day. I was being offered the opportunity to sit in on the deliberations of the teenagers, who have just three more days before the program ends and they all head home.

However, on the way down the hill to breakfast, I received the news of the bombings in London this morning. Forty more dead, hundreds wounded, another senseless round of violence in a cycle that seems to spin ever more quickly and wildly out of control.

I can think of no place I would have preferred to spend this difficult day than with this courageous group of teenagers.

Five years ago, the folks at Auburn decided to do something significant and real about the rising tide of violence in our world. The idea is pretty simple, really, though the logistics and the group dynamics are quite challenging. Students from the participating countries must be sixteen to eighteen years old to participate for the first time. They are chosen for their diversity, their commitment to their faith, their location in places of violence in the world, and their openness to energetically engage those who are different.

Students arrive in New York from all over the world, and head off to a camp an hour north of the city (another great thing a Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center is offering our denomination – this one is the Center in Holmes, NY). Then, they embark on a two-week adventure of getting to know one another, learning and practicing the communication skills necessary to share and listen to one another’s difficult stories, and becoming a new generation of practitioners of peacemaking.

Today’s news of the bombings in London evoked a watershed of deep sharing, tears, and a realistic assessment of the hard reality they confront as they go home. This afternoon, many of these young adults shared painful, rarely told stories of the ways in which their own families have been touched by the violence. One young woman said that for the last ten days she felt this was a safe place. "The bombings reminded me," she said, "that no place is entirely safe, but I’m still glad I came."

I have seen a lot of great things our church is doing as I have traveled. This fits in that elite category I’ve created in my mind of "The Church being Church." This program insists that God can help us to manufacture hope, even in spite of the clear-eyed assessment that the situation could easily be categorized as hopeless.

Over the last few months, I have heard a possible consensus growing among Presbyterians, many of whom have disagreed with one another about our action at last year’s assembly to start a process of "phased, selective, divestment" from companies whose activities support the occupation of Palestine and the terror of extremists in the Middle East. Whatever we may believe about the assembly’s actions, it seems that most of us can find common ground on a commitment to invest in efforts to build a strong and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Auburn’s program is a gift to our church. They have already been hard at work at developing the foundation for a resolution to the madness of a growing violence that, all too often, is fueled by religious extremists. They aren’t complaining. They aren’t wringing their hands. They’re just partnering with Christian, Jewish and Muslim colleagues around the world to defy the madness. They are making an investment in peace.

Please check out the website for Face to Face/Faith to Faith.

This program doesn’t just deserve our support, it deserves to be copied and emulated. They have to raise almost half a million dollars every year to make it go, and they need our help. They also could use help from pastors and lay leaders in identifying the teenagers in your area who would make good participants. Together, we can grow this work.

Tonight, after that very heavy afternoon session in which the kids shared so deeply with each other, someone pulled out a guitar as we finished dinner. The first song, sung with gusto by sixty teenagers who stood arm and arm on top of the picnic tables and the benches in the dining hall, was "Stand by Me." The organizers tell me that when the teenagers arrived they brought with them most of the stereotypes about one another that have been so destructive in the world. It’s not that they’ve unlearned all the racism and hatred and bigotry and violence that they’ve been brought up on in just two weeks. However, they’ve learned to see one another as people, and to rethink some of their own assumptions. One young man pleaded with the group today, "When you go home and you see other people, look them in the eye and see that they are people, just like I am." Those words - "Stand by me" - take on an entirely new meaning when song by these young adults who have experienced hatred in such profound ways.

Today, I received a wonderful gift from God. I sat on the edge of a moment of intimacy shared by a group of teenagers - Muslims and Jews and Christians – who dream of leading the world into a new and lasting kind of peace and security. "Look at the way we’re sitting all mixed up with one another after just one and a half weeks," one young woman said. "Imagine what we can do in a year."

Imagine!

Rick