Please consider reading through and signing on to the letter below. If you would like to add your name to this letter, please emailwith your full address and any title or religious affiliation you would like to include. The letter will be sent to the leaders of both parties in Congress, the Secretary of State, and the President. The cutoff date to sign the letter is July 28.
We, the undersigned, deplore our government’s cynical, inhumane, and uncritical support of Israel’s military actions in Lebanon. We urge the United States to join the international call for an immediate cease fire followed by negotiations and an exchange of prisoners.
What is happening in Lebanon obviously goes beyond Israel’s legitimate self defense. It lacks all proportionality. According to senior Israeli diplomats, the purpose of Israel’s action is to roll back the clock of history by twenty years. Lebanese civilians, described by several Israeli officials as “collateral damage,” have been dying by the hundreds, precious infrastructure has been destroyed or gravely damaged, and the sovereignty of Lebanon has been trampled in the Israeli rush into escalation backed by the United States.
We believe that this tragic affair could have been avoided by means of a negotiated prisoner exchange as has occurred many times before. Instead, Hezbollah’s provocation served as the pretext for reviving the doomed neo-conservative dream of imposing a new order on the Middle East by force of arms. We do not excuse Hezbollah’s provocation, but we wish that Israel and the United States had responded very differently.
At the moment, war fever is clouding our country’s better judgment, and Americans’ well-founded sympathies for Israel are being exploited for political purposes. We must remind our leaders and our fellow citizens that the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was intended to quickly destroy the PLO. Instead it helped to create Hezbollah. Eighteen years later Israel was forced to withdraw. We fear this history may now be repeating itself.
Without question, the Hezbollah guerillas and their rockets and missiles are a threat to Israel, and Hezbollah forces must be disarmed. But this can only come about through the unified intervention of the international community, working to strengthen the hand of Lebanon’s legitimate government. Continued military action by Israel will have the opposite effect of rallying Arab states and non-Hezbollah Lebanese to Hezbollah’s defense.
We also fear that this war will aggravate the perilous situation in Iraq, where the unprovoked and illegal US occupation has already produced violent resistance, bloody and unceasing sectarian conflict, and a Shia-led regime in Baghdad that is increasingly aligned with Iran.
We therefore oppose further escalation of the ground and air war in Lebanon or any military action against other countries in the region. Escalation on any of these fronts will produce still more anti-US hatred and serve to recruit a new generation of Hezbollah-style militants. The current cynical US attitude that endorses Israel’s continued action for an indefinite period has already greatly inflamed anti-US sentiment throughout the region.
We demand Congressional hearings and media inquiries that will result in a full accounting of any American foreknowledge of this war and of how many U.S. taxpayer dollars have been used to underwrite the current military operation. We demand public assurances that US intends no direct or indirect military attacks on Syria or Iran.
Any solution to this conflict will require, among other accommodations, the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the establishment of a viable and independent Palestinian state, and a complete and total end to the US occupation of Iraq.
We urge our leaders to recover their senses before more innocent blood is spilled in pursuit of apocalyptic dreams.
Carl Sandburg was asked just before he died what he thought was the worst word, the most despicable word, in the English language. Without hesitation, he replied – exclusivism.
Exclusivism is a terrible word because it is a terrible reality. Everyone has experienced it at some point and at some level in our life – some at minor places; others have been traumatized by vicious exclusions. Christianity is very often presented in the most exclusionary ways. Christ is the only way to a saving faith. There is no other way to God. My God is bigger than your God.
My father’s best friend was a Jew in Knoxville who owned a jewelry store. My father loved to tell the story of running into his friend, Max Friedman, at a Catholic service one day. “I’m surprised to see you here, Max.” “Well I just don’t intend to go to hell on a technicality!”
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings marched up to the Hill yesterday to show her support for a new $100 million dollop of school vouchers that Republicans say will “deliver” low-income students from failing public schools and allow the victims to attend private and religious schools of their choice.
From the Egypt of the public schoolroom, run by those oppressive union bosses, to the Promised Land of the church-affiliated school, run by compassionate soul-savers. That’s the image they want to sell, these country club Republican friends of poor kids of color. School choice, as part of the GOP’s “Values Agenda,” is quite deliberately framed in biblical terms to appeal to both the white “values base” of the party and to anguished African-American parents whose children may be doing poorly in school whether or not the school itself is underperforming. Read the rest of this entry »
This review by Peter Laarman was solicited by JewsOnFirst, a great new site devoted to monitoring the Christian Right (slogan: “because otherwise they’ll think we don’t care”).
Within the stream of new books critiquing the Religious Right and its malign influence in public discourse and public policy, few are as readable or as well-reasoned as this relatively brief cri de coeur by Columbia historian of religion Randall Balmer. Because Balmer knows his history so well, he is particularly grieved by all the ways in which today’s U.S. evangelicals betray the vision of their 19th century forebears, who agitated for social reforms including Abolition, women’s suffrage, the rights of workers, and universal high-quality public education. Balmer made a serious effort, for example, to get the top eight evangelical groups to give him their positions on the issue of torture in the so-called “war on terror”; only two groups were willing to respond, and they were both pro-torture. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the saddest things about living in what Gore Vidal aptly calls the United States of Amnesia is that we cannot seem to recall the point of issues we struggled to resolve 30 years ago, let alone 100 or 200 years ago.
I was reminded of this after reading Sean Wilentz’s monumental history, The Rise of American Democracy, over the July 4 weekend. Wilentz emphasizes how anti-slavery forces in this country, building on the British anti-slavery agitation led by evangelicals like Wilberforce, were able to persuade a critical mass of Americans with the argument that slavery should be abolished not only because of the awful suffering of the slaves themselves but also because control by violence over the bodies of others degrades the characters and endangers the souls of those who exercise such control.
The anti-slavery movement made good propaganda use of the image of a kneeling, heavily-shackled African crying out with the words, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” This appealed to a religious sensibility that ran deeper the random Bible verses cited by pro-slavery preachers; it reminded people of Genesis 4, in which God says to the murderous Cain, “Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Preoccupied by the threat from without, the drafters of the Bush Administration’s various torture memos seem never to have considered the threat from within—the threat to the souls of those who would be expected to torture in our name. David Addington, John Yoo, and the others never seem to have considered what allowing U.S. personnel to abuse, torment, and even kill other human beings in the name of freedom would do to the characters of the abusers, and by extension, to the character of the nation. For we cannot pretend that we who permit or condone such acts to be done in our behalf are exempt from their corrosive effects.
Now, belatedly, we are beginning to get some sense of the incalculable damage that has been done, and not just at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Baghram Air Base but in the streets and alleyways of Ramadi, Haditha, and now Mahmudiya, where U.S. soldiers are alleged to have raped a 15 year old, shot her several times, killed her parents and her 7-year-old sister, and then tried to set the rape victim’s body on fire. There will be many more such incidents uncovered, and many more that are not uncovered but that will haunt the dreams and torment the spirits of the perpetrators, who may return from Operation Defend Iraqi Freedom but who will never fully return to civil society.
The lesson the Abolitionists and their successors tried to teach us was simple: we cannot brutalize others without brutalizing ourselves. Because we seem to have forgotten it, we can boast all we wish about our vaunted freedom and democracy, but in the eyes of the civilized world we wear the mark of Cain. We who were victims in September 2001 have forfeited all of the moral high ground by becoming conscienceless brute victimizers.
This is where the mindless—and bipartisan—“war on terrorism” has taken us. Unless we can recover our moral center, and soon, we, like Cain, will be left to wander in the wilderness, seeking but not finding a space of grace.
This Sunday, well over a billion people across the globe will be riveted to the battle between Les Bleus and the Azzurri. Millions of immigrants to America will flood living rooms, restaurants and bars to watch and cheer as well.
And the majority of people born in the United States will be apathetic or openly hostile to a match that most of the rest of the world has been waiting four years to see.
The match in question is the World Cup soccer final between France (known as Les Bleus) and Italy (the Azzurri). But those prevailing attitudes about the sport in this country shed light on some other struggles of arguably more relevance to progressives: the conflicts concerning America’s place in the world and immigration rights. Read the rest of this entry »
Whose side is the Archbishop of Canterbury on? That’s what some moderate and liberal Episcopalians would like to know in the wake of Rowan Williams’ rather chilly response to goings-on at the recently concluded Episcopalian convention in Ohio. Those goings-on included the election of a new Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori.
The worldwide Anglican Communion, headed by Williams, certainly appears to be giving American liberals the back-of-the-hand treatment while extending a generous right hand of fellowship to dissident U.S. conservatives. There is some possibility that Williams will not even allow the new Presiding Bishop to participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference—a global gathering of all Anglican leaders that takes place once each decade. That would be a humiliating rebuke to the U.S. church.
On its face the fight is all about gender and sexuality. According to the Washington Post, Jefferts Schori once dared to use the expression “Mother Jesus” in a sermon; far worse in the eyes of conservatives, she allowed same-sex blessings to take place in the Diocese of Nevada, which she headed prior to her election, and she voted in the House of Bishops to endorse the consecration of openly gay V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. Read the rest of this entry »
Just how patriotic is the war of America’s overclass against the rest of us? That’s a question few pundits will be asking on this Glorious Fourth. My question is why such a crucial question still isn’t on the public agenda in any significant way.
Thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s ever-alert Ellen Schultz we now know that the declining health of this nation’s system of private pensions isn’t just a factor of demographics or global market woes. It turns out that a major part is played by siphoning off worker pension plans to pay for lavish executive retirement benefits. Because of these abuses, the total pension tab owed to a handful of the big cheeses at many companies matches company obligations to tens of thousands of the firms’ ordinary workers.
In other words, take the 430:1 ratio of current CEO:worker pay and ratchet that ratio up by several factors as the cheese and his wage slaves enter their sunset years. It makes for a pretty picture, doesn’t it? Note as well that the executives normally get pension payouts at a rate of 60 to 100 percent of their pre-retirement compensation; the drones lower down get 20 to 30 percent of pre-retirement pay. This is all going on while companies move as one toward what they call “cash balance” plans for their peons: such plans have the effect of slowing the growth of older workers’ pensions or stopping it altogether.
