Category Archives: Islam & Muslims

The Shadow at the Pride Festival

A year ago last Saturday, the Friends Meeting I’m part of took a big step, for us: we rented a booth at the Alamance Pride Festival, held in a large park in downtown Burlington NC.

The Spring booth, with a blogger on duty at the table.

Outwardly, our booth was not particularly eye-catching. Amid the fluttering of a thousand floating rainbows, the yellow table banner we made for it is about as gaudy as we get. Spring Friends Meeting has been what many call an “affirming” congregation for more than a dozen years, and we’ve paid our share of dues for that. But we didn’t do it for publicity, and we haven’t done much of what many others call evangelism, which we’d  rather name “outreach.” We have  lots of opinions about things, but are  mostly quiet about them.

Maybe too quiet. Spring has been gathering for Quaker worship in southern Alamance County for 251 years, but we soon found out in the booth that hardly anyone we talked to knew we were there.  Which meant that Pride was a great opportunity for our outreach aspirations, but it also brought home the suspicion that maybe we had been a bit too ready to “hide our lamp under a bushel,” for much of those two-and-a-half centuries, which is something the gospel says not to do. There’s a false modesty which at bottom is mostly a mix of snobbery and pride.
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Quakers Quitting on QUIT: Torture Wins, this time. And maybe next time, too.

I wish it wasn’t time to write this post.

But it is: Quakers are quitting on QUIT.

QUIT is — or rather was — the Quaker Initiative to end Torture. It began in the spring of 2005, with a call by Friend John Calvi,  just as the international scope, the vast evil plus the flagrant criminality of the U. S.  “War on Terror” torture  program — all this was becoming shockingly clear.

As detailed below, QUIT formally ended this week, on July 15, 2024.

Nineteen years.

We worked hard, we did stuff. We joined with others.  But in my view, we failed. At our most active and diligent, we didn’t really lay a glove on our three main targets.

Those targets were:

Continue reading Quakers Quitting on QUIT: Torture Wins, this time. And maybe next time, too.

“You May Say, They Are Dreamers – But They’re Not the Only Ones” — Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement Reviving, Expects a Long Haul

‘We all share the same pain’: can the Israeli-Arab peace movement rebuild after 7 October?

As the conflict in Gaza continues, reconciliation may seem a distant dream, but on both sides there are those working for peace

Caitlin Kelly — Tue 21 May 2024
Supported by theguardian.org

On the morning of 7 October, as news emerged of the Hamas attack on Israeli communities near the Gaza border, Naama Barak Wolfman joined thousands of others frantically texting their friends and family. “Checking you’re alright,” she wrote to her colleague, Vivian Silver, a Canadian who spent decades working to foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

The text was never read. Silver was one of several peace activists killed that day, though news of her murder took nearly a month to reach Silver’s friends and family. Many believed the Women Wage Peace leader had been taken hostage, even picturing her negotiating with her captors.

“We couldn’t find the right words to express the pain, the hurt, and the terror. People on both sides were afraid,” Wolfman recalls. “You shut down, you close the windows. In Israel, that’s what everyone literally did for the first few months.”

Continue reading “You May Say, They Are Dreamers – But They’re Not the Only Ones” — Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement Reviving, Expects a Long Haul

Rushdie on “Free Palestine,” Speaking in Germany

Writer Salman Rushdie: “Free Palestine would be a Taliban state”

 

Märtyrer der Freiheit: Schriftsteller Salman Rushdie wird seit Jahrzehnten von Islamisten mit dem Tod bedroht. 2022 attackierte ihn ein Mann lebensbedrohlich mit dem Messer, stach ihm das rechte Auge aus. Jetzt präsentierte Rushdie in Berlin sein Buch „Knife“, in dem er den Mordversuch literarisch verarbeitet
[NOTE: This text was published by Die Bild, a German newspaper, and machine-translated from German into English. ]

May 19, 2024

Martyrs of freedom: Writer Salman Rushdie has been threatened with death by Islamists for decades. In 2022, a man attacked him life-threatening with the knife, stabbed him with the right eye. Now Rushdie presented his book “Knife” in Berlin, in which he processes the murder attempt in a literary way.

Continue reading Rushdie on “Free Palestine,” Speaking in Germany

A Quaker In Conflict, Outer and Inner: Damned if He Speaks, Damned If He Doesn’t. Meanwhile, There’s Work To Do.

New York Times — December 31, 2023

Can He Condemn the Killings Without Causing More Pain?

Chris George has lived in Israel and Gaza, where he was once held hostage. As his employees ask him to speak out on the latest war, he is torn.

He had spent his entire career attending to the horrors of terrorism and war, and now Chris George, 70, believed it was his responsibility to act again. He sat at his desk inside Connecticut’s largest refugee resettlement agency, trying to write a public statement about the violence in Israel and Gaza that had resurfaced traumas among his staff, and in his own personal history. Continue reading A Quaker In Conflict, Outer and Inner: Damned if He Speaks, Damned If He Doesn’t. Meanwhile, There’s Work To Do.