Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• By Peacemakers Trust

Peacemakers Trust has received an invitation from The Sharing Way, a Canadian faith-based development agency, and its Rwandan partner, the Association des Églises Baptistes au Rwanda (AEBR), to work with them to develop a three year plan of action that responds to emerging needs and challenges in post-genocide Rwanda. The participatory planning process will involve consultation and planning meetings with a number of Rwandan church leaders from around Rwanda, including women and youth leaders.

You can become a partner in raising the costs of this initiative with a tax-deductable donation to Peacemakers Trust, a Canadian charity focused on conflict transformation and peacebuilding. (read more…)

• News source:
• originally published 2 February 2010
• Independent Catholic News

As the acclaimed 3D film ‘Avatar’ was today nominated for an Oscar in the Best Film category, tribal peoples around the world have claimed the film tells the real story of their lives today…

• News source:
• 15 February 2010
• USA Today
• A man with a machete attacks and kills your family. Repeat this scene on a genocidal scale. Would you forgive? Could you? Rwandans are, as human instinct and faith intersect in this African nation.
• By Amy Sullivan

KIGALI, Rwanda — Rosaria Bankundiye and Saveri Nemeye are neighbors in the tiny village of Mbyo, south of Kigali. On a steamy morning, they sit in the cool living area of the clay house Saveri helped build for Rosaria just a few years ago. Two of his sons roll around on the floor while the adults talk. At one point, Saveri leans over to say something to Rosaria and she starts laughing, her smile wide. They have known each other for a long time.

Nearly 16 years ago, during the genocide that wracked this African country of 10 million people for 100 days in 1994, Saveri murdered Rosaria’s sister, along with her nieces and nephews. Genocidaires also attacked Rosaria, her husband and their four children with machetes and left them for dead. Only Rosaria survived. Yet when Saveri came to beg her forgiveness after he was released from prison in 2004, Rosaria considered his request and then granted it. “How can I refuse to forgive when I’m a forgiven sinner, too?” she asks.

• News source:
• originally published 29 January 2010
• Times Colonist
• Tom Oshiro's lengthy service at the Mustard Seed Street Church and Food Bank was recognized... at the sixth annual Victoria Leadership Awards ceremony
• By Judith Lavoie

To Gail Bones and other volunteers at the Mustard Seed Street Church and Food Bank, pastor Tom Oshiro is the inspiration that keeps them going day after day.

“What do I think of Tom Oshiro?” said the volunteer haircutter at the Mustard Seed Street Church and Food Bank. “He’s the most precious person and probably the closest thing to Mother Teresa that I will ever meet.”

Oshiro, honoured with Leadership Victoria’s annual Lifetime Achievement Award yesterday, arrived at the Mustard Seed in 1991, going from counsellor to pastor and director. He has watched the number of hungry people grow from 400 to 7,200 a month — including 1,700 children — and overseen the food bank as it clambered from the brink of financial collapse in 1996 to reach last year’s budget of $1.9 million — all from donations.

“We have never got one cent from government, which is such a blessing — they can’t dictate to us,” said Oshiro, 81, sitting in his Mustard Seed office surrounded by walls of books, children’s paintings, crystal-meth pamphlets and religious symbols.

Oshiro, who was named Citizen of the Year for Victoria in 2002, is slightly bemused by the award, and reflected on his definition of leadership.

• News source:

Redistribution of Wealth: Economic and Environmental Justice from Indigenous and Faith Perspectives March 5-7
Maritime Labour Centre, Vancouver, Coastal Salish Territory

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars and activists, both secular and faith-based, who are exploring alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism either grounded in sacred cosmologies and/or incorporating values that prioritize and link redistribution of wealth with respectful relationships with land.
Keynote speakers are:

Friday night

• gid7ahl gudsllaay, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson (Haida Gwaii), General Counsel for the Haida Nation and founder of EAGLE (Environmental-Aboriginal Guardianship through Law and Education);
• Mritiunjoy Mohanty (India), Indian economist who teaches at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Kolkata ;

Saturday:

• Pablo Solón (Bolivia), Bolivia’s Ambassador to the UN.

Other speakers and resource people include:
Rauna Kuokkanen (Samiland/Canada); David R. Loy (United States); John Parker (United States); ; T’Uy’Tanat-Cease Wyss (Skwxw’u7mesh Nation) as well as Na’cha’uaht/Kam/ayaam – Cliff Atleo, Jr.; Stephen Aberle; Azhar Syed; Clifford Azack (Nisga’a Nation); Dolores Chew and Larry Grant (Musqueam Nation).

The conference program can be viewed here:

http://interfaithjustpeace.org/program_2010_specific.php

Register now and consider subsidizing someone else. Cost $35- $100 sliding scale. Half-day rates available. No one turned away for lack of funds.
Registration forms are at:
PDF format:http://interfaithjustpeace.org/pdf/2010/2010_registration_form.pdf
MS Word: http://interfaithjustpeace.org/pdf/2010/2010_registration_form.doc

Interfaith Summer Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movements
Institute for the Humanities
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby B.C.V5A 1S6
Canada
interf [at] sfu.ca
www.interfaithjustpeace.org

• News source:
• 3 February 2010
• mepeace.org
• By Waleed Hammad

As the setting sun casts a reverential red glow over Jerusalem’s Old City, a small group of sheikhs and rabbis stand aloft on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the holy sites, joined in prayer. Their prayer is also joined up, an amalgam of recitations from Islam and Judaism, as if by fusing the powers of these two religions, the men can focus on their single cause: peace between the populations of the holy land.

These spiritual leaders have given their blessings to a new organisation, one that seeks to bring Jewish settlers and Palestinians together, so they might become good neighbours.

The group, Yerushalom, was set up three months ago by Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank, who say they want to build bridges and better relations with the Palestinians living alongside them.

• News source:
• originally published 13 January 2010
• New Jersey Jewish News
• By Robert Wiener

The dovish lobbying group J Street is setting up regional chapters in several dozen areas of the United States — including three to cover New Jersey.

The self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group announced its regional organizing campaign in a Jan. 7 press release.

• News source:
• originally published 6 January 2010
• New Jersey Jewish News
• By Robert Wiener

On an interfaith mission to Israel, a local rabbi said her commitment to fostering peace in the region was tested in ways she and the other Americans on the trip had not anticipated.

Rabbi Amy Small of Congregation Beth Hatikvah in Summit was one of three rabbis who took part in a peacemaking trip to Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank led by the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative.

The 15 delegates, all from the United States, included two high-ranking Catholic clergy, a Greek Orthodox priest, four Islamic leaders, and ministers from four different Protestant denominations.

The trip, held Dec. 16-23, included moments of intimate bonding among the Muslims, Christians, and Jews, “who often live in their own worlds,” Small noted last week, back in her synagogue office.

• News source:
• 19 January 2010
• Democracy Now
• By Amy Goodman, playing and commenting on excepts of speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today [January 19] is the [US] federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King… We play his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which he delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, as well as his last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountain Top,” that he gave on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated.

• News source:
• 17 January 2009
• Washington Post
• By Manuel Roig-Franzia

PORT-AU-PRINCE — At night, voices rise in the street. Sweet, joyful, musical voices in lyric Creole. A symphony of hope in a landscape of despair…

Seekers stream into the parking lot of the ruined Sacre Coeur Catholic church, a 105-year-old brick gem that was turned into a grim, hollowed-out shell, its stunning stained-glass windows tossed to the ground in shards. There, the Catholics and the Protestants and others seek solace from Father Hans Alexander, a Haitian priest who took his decidedly un-Haitian first name from his German father. He doesn’t ask them about their religion; he asks them about their pain.

“Catholics and Protestants and other religions are praying together now,” Alexander says, as two tearful women slump over his thick, broad shoulders. “We are saying, ‘We love Jesus; we don’t care about religions. We just care about the Lord.’ ” He has tried to teach his followers this lesson for years but did not always succeed in changing the minds of parishioners who thought their religion was better or truer than others. The quake, he says, has done much to convince those he could not.

• News source:

“Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Peace and Justice”
March 12-17, 2010

Location: The Campus of Bethlehem Bible College
And the Intercontinental Hotel, Bethlehem

• News source:
• 5 January 2010
• Sojourners
• By Julie Clawson

The Out of Ur blog recently posted a video of N.T. Wright going off on the dangers of social media. He warns that blogging and the like will stand in the way of real communication with others and he calls the popularity of social media “cultural masturbation.” Now it’s nothing new to hear some voice or other going off on modern technology, putting their own particular “it’s the end of the world as we know it” spin on the matter…

… The warning that Wright and others give is that social media takes people away from actual face-to-face interaction. If we spend too much time blogging and tweeting, we will reduce our time spent with huggable (Wright’s term) people. The problem is – that just isn’t true. A recent Pew Study busted that myth. It reported that, yes, about 6% of the population are isolated and asocial, but that is a number that has stayed steady since 1985 – before the widespread advent of the Internet. The study also found that people who spend time on the Internet are actually far more likely to go out and be with real live people than those who don’t use the Internet. The point – social media actually builds community, even of the huggable people sort.

• News source:
• 28 December 2009
• Toronto Star
• By Dow Marmur

At this season of celebration and goodwill, it may sound unduly cynical to suggest that because Jerusalem is holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, their adherents find it especially difficult to get along there. Even the internal conflicts within each religion are more dramatic in the Holy Land than elsewhere…

Despite obvious difficulties, serious efforts are being made in different quarters to create a climate of religious coexistence in the Holy Land.

• News source:
• 27 December 2009
• Khaleej Times
• By Phillip Knightley

Some years ago I attended a conference outside London run by a Buddhist organisation who wanted to know why the Western media had dozens of war correspondents on their staffs but not a single peace correspondent.

It was a simple, fair and important question and although we argued about it for hours no satisfactory answer emerged. As far as I know the Buddhists are still looking.
 They will be greatly helped by a new academic study published in Media, War and Conflict (Sagepublications.com) which draws on a six country study of viewers of CNN International, BBC World and Al-Jazeera English to see whether broadcasters foster cross-cultural understanding or a clash of civilisations.

• News source:
• 22 December 2009
• Ekklesia
• By Ecumenical News International

A Catholic human rights activist who denounced the atrocities of white minority rule in the country then called Rhodesia, has charted what he describes as the “descent to tyranny” of Zimbabwe’s post-independence ruler Robert Mugabe – writes Trevor Grundy.

For more than 20 years until 1999, Mike Auret worked for Zimbabwe’s Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, set up by the country’s Catholic bishops.

In his new book, From Liberator to Dictator: An Insider’s Account of Robert Mugabe’s Descent into Tyranny, Auret records how he met Mugabe several times and was captivated by the man’s intelligence and apparent sincerity…

• News source:
• originally published 24 November 2009
• Ekklesia
• press release

London, UK – The religion and society thinktank Ekklesia is observing that opposition against the ‘anti- homosexuality’ Bill currently being proposed in Uganda is a prime opportunity for the churches to create some unity around issues of sexuality which so often divide them…

The Bill being proposed in Uganda would introduce the death penalty for certain sexual activity between consenting adults. Whatever people’s views on sexuality within the churches, says the thinktank, Christians should be able to join together to oppose the measures.

• News source:
• 9 December 2009
• Nashville Arts Scene
• By Lyda Phillips

In a new book, Andrew B. Lewis follows the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its leaders from Nashville’s north side into the heart of Dixie

The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
Hill and Wang, 356 pp., $28

Nashville’s north side had it all going on in the late 1950s. Jefferson Street was jumping with students from Fisk, Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State and American Baptist Theological College. The clubs along the strip between Fisk and TSU were packed with kids out to hear Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Tina Turner and Ray Charles. The postwar economic boom had brought new prosperity to the entire country, and teenagers, black and white, bopped to the beat, self-identifying as part of a new, hipper culture.

In that electric atmosphere, a group of earnest and thoughtful Nashville students became leaders in one of history’s most impressive—and successful—mass movements, as they threw their bodies, their very lives, on the line to end segregation in the South. The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation by Andrew B. Lewis is a new look at this era, examined through the lens of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its leaders—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry, Bob Zellner and Julian Bond.

• News source:
• 3 December 2009
• God's Politics
• By Becky Garrison

The forthcoming documentary The End of Poverty? opens with the question “Why does poverty persist in a world of growing wealth?” Through a series of interviews with newsworthy leaders like John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, and Nobel Prize winners in economics, filmmaker Philippe Diaz traces the historical roots of this current worldwide poverty crisis back to exploitative practices that began during colonial times. In a touch of irony, most of the economists Diaz interviewed for this film in 2006 predicted that the current financial crisis was inevitable because the current policies such as unfair debt, trade, and tax policies penalized those countries even further. The solution offered by these experts to remedy this worldwide problem is justice, not charity.

• News source:
• 17 November 2009
• FREEradicals
• By Jeni Mitchell

In the wake of the Fort Hood shooting, commentators on this blog and elsewhere have been exploring more broadly the connections between grievances, ideology and violent action. Too often there is a tendency to see a certain inevitability in processes of violence, to believe that people with particular grievances will inevitably be tempted to engage in or at least support violent acts. I thought it might be interesting to look at a case that disrupts these assumptions.

A very fine organisation that I used to work for in Washington, the Middle East Institute, is hosting its annual conference this week. At the opening session, an award was presented to Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor, for his efforts in promoting peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

• News source:
• 12 November 2009
• Common Ground News Service
• By Aziz Abu Sarah

WASHINGTON, DC – The struggle for civil rights, freedom and independence is not unique to the Palestinian people. Many nations have travelled the same road. Palestinians today have the advantage of looking back and learning from those who succeeded in their struggles.

The American civil rights movement in particular has important lessons for those working to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It succeeded in using non-violent strategies to bring about the end of legally sanctioned segregation in the United States. What principles can the Palestinians learn from the movement?

The civil rights movement in the United States based its struggle on messages that were hard to disagree with, even for those who did not identify with its aims and objectives. Prominent civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, reminded the American people of one of the most basic principles in their constitution: “all men are created equal”. He highlighted the law of humanity and lifted it above man-made laws. He called any law or practice that denigrates human dignity or limits freedom unnatural and immoral, and said these laws shouldn’t be obeyed because they inspire a false sense of superiority in one race against another. He touched people’s hearts by reasoning with them and speaking their own language.

Dr. King appealed to the deepest consciousness of the American people. He invoked the highest standard of American values: the constitution and the writings of the founding fathers. Thus, his appeals reached millions of American people and resonated within their hearts and minds.

In the same way, Palestinians can reach the hearts and minds of the Jewish citizens of Israel by appealing to their hopes and fears, ideals and principles. But as Israel has no constitution, this means calling on the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish traditions.

By presenting Jewish morals, standards and beliefs in a new light, Palestinians can make their arguments more salient to Israelis. For example, the words of the prophet Isaiah are particularly resonant, especially as they are read during the Yom Kippur service: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”

Moses’ cry to Pharaoh is also powerful: “Let my people go”. Moses was asking for freedom, and his words are sharper than any sword. It is a phrase that can reach the hearts of the Jewish community far more effectively than any angry slogan or threat.

Palestinians should also appeal to Israel’s democratic ideals. As Israel maintains a belief in liberty and self-determination, so should Palestinians insist that Israel live up to its own ideals. This means highlighting that true democracy cannot allow for the occupation and oppression of others.

In recent years, many Palestinians have chosen non-violence as a form of resistance, from weekly demonstrations against the Israeli separation barrier to economic and cultural boycotts. However the majority of activities have been unilateral or have failed to reach the mainstream Israeli public.

In America, the civil rights movement geared its campaign toward the large silent majority of white Christians. It is time for Palestinians and Jews who support freedom to do something similar, and call on Israel to uphold the principles it claims to espouse. This appeal should not just be made with words, but through non-violent actions aimed at evoking symbols that will reach every Israeli and Jew, from the soldiers at the checkpoints and the settlers in the West Bank to the businesspeople in Tel Aviv.

The Palestinian struggle shares many similarities with Jewish history. From its fight for existence to the Diaspora experience, Jews and Palestinians have both desired a secure and free homeland.

These struggles have been burdened by disappointment. Here we can also learn from the American Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail about his own disappointment, but he did not let his frustration distract him from his ultimate goal. Instead, he kept building bridges between people who were divided by walls of fear, racism and even hatred. He was sustained by a belief that he was not fighting a war that would be won or lost by conventional weapons, but a struggle for the triumph of humanity over extremism.

Palestinians, like King, should fight not only for freedom, but also for humanity to defeat separation and prejudice.

——————

Aziz Abu Sarah is the Director of Middle East Projects at Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University at George Mason University. His blog can be found at http://azizabusarah.wordpress.com. Email: azizabusarah@gmail.com. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 12 November 2009, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.