Blessed are the peacemakers

There are lots of computer war games available, but did you know that there are peace games as well?

Jim Forest, of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, writes On Pilgrimage: from war games to peace games:

One of the things we talked about is a possible response to an annual military welcome-house at a Missouri army base. The event features a big tent in which kids are invited to play computer war games. It’s very popular.

An idea that emerged in our conversation is the possibility of setting up a peace games tent outside the base where, using borrowed laptop computers, kids (and parents) could play peace games.

Even if no peace game sells nearly as well as various war games, I was pleased to find that there are a lot of peace games out there.

The Christian Radical: Tell Congress: stop the violence in Zimbabwe

The Fellowship of Reconciliation is calling for the US Congress to stop the violence in Zimbabwe -- but how can they do that if they can't stop the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine?

The Christian Radical: Tell Congress: stop the violence in Zimbabwe:

As Americans, we are compelled to use our position as a global power to call for an end the the violence and for a restoration of democratic rule in Zimbabwe. Please contact your U.S. Senators to support the world's call for justice.

Click here to send a message to your U.S. Senators.

Thank you for raising your voice with others to create a more peaceful world.

The Christian Radical: Tell Congress: stop the violence in Zimbabwe

One of Mad Bob Mugabe's excuses is that he is protecting Zimbabwe from American imperialists like George Bush -- and when American peace organisations make calls like this, who can gainsay him?

Dorothy Day's anarcho-Catholicism:the way of love

Dorothy Day rejected Western individualism and collectivism, and proposed a new way: communitarianism

clipped from www.speroforum.com Dorothy Day - a radical pacifist who had been a member of the I.W.W., met Leon Trotsky, had an abortion, and raised a daughter as a divorced single mother - may be the next American canonized a saint in the Catholic Church. November 29th marks the anniversary of the passing of Dorothy Day, the foundress of the Catholic Worker Movement. In 1933, she founded the Catholic Worker movement with the itinerant French illegal immigrant Peter Maurin, a sort of modern Holy Fool in the mode of Saint Francis of Assisi. However politically heterodox Dorothy Day was, she was always religiously orthodox, saying, "When it comes to labor and politics, I am inclined to be sympathetic to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to the right."

The author of this article on Dorothy Day has his own blog The Western Confucian, where you can also leave comments.

Al Gore's peace prize

A conservative blog for peace: On Mr Gore's prize notes some of the ironies in the award of the Nobel peace prize to former US vice-president Al Gore.

The Western Confucian puts it in a nutshell:

This is the man, appropriately surnamed Gore, who was number two during the bombing of Serbia and the Iraq sanctions regime that killed half a million souls, mostly children. And yet when Pope John Paul II was the leading voice for peace in 2003, he couldn't get the prize because of condoms. Instead, it was instead given to someone no one ever heard of and whom we've since all forgotten. Shameful.

Jan Oberg notes that Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the Peace Prize should be awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Al Gore's record on that speaks for itself.

Al Gore - as vice-president under Bill Clinton between 1993 and 2001 was never heard or seen as a peace-maker. Clinton-Gore had a crash program for building up US military facilities and made military allies all around Russia - and missed history's greatest opportunity for a new world order.

In contravention of international law and without a UN Security Council mandate, they bombed Serbia and Kosovo, based on an extremely deficient understanding of Yugoslavia and propaganda about genocide that has caused the miserable situation called Kosovo today (likely to blow up this year or the next), and they bombed in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Or, as Alexander Cockburn observes:

It's as ridiculous as as if Goebbels got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, sharing it with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his work in publicizing the threat to race purity posed by Jews, Slavs and gypsies. (The peace prize actually went that year to the Nansen Committee for Refugees. Gore certainly played his part in creating Iraq's current 4 million refugees, among the greatest displacements of the past hundred years.)

I was going to say that one could at least say for Clinton-Gore that in Iraq, unlike Bush-Cheney, they did not pass the point of no return. They did not jump into the quagmire. But then, of course, they did jump right into the middle of the quagmire in Yugoslavia.

Muslims call for peace with Christians

In my previous post I reported some confusion about a letter to Roman Pope Benedict XVI signed by 38 Muslim scholars, and another addressed to a wider audience by 138 Muslim scholars.

The confusion has now been resolved, with the latter being issued on the anniversary of the former. The second and more recent letter is addressed to a number of different Christian leaders and is a call for Muslims and Christians to work together for peace. It is addressed to all Chtristian leaders everywhere, and is addressed to two African church leaders by name: His Beatitude Theodoros II, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa and His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Apostolic Throne of St. Mark.

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

Ruth Gledhill, the religion correspondent of The Times, blogs about it here, and reports that Irene Lancaster thinks the letter is "threatening". Part of the confusion about the two letters was caused by Ruth Gledhill linking to the wrong one on her blog, which one hopes may be corrected.

There seems to have been a mixed reaction among Christians, but I think that any call for peace is a hopeful sign, if it can be followed up. Religious leaders might not be able to deter political leaders who are bent on war. Many of the Christian leaders to whom the letter was addressed urged the USA and Britain not to invade Iraq in 2003, and the call was ignored. But quite a number of ordinary Christians went to Iraq to face the bombs.

Imagine what might have happened if Christian and Muslim leaders had been united, and the Roman Pope, Orthodox Patriarchs and the other leaders to whom the letter was addressed had gone to Baghdad in March 2003 and refused to move until George Bush withdrew his threat?

The world might have been a much less dangerous place today.

So if the letter leads to united action for peace by Muslim and Christian leaders, it is to be welcomed.

Score two for the peacemakers -- blessed are they

A very interesting verdict in a court case in Britain:

Toby Olditch and Philip Pritchard, who broke into the US Airbase at RAF Fairford on the eve of the Iraq war, intending to sabotage B52 bombers bound for the war, were acquitted of all charges on Tuesday. The judge evidently allowed them to present the defence of "lawful excuse" to the jury, that they were acting to prevent a greater crime. The prosecution accepted that even delaying the bombers could potentially save civilian lives, as they would have more time to flee.

But I wonder if Americans will get into a tizz about it, because it might perhaps also be seen as a precedent to justify the bombing of abortion clinics.

But read the whole thing - it gets better.