A letter to Obama from the Other Europe

via RFE/RL,

An Open Letter To The Obama Administration From Central And Eastern Europe

I was a big fan of the series Philip Roth edited.

Two Iranian Christians May Face Execution For Apostasy

Via RFT/RL

I read this stuff and think of Sinkford with Akmenijad and it sickens me.

Two Iranian women jailed in Iran's notorious Evin prison for converting from Islam to Christianity may be executed for apostasy, RFE/RL's Radio Farda reports.

Amir Javadzadeh, a broadcaster for the London-based Christian radio station Channel of Affection, told Radio Farda that the two women could be put to death even though "they were not politically active at all." He said they "just wanted to serve people according to the Bible."

The two women, Marzieh Amirizadeh, 30, and Maryam Rustampoor, 27, were arrested in March, although they "converted to Christianity about 10 years ago," Javadzadeh said. He added that they became Christians after "spending a lot of time studying the religion and helping others."

Merging of Church and State in Illinois

Grants to Churches in Illinois Governor Quinn's Capital Bill (Here as PDF). Pretty good for a State near fiscal collapse.

Christian Love Missionary Baptist Church will get $250,000, Bethel Lutheran Church will get $200,000, Haven of Rest Missionary Baptist Church will get $400,000, Mt. Vernon Baptist Church will get $200,000 to upgrade its kitchen and Our Lady of Peace in Chicago will get $45,000 to improve accessibility.

We Could have used that Peace Making Resolution

To sort out the morality of assassination and predator drones. From today's Opinion Journal Online,

The CIA has recently opted to step up its use of Predator and Reaper drones to kill al Qaeda and related militants in Pakistan's tribal areas. That program is done in consultation with Pakistani officials and is less risky than sending in individuals, because it doesn't involve U.S. personnel on the ground.

One official with direct knowledge of the secret program said that assassination teams could be more effective than taking out al Qaeda leaders with drone-fired missiles. "We're talking about the difference between two feet and 50,000 feet," said one official with direct knowledge of the program. "Do you want the collateral damage of 50,000 feet or two?"

Cook County Commissioner Beavers on States more corrupt than Illinois: Utah and Oregon

Tony P getting under Beaver's skin. If Utah and Oregon are more corrupt, than we have to beat them on body count with 11 shot dead over the long weekend. We need more than a Peace Making Pledge for this City.



xp Bill Baar's West Side, Prairie Politics

UUA's call for a Truth Commission

Rep. Eshoo released Letter to CIA Dir. Panetta (PDF here) asking for Panetta to correct his previous testimony that the CIA really does lie on a systematic basis since 2001. Illinois's own Jan Schakowsky cosigned.

When folks are laying themselves on the line like this, we need a truth commission more than ever to figure out what in the world is going on between the Hill and Langley 'cause somebody's lying.

Nargess Mohammadig: We have to Speak of Hope and Love

Via WLUML,Nargess Mohammadi's speech on acceptance of the Alexander Laner Award,

We have to Speak of Hope and Love

Everyone has the right to Freedom of Speech and Thought: Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

If one day we realize the goals of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, that will be a day of victory for human kind. If one day, humans can, without fear, insecurity, prison or death, express their beliefs and thoughts, and through peaceful means set out to publish those beliefs, authoritarianism will be undermined. But until that day, all those who hope for freedom will have a difficult road ahead.

I am very disappointed that I was not able to among you today. On the 8th of May, while on my way to an international women’s conference in Guatemala, I was banned illegally and without any legal order from travel and my passport was confiscated at the airport by security officials who identified themselves as affiliated with Office of the President.

You well know what is transpiring in Iran today. Many journalists, human rights defenders, political activists are currently in prison. On the other hand there are painful scenes of the murder of young women and men, which have inflicted a pain in our hearts that is beyond description. The innocent face of Neda, the young woman who has come to symbolize the peaceful protest of Iranians, will not fade from our memories. Of course, the movement and the demands of the Iranian people serve as signs of hope and promise and the realization of a bright future in our country which will indeed lead to freedom. The Iranian people have been working to achieve freedom, justice and democracy for one hundred years in their country and on this path they have forgone their lives and their possessions. They continue to work toward the realization of common human ideals, and certainly they will be victors on this path.

We have to speak of hope and love and what hope is more powerful than the human chain across the world, where individuals from all corners of the world, act in solidarity to support one another. No longer can governments, with the excuse of national sovereignty, erect a wall around the peoples of their nations, and with the same excuse, treat their citizens as they please and view any voice of objection from around the world as an act of interference in their internal affairs.

In the introduction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, foundational definitions have been provided, such as the unity of human kind as members of the same family, and the inherent dignity of human beings. In other words, the future of each individual in any part of the world, is not the sole concern of governments, rather their well-being is the concern of all members of the human race.

Today, speaking in defense of the people of Palestine, the US, Afghanistan, Iran, etc, and raising objections to the violation of human rights by governments, rulers and other powers, is not only not interference in the affairs of another country, which should not be prohibited, it is in fact the duty and commitment of every free individual anywhere in the world. This issue is not only emphasized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it is emphasized in all religions, in all languages and in various different forms. Saadi the renowned Persian poet puts it beautifully: “The children of Adam are limbs of each other [having been created of one essence].”

Along these lines, I would like to thank the reputable and significant Alexander Langer foundation for their support of human rights defenders and for honoring me with their award. I am well aware of the immense value of this important award. This award does not belong to one individual, rather it belongs to all those working toward freedom in Iran. The honoring of human rights defenders around the world with such awards works to create powerful links in the strong and connected chain of human beings around the planet, who have taken up the difficult task of pursuing the path to freedom and democracy with support of the international community. This support makes the road ahead less difficult.

5 July 2009

Source: Change for Equality

18 Tir 1388, Tehran Bolvare keshavarz

Today's protests on the anniversary of the 1999 demonstrations.

Live RPG removed from soldier

Video over at Military Times. Pretty heroic stuff on the part of the Medical Staff not to mention the Solider who got hit.

Iran election: faces of the dead and detained

Over at The Guardian,

Hundreds, probably thousands, have been arrested in Iran since the
presidential election on 12 June. Human rights and campaign groups such as Human Rights Watch, the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran and Reporters Without Borders have been collecting and publishing the names of those dead or detained.

We have brought those lists, and reports from trusted media sources, into a database that we are asking readers and those elsewhere on the internet to contribute too.

Since we launched this exercise we have had hundreds of emails, photographs and names sent to us. Keep them coming.

The Peace Making Statement at UUA

Good posts here and here on a cumbersome Statement that should have been put to rest at Salt Lake City.

A reply to me by Joel that needs a fuller response. Let me sip my second cup and hopefully make sense before rushing off here.

He wrote,

I agree that a year won’t help. Either it says, “Every UU is free to believe what they want about war, and their beliefs are equally valid”- in which case it is meaningless, or it says, “Peacemaking is central to our faith, but we’ve agreed not to be too hard on our deluded members who are serving with the forces of violence”, in which case we’ve just alienated a lot of members. I just don’t see any way around the central dilemma- how do you declare a credal statement for a creedless faith?

Yes, we believe what we want as UUs but our freedom does not validate all beliefs. Far from that. We covenant in a journey towards truth and part of that journey should mean we analyze those truths found by UUs and others and sort out what's sensible and not, what's good and bad, what's true and false. We're free (and I'd argue obligated) to make judgments including judgments on fellow UUs beliefs, as long as we do so within the bounds of behavior we've covenanted with each other.

Peacemaking is central to the service members mission. They will tell you that (ask some). A Peacemaking SOC does not by definition drive out Service Members. The ones I've read drive out Pacifists instead (one reason why I dislike such SOCs).

The SOCs sound an awful lot like creeds. I think we're better off without them and instead encourage more pastoral letters and commentary from UUs. They can be written though; and they can be written in non-creedal ways.

I argued (and lost, UUs judged me wrong) that my Church's draft --which read a lot like the UUA's draft-- was far too grand; scaling from the personal to the international. Keep it focused on the international I argued, and test what the SOC guided, on real world cases.

That's really the test of these things: how does conscience formally expressed for a collective, guide the collective in practice.

If we can't get from conscience to practice as in the case of this SOC, then best to write it off. Start over if we have too.

But it should not have been rejected as incompatible with Military Service (I have to go back and reread the UUA's draft to see if there was a clause that did that.) but a Peace Making SOC certainly doesn't drive out Service Members by virtue of the word Peace in it.

And lack of a SOC in no way validates any and all beliefs. Nothing we do as UUs validates in that way. We are not a Church of ethical blank checks. We have a lot of judges maybe, but no blank checks.

Alan Wald: Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

Alan Wald reviews some bios on key American Red authors,

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven G. Kellman. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.

An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert K. Landers. Encounter Books, 2004.

The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Ruth Price. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad. Knopf, 2007.

If we add these volumes to the growing shelf of other outstanding biographies of writers on the Left—Jack Conroy, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Josephine Herbst, Langston Hughes, John Howard Lawson, Claude McKay, Clifford Odets, Don West, Nathanael West, Richard Wright—the weight of an engagement with Communism in the making of US literature in mid-century becomes incontestable. The magnitude of the phenomenon will become possible to appraise as more attention is allocated to middle-range writers, especially those in popular genres (science fiction, pulp, historical novels, mystery fiction), as well as the neglected cultural Left functioning in the Cold War era itself. Even so, there will always be some scholars who simply cannot stomach the idea that a major artist could actually have been a real "Communist," or that the cultural movement around the Party could have been as inspiring and nurturing in one situation as it was constricting and vulgar in another. There is also the temptation to invalidate a credible achievement of the Communist movement (such as its exemplary contribution to anti-racism) by pointing to a deep flaw (blindness to brutal dictatorships). Such conundrums can cause scholars to try to abridge or tiptoe around the whole matter. With considerable success, the four biographers in this review opted to take the more difficult road.

Tony Blair's speech The Chicago Council on Global Affairs on Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The conclusion from a speech made by a real Socialist in Chicago a few weeks ago,

Finally, we are required to do something that it seems rather odd to have to say. We have to re-discover some confidence and conviction in who we are, how far we've come and what we believe in. By the way, I think this even about the economic crisis. It is severe. It's going to be really, really hard. But we will get through it and not by abandoning the market or open economic system but by learning our lessons and adjusting the system in a way that makes it better. But on any basis, this system has delivered amazing leaps forward in prosperity for our citizens and we shouldn't, amongst the gloom, forget it.

The same is true for the security threat we face. We are standing up for what is right. The body of ideas that has given us this liberty, to speak and think as we wish, that allows us to vote in and vote out our rulers, that provides a rule of law on which we can rely, and a political space infinitely more transparent than anything that went before ; that body isn't decaying. It is in the prime of life. It is the future. And though the extremists that confront us have their new adherents, we have ours too, nations democratic for the first time, people tasting freedom and liking it.

And that is why we should not revert to the foreign policy of years gone by, of the world weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be.

We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced. Here is where I remain adamantly in the same spot, metaphorically as well as actually, of ten years ago, that evening in this city. The statesmanship that went before regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. It's all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who's on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. The notion of humanitarian intervention was the meddling of the unwise, untutored and inexperienced.

But was it practical to let Pakistan develop as it did in the last thirty years, without asking what effect the madrassas would have on a generation educated in them? Or wise to employ the Taliban to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan? Or to ask Saddam to halt Iran? Was it really experienced statesmanship that let thousands upon thousands die in Bosnia before we intervened or turned our face from the genocide of Rwanda?

Or to form alliances with any regime, however bad, because they solve 'today' without asking whether they will imperil 'tomorrow'? This isn't statesmanship. It is just politics practiced for the most comfort and the least disturbance in the present moment.

I never thought such politics very sensible or practical. I think it even less so now. We live in the era of interdependence; the idea that if we let a problem fester, it will be contained within its boundaries no longer applies. That is why leaving Africa to the ravages of famine, conflict and disease is not just immoral but immature in its political understanding. Their problems will become ours.

And this struggle we face now cannot be defeated by staying out; but by sticking in, abiding by our values not retreating from them.

It is a cause that must be defeated by a better cause. That cause is one of open, tolerant, outward-looking societies in which people respect diversity and difference in which peaceful co-existence can flourish. It is a cause that has to be fought for; with hearts and minds as well as arms, of course. But fought for, nonetheless with the courage to see it through and the confidence that the cause is just, right and the only way the future of our world can work.

HT Tom Bevan's: 10 Years On, Blair Restates the Case

God's moods

Steve Paulson interviews Robert Wright about Wright's Book The Evolution of God

Some caution for the WWJD crowd (I would add the UU Jesus-as-ethical-model crowd),

He's [Jesus] typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.

Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he's not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with "love your enemies." Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn't say Jesus said it. It's only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn't the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it's actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.

Multi-ethnic-imperialism not such a bad thing maybe; and it's the work of people, not God. And darn if the person isn't today's UU least favorite: Paul.