A hard rain fell on Friday afternoon, March 7, 2008, during the interfaith Witness for Peace rally on Capitol Hill. The rally calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Iraq was a precursor to other rallies with the same call occurring in the weeks around the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. It highlighted a week of activities including worship services, workshops, a torture mini-conference, and civil disobedience training held by Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partners, March 6-10, 2008.
Rally organizers and invited speakers stood on a canopied platform looking down at some 150 peace activists. While some in the crowd clutched umbrellas, others had their hands full of protest signs and banners, or holding sections of a rope—a visual representation of Witness for Peace’s “common longing for peace” binding them “together in hope.” Activists had been requested to bring six feet of light cord (multi-colored clothesline was suggested). They were instructed to garnish the rope with ribbons and strips of cloth containing prayers and hopes for a peaceful Iraq. To describe the desired effect, activists were told to “imagine something like Buddhist prayer flags.” There were also vaguely Christian flags, such as one that featured spirals of many colors emanating from a peace symbol topped with a cross.
Stop, Hey, What’s That Sound? Everybody Look What’s Going Down!
The keynote address at Witness for Peace came from the Rev. Dr. James Forbes, retired senior pastor of liberal flagship Riverside Church in Manhattan. Forbes told the crowd that he was not going to “wax eloquent with prophetic indignation about who started [the war], and why they started it, and why they don’t want to stop it.” The crowd surely didn’t need to be told such things, anyway, since whenever the Religious Left is “prophetic,” it almost always lays blame on the United States. So rather than waxing eloquent, Forbes just waxed on, recounting two experiences at “ground zero” of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, and applying them to what he perceived as the condition of the United States today.
Protestors gathered on Capitol Hill on March 7 to call for the total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. |
First, Forbes told about a traffic light he noticed while waiting for President Bush to arrive at “ground zero” as part of a delegation of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim leaders. The light was broken and covered with debris. Forbes turned to the rabbi next to him and said, “Rabbi, before we can get going again, we are going to have to repair this traffic light.”
The perceptive rabbi understood that Forbes was speaking metaphorically. Before the United States could “resume business as usual, after the devastation and humiliation of 9-11 . . . there are some things we as a nation need to stop,” Forbes declared. “That’s a red light. There are other things we as a nation need to be cautious about. That’s a yellow light. There are other things that we as a nation must be moving, steadily and swiftly,” he added. “That’s a green light.”
Forbes then interpreted his complex metaphor to the eager listeners. The green light, he said, meant that it was time to go and stop the war. A huge shout went up from the crowd. No one seemed the least bit confused by the use of green for “stop” in the metaphor.
Next, said Forbes, the yellow light tells the United States to be careful, because when you engage in wars “in pursuit of your enemy, or in the spirit of revenge,” the wars could “rob you of the will or of the resources to build up the kind of democratic ideals” upon which your nation has been built.
Finally, Forbes explained that the red traffic light says to the people of the United States, “stop and take some time out.” Forbes referred to Romans 8: 28 (“For we know that all things work together for good for those that the love the Lord”), declaring that as tragic as the circumstances of 9-11 were, the terrorist attacks were a gift in that they “provided a situation that required that our nation stop for a moment, and reflect for a while.” He said that we had to decide what, “in this age of globalization,” are the most enduring values that we should hold onto as we rebuild.
Forbes said the problem was that “when we should have stopped to reflect . . . there was a preemptive strike made against sober reflection and restoration of values. . . . It was not only a preemptive strike in Iraq, it was [against] the [United States].” Ignoring the 18 months of debate that took place between the 2001 attacks and the beginning of military action in Iraq, Forbes suggested that if we had stopped to ask such things as “What kind of America do we want to be?” or “How do we plan to deal with the tragic consequences of racial and religious polarization and the clash of civilizations?” we would not be “squandering our resources in a battle that we will not win in the manner that we are approaching it.” Forbes called for an end to the war in Iraq in order for America to take time out, sit back, and reflect on how we could “move towards the resolution of conflict in this globalized age.” The crowd cheered wildly.
Pigeons for Peace and Leaves for Healing
But Forbes was not finished. He went on to describe another richly symbolic event that took place at ground zero. After it had been determined that there were probably no survivors left in the rubble, work to clear the debris began. Then, said Forbes, “Out of the rubble, a white pigeon flew, and up into the air.”
Again Forbes tried to determine what God was saying to America through the pigeon. “A dove is related to the Spirit, and also to truth,” he said. So in the pigeon-dove, Forbes had another message from God. At that terrible time, when Americans were praying, “God bless America,” said Forbes, he believed “that dove [pigeon] was God’s way of saying, ‘I will bless America, but I cannot bless America if America is only concerned about America. I care about the whole world.’” As the crowd cheered, Forbes continued, “And also, I think that dove [pigeon] is a symbol of the fact that if you really want to see a great America rise again and provide leadership around the world, America must recover the moral and spiritual resources that will make it a great nation.”
Forbes concluded with three ways in which America could become a great nation once again. First, he said, we need to determine from the presidential candidates where they stand “in regards to peace,” and how they expect to “extract from [Iraq] those people engaged in fierce warfare.” Second, he said that churches, mosques, and synagogues needed to stop spending all their time talking about “pie in the sky by and by,” and have “conversations” that will lead to a “widespread movement of clarity about peace and justice and equality.” He did not explain how such conversations would lead to clarity. And finally, Forbes said, “no matter how the election turns out, this nation is gonna need a whole lot of healing.” He cited biblical references to “the leaves of the tree . . . for the healing of the nations” in Ezekiel and Revelation. “Are you willing to become a leaf . . . on the branch for justice and peace and equality?” he asked the rain-soaked activists. “If we do that, then the sun will shine again and the rain and sun will give us a new planting for peace, not only in America, but all around the world.”
Unfortunately, the sun was not yet ready to shine again, and the rain continued to pour on such “healing leaves” as the Code Pink women—the anti-war activists recently seen displaying obscene signs and harassing the families of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. Spirits remained high, though, throughout the rest of the Witness for Peace, as people prepared for the march to the Hart Senate Office Building for prayer and civil disobedience.
Friends of the Brotherhood and the Seamless Garment of Horror
Before the march to the Hart Building, however, the crowd took part in an ersatz “communion” service featuring speakers, interfaith prayers, and a musical number. The first speaker was Asma Mirza, the national president of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). The rally leader who introduced Mirza described MSA as the “largest Muslim ‘youth group’, with over 200 branches in the United States and Canada.” She failed to mention that the MSA was founded by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood—an organization that in a 1991 memorandum expressed as an objective “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house.” The same memorandum lists the MSA as an “organization of our friends. The MSA is “the leading evangelist of Wahabism,” according to Islam expert Stephen Schwartz (himself a Muslim).
Not much of such extremism was evident, however, with the soft-spoken Mirza, who greeted the crowd with “asalaam aleikum (peace be upon you),” to which the crowd excitedly responded, “aleikum asalaam (and upon you, peace).” She talked about growing up in Virginia and learning about Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and other founding fathers “who believed in liberty and justice for people everywhere.”
“We want to believe in those ideas,” Mirza continued, “we want to be proud of our government, proud of our nation…[but] as long as death and destruction happens in the name of our country, something is wrong. As long as our country calls on its mothers to bury their children, we are not living up to the ideals that we believe in.”
Mirza told the crowd that it was their “common humanity” that brought them to the peace rally that day, the humanity that they use “to help the widow, to help the orphan, and not to allow our government to create them.” She referred to the recent deaths in Gaza as part of a “terrible week,” but did not mention another incident of that terrible week—the murder of eight students of the Mercaz Harav rabbinical seminary in Jerusalem.
Following Mirza, Franciscan brother Joe Daniel read “a letter from jail,” which he described as being in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Jesus the Christ, “whose capture and torture and execution we will celebrate in the Christian world in two weeks’ time.” The letter was from Fr. Louie Vitale, a Pax Christi Teacher of Peace, who, Daniel told the crowd, was “spending time in jail now for having protested at a center in New Mexico that trains people to interrogate and torture others.” Vitale’s letter talks about the brutality of torture and goes on to urge the crowd, “In light of this cruel and inhuman treatment by our own military and those we have supported and entrusted for torture in other countries, we must say ‘No—not in our name—never again.’ Vitale added that since torture is so integral to war, “we need to say no to all war. From torture of an individual in a cell or pit to all out nuclear holocaust it is a seamless garment of horror, terror, and inhumanity.”
Wahabi Hip-Hop Communion
After having their deeply held beliefs concerning the sins of America towards the rest of the world reinforced, the activists prepared to march to the Hart Senate Office Building. Some—presumably those who had taken the preparatory workshop earlier that week—would participate in civil disobedience. Others would stand by to pray.
But more spiritual preparation was needed before the march, and so bread was distributed for an interfaith “communion.” A number of prayers (or whatever the equivalent is for people who don’t actually pray) were offered by Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Unitarian leaders.
As in many churches, there was music during the ceremony. Popular American Muslim hip-hop stars Native Deen provided the soundtrack (Deen is Arabic for “religion” or “way of life.”) . The U.S. State Department has asked the group to spread a message of tolerance, sending them to perform in London, Turkey, Dubai, the Palestinian territories, and Israel, as official representatives of the United States.
For the inter-faith communion, Native Deen performed their song “Small Deeds.” The song speaks about the value of doing small good deeds such as helping someone with the broken-down car or flat tire, picking up trash, taking care of your baby brother, obeying your parents, and such. The crowd clapped and swayed to the music as they got their belongings together to march to the Hart Building and perform their “small deed.” They were nodding and agreeing with the song’s message, and the refrain, that said, “It’s a small little thing, that can cling and just ring, and will bring the blessing from Allah Who’s the King.”
As the inter-faith crowd swayed to the praises of “king Allah,” church bells began to ring. And from the other side of Upper Senate Park tolled the hymn, “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run; his kingdom spread from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and wane no more.” Another King had something to say about the matter.
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