Responding to Violence

In New Zealand there never seems to be very much news on Boxing Day, just page after page of advertisements offering 50% discount on Boxing Day sales in the major department stores. But there were a few news items which stood out, some of which appeared to run totally counter to the spirit of the previous Christmas Day, while others captured the essence of the day’s message.

First, there is the brouhaha which has enveloped over the release of Stephen Spielberg’s new film, the geopolitical thriller Munich. The film recounts the aftermath of the kidnap and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, and Spielberg has described it as “a prayer for peace”. The film recounts the way that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, sent agents to track down and kill those whom it believed to have a degree of responsibility for the outrage, something which has been standard practice for that agency. But as in all instances of this kind of response, moral ambiguities begin to emerge, over the precise degree of personal responsibility and whether perpetuating the cycle of violence can ever produce a peaceful and just resolution.

Spielberg seems to have hoped that these historical events would prompt debate both within the United States and beyond, about the moral legitimacy of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. But the film has touched an extremely raw nerve, both amongst conservative Americans and the Jewish lobby within Israel and in the Diaspora. It is the suggestion of moral ambiguity which enrages both the American administration and the Israeli Government. The latter has recycled its standard response, that there can be no moral equivalence between those who have been designated “terrorists” and those who are mandated to hunt them down and kill them. But what that response never addresses is the first order question of who decides who are terrorists and who are freedom fighters. I imagine that had these terms been in use in the eighteenth century, the American colonists fighting for independence from Britain might well have been designated freedom fighters by the colonists and terrorists by the Crown. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Israeli commentators have often resorted to the Jewish Bible’s revengeful exhortation of ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’, a principle which I have also heard reiterated by many Christians who clearly have forgotten what Jesus in the New Testament had to say about violence. Despite the fact that Jewish colleagues in the religious studies department of my university would not interpret these words literally, there are many people more than willing to do so. Two other pieces of news this week attest to this. The first was confirmation of something many of us had in any case assumed, that Israel has all along been offering assistance to US troops in Iraq in the hunting down and assassination of those who under any definition might be designated ‘enemies’. The second was the boast of a group of Holocaust survivors known as the Avengers who, disguised as American and British officers at the end of the last war, indiscriminately poisoned Nazis who were being held in American prisoner-of-war camps. Geneva conventions apparently count for nothing in such circumstances.

Amongst the many Christians down the ages who have spoken about the need to find alternative responses to violence was the Latin American bishop Dom Helda Camara, one of whose books was called The Spiral of Violence. Jesus lived in an age when the notion of violent retaliation, particularly to protect family honour, was endemic. He saw what needed to be done. Jesus said in effect, ‘Don’t retaliate. Don’t fulfil the enemy’s expectations of you. Respond in unexpected ways’. When people respond non-violently a number of things occur. The cycle of violence is unexpectedly interrupted; one’s enemy is in a very real sense disarmed; and new values and behaviours are being established. One of my mentors, Paulo Freire, used to say that we cannot build a just, free and peaceful society employing tactics and strategies that do not embody these goals. It is impossible to build a peaceful society by using violent means. Of course a non-violence renders one vulnerable, but if the Christmas message is about anything it is about the vulnerability of a baby born in a stable.

The good news on Boxing Day was embodied by two Prelates. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch for the Holy Land, made mention in his sermon at midnight mass in Bethlehem of the new political landscape beginning to emerge in that region. He said, “Leaving all violence, all vengeance, freeing political prisoners, and putting the past behind, can create a new land”, one in which Israelis can feel secure and Palestinians can feel free. With elections amongst both Palestinians and Israelis scheduled for the new year, and Ariel Sharon attempting to break the mould of Israeli conventional politics, we can hope that such a scenario becomes more a reality than a possibility.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Christmas sermon in Canterbury Cathedral made special mention of two families who, in response to senseless violence, spoke not in terms of retaliation, but of forgiveness. In a reference to Abigail Wichells who remains paralysed after a frenzied knife attack, he noted that Abigail’s mother upon learning of the suicide of her daughter’s attacker said ‘his death is the real tragedy in this story’. Williams said that the mother was “not making light of her daughter's terrible ordeal or denying the complex evil of the action, but simply making space in her heart for someone else's fear and pain". He also commented on a moment many of us witnessed on television news in the UK when the mother of Anthony Walker, a Liverpool teenager murdered in a racist axe-attack “told us that yes, she forgave her son's killers and yes, her heart was still broken. What made this so intensely moving was the fact that her forgiveness was drawn agonisingly out of her, without making her loss easier. She could not have been who she was if she did not recognise that forgiveness was laid upon her; her life and her dead son's would have been nonsense if she did not forgive”.

One of the greatest tragedies of our human condition is that we all too often opt for the Old Testament’s eye-for-an-eye notion of vengeance in both our personal and political relationships, rather than the New Testament’s vision for the creation of just and compassionate relationships based on our capacity for forgiveness.

Christ Born Across the Sea

This Blog brings my Christmas greetings to those of you – numberless or few, I know not – who visit my site. This is supposed to be the season of both good will towards as well as good news for the poor and dispossessed of our world.

Undoubtedly the biggest disaster of the past twelve months – apart from the continuing disaster of the Iraq War of course - was the tsunami which devastated so much of coastal Asia. These sad occasions afford the opportunity for the rest of us to dig deep into our pockets and our resources of humanitarian care, to try to alleviate suffering and loss on such an immense scale. In addition to the hard-working staff members of international aid and relief agencies, catastrophes of this kind also attract a host of do-gooder individuals who, operating from a mixed bag of motives, some honourable and others less than honourable, travel under their own resources to the stricken region to help out however they are able.

James Garwood appears to have been just such a person. An American, and one time heroin addict, who encountered Jesus while in prison, James set off for Thailand’s Khao Lak coast, armed with good intentions and a big bag of balloons with which he aimed to entertain the thousands of refugees in that area. Now twelve months later James is leader of a Christian Church which he has named ‘Life in Action in Thailand’. He holds regular services for recent converts to Christianity from Buddhism, insisting that he did not come to start a church but “felt God tugging at my heart” and claiming that “hundreds and hundreds” of local people converted to Christianity following the tsunami. James is not the only evangelical preacher to have descended upon this area which prior to the tsunami was Buddhist in faith with not a single local Christian church. As could have been predicted, the majority of these new churches have been set up by US-based evangelicals supported by apparently inexhaustible funding from US evangelical congregations.

Given the history of Christian missions I was not surprised to learn that some of these converts converted for material rather than spiritual reasons. Said one former Buddhist “Christians are very good to me. That’s why I converted”. There are echoes here of the ‘rice Christians’ of India, or of those conversions in Africa which appeared to have more to do with job opportunities in the colonial administration than religious impulses. As both a student and teacher of missiology, as well as having myself been a missionary in the Middle-East, I have longed for the day when Christian mission would forever divorce itself from economic, political, cultural and ideological accoutrements of its sponsoring churches. While on the whole the older churches have learnt lessons and adopted approaches much more sensitive to cultural realities, it remains a feature of many of the ‘younger’ expressions of Christianity that they remain blissfully unaware of the contents of the baggage they carry with them.

This seems to be particularly the case in respect to American evangelical groups. One of the PhD dissertations I recently had to examine was submitted by an American Evangelical who had spent twenty years as a ‘missionary’ in Europe, half of that time in a Catholic European country, and half in a former Eastern European nation that has Orthodox and Catholic communities. His primary mission seemed to be to replicate the kind of Church order and governance which his US sponsoring Church claimed to have been directly handed down to it by God. He was oblivious to the fact that this governance mirrored the USA’s political and ideological aspirations including the US's particular and peculiar understandings of democracy. The American theologian Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about this phenomenon which he describes as enculturation. He uses this term to describe the way that the ethos and activities of many American churches cannot be separated from the values, behaviours and aspirations of that country’s dominant ideology. This not only affects the way that such churches operate in a missionary context, it more importantly in his view renders them incapable of offering any critique of the culture of which they are a product.

One of the problematic areas of missionary concern then becomes that the Jesus who is being proclaimed to the unbeliever is not at all the Jesus of first century Palestine but the Jesus who ‘in the beauty of the lilies was born across the sea’, who is a product of American history, experience and imagination. In many contexts there has been a rejection of Jesus as a cultural product in favour of an indigenised Jesus. Some years ago I heard the current Anglican Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand, Whakahuihui Vercoe, claim that we ought not to assume that Jesus was incarnated into only Palestinian culture, but rather at the moment of birth was incarnated in many if not all cultures. Thus the Maori people had encountered Jesus within their own cultural and religious traditions long before, in the Archbishop’s words, “the British missionaries introduced us to a white Jesus whom we did not know”.

So what we see happening in Thailand today mirrors that Maori experience. Buddhists are introduced to an American Jesus, powerful and equally importantly, wealthy, who apparently has at his command infinite resources for rebuilding shattered and dispirited communities. Phra Viroth Titaphoonyo, abbot of the Wat Laem Pom Buddhist temple laments the influx of American money and values the missionaries bring with them, and the nature of the material help on offer. He sees Buddhism and Christianity responding to the situation in quite different ways, one spiritual and the other material. “If you are a Buddhist”, he says, “when the people jump in the water and ask for help, a Buddhist teaches you how to swim. A Christian just gives them a hand a pulls them up”.

So if this Christmas you were tempted to complain about the gross commercialisation of the festive season, please include in your complaint the equally gross materialism of some manifestations of Christian mission.

The Facts of War

This week the United States’ Administration has made two startling admissions. President George Bush, with his ratings plummeting dramatically, went on the offensive to claim that given everything that has happened in Iraq, he would still have made the decision to declare war because the removal of Saddam Hussein has been a good thing. Some weeks ago in my blog “Messages from God” I noted that the lowest estimates of civilian deaths in the continuing Iraq War were just over 24,000. In the course of his argument for supporting the War the President admitted publicly for the first time that American sources put Iraqi civilian casualties at 30,000. Given my experience of American announcements of casualties during the Viet Nam War when I was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I personally believe that the actual number of deaths at this juncture of the war will ultimately turn out to have been significantly higher.

The President’s defence of his warmongering was made while I was travelling back to New Zealand for Christmas. One of the national dailies, The New Zealand Herald, has a column on ‘numbers’ and yesterday’s numbers relate to the Iraqi situation and make for interesting reading:

The cost to the US of the war to date: $204.4bn
World Bank estimate for reconstruction: $35,819,000,000
Allied troops killed: 2339
US soldiers wounded in action: 15,955
Civilian deaths: 30,000
Insurgents killed: 53,470

Iraqis who feel less secure now: 67%
Iraqi children starving: 8%
Iraqis with inoperative sewage system: 70%
Iraqis ‘strongly opposed’ to US troops: 82%
Inflation rate: 20%

Average monthly salary for Iraqi soldier: $343
Average monthly salary for US soldier: $4160

Journalists killed: 66 (83 in Viet Nam War)
Foreigners kidnapped: 251
Daily attacks by insurgents, November: 90
Casualties from mines per month: 20

Weapons of Mass Destruction found: 0

It is of course many months now since the President triumphantly announced that the war was over. Ninety-four percent of US deaths and injuries have occurred since the ‘end’ of the war. Far from being over, some of us believe the war has hardly begun. The Iraq elections taking place today as I write are being hailed by the Coalition partners as a triumph for democracy whereas in fact what has been installed is an oppressive American colonial regime. Nor is there much hope being expressed over the post-election situation. The Kurds have already virtually become an independent region with control over their own oil revenues, and given the long history of enmity with neighbouring Turkey, everyone expects that hostilities will break out between the two. The big winners in the election are likely to be the Shiite Muslims who will inevitably work to ensure that the country which had under Saddam Hussein become the most secular in the Arab world will be placed under Sharia law and become as repressive as its sister regime in Iran. An Iran/Iraq political alliance would constitute a real danger to both middle-east and global politics. And let’s not forget the five million strong Sunni community which used to run Iraq but now constitute the bulk of the so called insurgency. Today many of them appear to be opting for a political solution by participating in the election, although several I saw interviewed on TV said that they are doing so in order to return Iraq to Iraqi control and rid themselves of the occupying forces. However, once the Shiites and Kurds have divided the country between them, a Sunni return to large-scale and permanent insurgency seems almost inevitable. The lasting achievement of President Bush and his allies looks like being a radically destabilised and increasingly volatile Middle East. The principle at work here is as old as humanity itself, as an ancient biblical sage commented, “Sow the wind; reap the whirlwind”.

The second startling announcement from the Administration was that it has caved in to overwhelming international and domestic pressure about the treatment of prisoners. Last week Condoleezza Rice was given a very rough ride during her visit to European governments as more and more information was uncovered about the CIA’s practice of transiting prisoners through European countries to prisons in countries where interrogation through torture is a frequent occurrence. The initial US reaction was along the lines of ‘Hey, we are all in this war together and sometimes the extracting of information calls for unconventional methods’. But this in no way placated the Europeans. Domestically 100 Republicans joined Democrats in Congress to demand a ban on torture and now the Administration has accepted tough new rules for the US forces’ dealings with prisoners which include a ban on torture and other inhumane treatment to be written into the US forces’ Code of Justice. Hopefully this means that the regime in Guantanamo Bay will begin to reflect the values of a liberal democracy rather than those of Stalinism.