Churches for Middle East Peace, 110 Maryland Ave.NE,# 108, Washington, DC 20002
PRESS RELEASE
July 26, 2000 Contact: Corinne Whitlatch 202/546-8425
CHRISTIANS CALL FOR A SHARED JERUSALEM
"At last Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have broken the taboo and discussed concretely how to share Jerusalem between their two peoples and the three Abrahamic religions," said the director of Churches for Middle East Peace Corinne Whitlatch. She applauded the summit's discussions as a monumental and necessary step toward a resolution to the controversy over the Holy City's future and rejected conclusions that the summit failed.
"We are further encouraged because, in the course of the Camp David talks, Israeli and Palestinian officials met with Jerusalem's Christian Patriarchs and heard their perspectives on the need for an internationally guaranteed special statute for the Holy City," added Whitlatch.
Whitlatch further said, "For too long, the Israeli public and many Americans have been led to believe that peace between Israel and the Arabs is possible while Israel maintains exclusive sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the West Bank land annexed to Jerusalem by Israel since 1967. That is just not possible."
The Protestant mainstream and historic peace churches and Catholic organizations that compose the Washington based coalition have long contended that Jerusalem at peace cannot belong exclusively to one people, one country or one religion. And that Jerusalem should be open to all, shared by all â ” two peoples and three religions. A statement by the leaders of these churches, that has been publicized since it was signed in late1996, urges upon the United States government to call upon negotiators to move beyond exclusivist claims and create a Jerusalem that is a sign of peace and a symbol of reconciliation for all humankind.
Churches for Middle East Peace asks that the United States place a higher regard on international law, as found in U.N. Security Council resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention, as the basis for a durable solution that can be endorsed by the international community.
Churches for Middle East Peace is a Washington based program of the American Friends Service Committee, Catholic Conference of Major Superiors of Men's Institutes, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Church of the Brethren, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Mennonite Central Committee, National Council of Churches, Presbyterian Church (USA), Reformed Church in America, Unitarian Universalist Association, United Church of Christ and United Methodist Church.
The Gulf War Brought Out the Worst in Us
Foreign policy: Demonizing one general diverts us from assessing responsibility for the slaughter.
By ROBERT JENSEN
Did a U.S. general in the Gulf War violate rules of engagement and, in effect, murder Iraqis after the cease-fire?
That's the claim of journalist Seymour Hersh in the May 22 New Yorker magazine. The former general and current federal drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, has counter-punched, arguing that he is the victim of a journalistic vendetta.
Which one is right? It doesn't really matter. The incidents Hersh writes about are, in the context of the massacre we call the Gulf War, relatively trivial, and therein lies the problem with the controversy. By focusing on the actions of a commander in a limited arena, we risk forgetting what U.S. military forces did in Iraq in 1991--across the board, on a daily basis, in full view of all the world, with impunity. What we did has a name in the rest of the world, though it can't be spoken in polite circles here: War crimes.
We have yet to come to terms with the enormity of the crimes our government and military carried out in 1991. If Hersh's allegations are true, McCaffrey's conduct was reprehensible and criminal, but those actions pale in comparison to the brutality the U.S. military unleashed on the people of Iraq throughout the war.
What brutality? What crimes? Start with the most basic facts about the U.S. attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Iraq.
The Geneva Conventions are clear on these matters: "Civilians shall not be the object of attack." The charge to military forces in the U.N. Security Council resolution was to expel the Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait. To do that, we dropped 88,000 tons of bombs over Iraq, one of the most concentrated attacks on an entire society in modern warfare. Those bombs killed civilians--both directly and over time through the destruction of the country's power grid, food, water treatment and sewage systems. Some of that bombing of civilians was targeted, some indiscriminate; both are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
Recall the "Highway of Death," the deadly stretch of road in Kuwait that was littered with burned-out vehicles and charred bodies. U.S. military forces, in violation of international law, fired on retreating and largely defenseless Iraqi soldiers just before the cease-fire. U.S. pilots described it in news accounts as a "turkey shoot" and "like shooting fish in a barrel." The carnage was not only unnecessary but grotesque.
Remember the brutality of U.S. weapons. We used napalm to incinerate entrenched Iraqi soldiers. We dropped fuel-air explosives, ghastly weapons often called "near-nukes" because of their destructive capacity through fire, asphyxiation and concussion. We dropped cluster bombs that use razor-sharp fragments to shred people. To penetrate tanks, we used depleted-uranium shells, the long-term health effects of which are unknown. Widely accepted notions of proportionality and protection of civilians go out the window with such weapons.
Though the shooting war has stopped, the most onerous economic embargo ever imposed on a nation continues today. Supposedly designed to rein in the regime of Saddam Hussein, the harsh economic sanctions have only killed innocents--as many as 1 million in the past decade, according to U.N. studies.
In short: It is misleading to call the Gulf War a war; it was a massacre. In the words of British journalist Geoff Simons, who has studied the war in detail, it was a massive slaughter of a largely helpless enemy, with much of the killing occurring after the time when constructive diplomacy would have brought an end to the conflict and a secure "liberation of Kuwait." That is an assessment many people--likely the vast majority--around the world would agree with, but one rarely voiced in this country.
My goal is not to defend McCaffrey. But no matter how guilty he might be, I fear that demonizing him will divert us from assessing the responsibility of those politicians and top officers who planned and executed the slaughter. And it will keep us from asking why we--citizens with so much political freedom--have done so little to hold those politicians and officers accountable for the crimes committed in our name.
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Robert Jensen Is an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. E-mail: Rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times
Israel redirects Hellfire missiles 'after US advice'
- Subject: for Seeds & such -- from the Independent on Israel/Lebanon bombings & U.S. involvement
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 17:45:58 EDT
Plans to target Syrian military inside Lebanon are shelved after ambassador's intervention to keep fragile peace process alive.
By Robert Fisk in Bsalim, Lebanon
6 May 2000
Did the American ambassador to Israel decide the target of Israel's bombardment of Lebanon yesterday? Incredible as it seems, Martin Indyck's intervention appears to have done just that. By urging Israel to suspend a plan to attack Syrian facilities in Lebanon during its latest attack on the country's civilian infrastructure, the plea led to the bombing raids - with American-made missiles - on Lebanese power stations.
In the rubble of this smouldering Lebanese electricity plant yesterday, I found the remains of the American-made rockets that destroyed at least $2m of transformers, installed only four years ago by the French government. Fired by the Israelis a few hours earlier, they were Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, made by Boeing-Lockheed at its plants in Georgia and Florida.
Even more extraordinary, however, is the report that the US ambassador to Tel Aviv intervened on the targeting. Impeccable diplomatic sources have told The Independent that the Israelis originally intended to retaliate for Thursday's Hizbollah rocket attacks across the border by hitting installations belonging to Syria's 21,000 troops in Lebanon.
But hours before the air assaults were to begin, these sources say, Martin Indyck, the US ambassador to Israel, appealed to the Israelis to spare Syrian targets - on the basis that their destruction might make a reopening of SyrianIsraeli peace talks impossible. As a result, the Israeli air force instead targeted Lebanese civilian objectives, including the Bsalim power station.
The report of Mr Indyck's intervention - and the diplomatic source is connected to the highest authorities - is remarkable. That a US ambassador can, in effect, decide the target of Israel's bombs is one thing. But Mr Indyck also happens to be the former head of Aipac, the most powerfulJewish-Israeli lobby group in the United States. He has frequently intervened in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks but never - so far as has been recorded - in Israel's military adventures in Lebanon.
Nor is there any doubt about the American missiles. The Israelis admit they fired five rockets at the Bsalim switching station in the mountains above Beirut. I tore the manufacturers' computer coding off one missile fuselage, whose Lot number was MGP976801. The "M" shows it was once sold by the Boeing company to the US Marine Corps; indeed, it appears to be part of a batch given to Israel in 1991 as a quid pro quo for not joining in the Gulf War against Iraq. One of the same set of Hellfire 114C missiles - with similar manufacturers' codes - was fired by the Israelis into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996, killing four children and two women.
The Israelis destroyed four of the nine electrical transformers at Bsalim. "They are leaving the others for later," a young power worker muttered with fury. "They can hit what they want here. How can we possibly retaliate?" Clouds of toxic smoke drifted down from the burnt-out equipment, its power lines dangling impotently, its heavy iron punctured by rocket holes.
It is in the cynical and preposterous nature of the war in Lebanon that dates and details become confused - often deliberately - by the protagonists. It is therefore important to remember that the staff at the Bsalim switching station - which converts 110 into 220 volts after receiving power from the Lebanese national grid - saw Israeli troops stealing maps of the facility from their offices at Bsalim during Israel's 1982 siege of Beirut. Fourteen years later, these maps were put to use when the Israelis staged their first bombing attack on Bsalim after six Israeli occupation soldiers were killed in southern Leban-on. France rebuilt the station with Italian equipment.
Yesterday's early-morning raid followed the Katyusha attacks on the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, which killed an Israeli soldier and wounded at least 16 civilians. But these Hizbollah attacks were retaliation for two earlier Israeli assaults on Lebanese civilians. In the first of these, 16 Lebanese civilians were wounded and in the second two Lebanese Christian women - one of them 80 years old - were killed by an Israeli shell. Their corpses were found at dawn on Thursday.
With the single exception of the dead Israeli soldier, the targets of both the Hizbollah and the Israelis were civilian. And the Bsalim power station was in a Christian area of Lebanon. It is believed to be the first time that Muslim Hizbollah guerrillas have retaliated for the deaths of Christian civilians in Lebanon, traditionally sympathetic to Israel.
Israel also badly damaged an electricity switching station at Badawi outside the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli and attacked the village of Britel in the Bekaa Valley.
When a flurry of Katyushas were again fired over the border yesterday morning, the Israelis air-raided two villages just outside the United Nations area of operations in southern Lebanon. All in all, a dangerous, expensive 24 hours of warfare. Millions of dollars of damage have been caused to Lebanon's infrastructure, much of the country is without power - and Israel's chances of a peaceful withdrawal from southern Lebanon this spring are further away than ever.
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Complaint filed against Bishop Talbert
By United Methodist News Service
April 20, 2000
A formal complaint has been filed against United Methodist Bishop Melvin G.
Talbert, charging him with "disobedience to the order and discipline" of the
church for his handling of a case involving 68 pastors who participated in
performing a same-sex union service.
Talbert leads the United Methodist Church's California-Nevada Annual
(regional) Conference. The same-sex union service, involving two women,
occurred Jan. 16, 1999, in Sacramento, Calif.
The complaint was brought by Jacque Vance, a laywoman from the Orangevale
(Calif.) United Methodist Church, with help from the Coalition for United
Methodist Accountability (CUMA). Vance's complaint was filed April 18 with
Bishop Elias G. Galvan of Seattle, in the belief that Galvan was president
of the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops.
When contacted for comment early April 20, Talbert said he hadn't seen
Vance's complaint. "Bishop Galvan informed me that this had reached his
desk," he said.
Galvan told United Methodist News Service that he had received two pieces of
correspondence but hadn't examined them to see whether they were complaints.
Moreover, he is not the president of the jurisdictional college of bishops
and therefore isn't the appropriate person to handle this matter. He plans
to take the correspondence to the jurisdictional college of bishops when it
meets in Cleveland during the last week of April, and the college will
decide whether the current president, Bishop Edward Paup of Portland, Ore.,
or the incoming president should handle it.
Vance, a personnel consultant, charged Talbert with failing or refusing to
respond properly to initial complaints from lay people in the Orangevale
church, according to a CUMA press release. Those complaints were filed soon
after the 68 pastors participated in the service. Talbert "put aside" the
complaints, CUMA said. After two members of his cabinet filed a complaint,
Talbert referred the case in May to the conference's Committee on
Investigation.
The denomination's Book of Discipline states that same-sex unions shall not
be conducted by United Methodist pastors nor held in United Methodist
sanctuaries. The Sacramento service, held in a non-church setting, involved
the 68 Cal-Nevada pastors plus clergy from around the country participating
either in person or in absentia.
The investigative committee handled the case over a nine-month period, which
culminated with hearings in February. Following the hearings and private
deliberations, the committee decided to drop the charges against the 68
pastors.
Bishop Talbert, who was not a member of the committee, announced the
decision Feb. 11. In the process, he added in his own personal perspective
on the issue. One comment, in particular, drew criticism, especially from
evangelicals and other conservatives in the church. The bishop said that
while the investigative committee "may appear to have broken covenant with
the Book of Discipline, there is another more basic and fundamental covenant
that has precedence over this one narrow focus of law."
"In our polity, the annual conference is the basic body of the church," he
said. "The annual conference is the covenant into which clergy members are
received and held accountable for their ministry. It is my humble opinion
that the decision of this committee on investigation does reflect the
longstanding covenant commitments for inclusiveness and justice of the
California-Nevada Annual Conference, within the spirit of our longstanding
commitment to Jesus Christ as the people called United Methodists."
In the CUMA press release, Vance echoed earlier criticism about Talbert's
comments. "This bishop is saying that the California-Nevada Annual
Conference may make its own law, that it is above the established and
adjudicated law of the United Methodist Church and that it does not have to
comply with it," she said.
Talbert's action "gives a license to everyone in the United Methodist Church
to disregard any and all parts of the doctrinal standards and the Discipline
of the denomination," Vance said. Bishops "have equal standing before the
denomination to obey its laws," she said, and a bishop "has no right to
stand above the law without paying the consequences."
Talbert said he would await the outcome of the church's due process
regarding Vance's complaint. Not having seen the complaint, he couldn't
respond to the particular charges, and he said he wouldn't make any comment
outside the church's process.
"At this point, I do not feel that it is appropriate for me to respond," the
bishop said. "I believe that my response needs to be in the context of the
due process."
The Book of Discipline states that when a complaint is filed against a
bishop, the president of the jurisdictional college of bishops shall make a
supervisory response. The response is "directed toward a just resolution
and/or reconciliation among all parties." This may include consultation with
the jurisdictional committee on episcopacy or voluntary mediation in which a
neutral, trained mediator or mediation team is brought in.
The supervisory response "is not a judicial process," the book states. If
the response doesn't lead to a resolution, the case could be referred to a
bishop from another jurisdiction or central conference or a pastor from the
same jurisdiction or conference. That person would serve as church counsel,
representing the denomination in pressing the complaint. The counsel would
sign the complaint and forward it to a committee on investigation. From
there, the complaint would go through a clearly defined process. Meanwhile,
efforts for resolution would continue.
The committee would have the power to call witnesses and hold hearings
during its investigation. If it decided that the charges were valid, it
could recommend that a trial be held. In that case, a trial court of 13
United Methodist clergy members would be convened. Nine votes would be
needed to convict. The court would then have the power to impose a number of
penalties, some severe - such as expulsion from the church - and some less
so.
CUMA, formed in February, describes itself as a group of "laity and clergy
who have come together to seek doctrinal, fiscal and procedural
accountability in the life of the United Methodist Church." The member
organizations are Good News, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and
the Confessing Movement.
Neither the committee nor Talbert handled the Sacramento case in a manner
that adhered to church polity, said Ira Gallaway, chairman of the steering
committee for CUMA, in the same press release. "Unfortunately, they didn't
judge the facts of the case. They chose, rather, to judge the law of the
church, with which they disagree."
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United Methodist News Service
News media contact: Tim Tanton·(615)742-5470 – Nashville, Tenn.
Photos and stories also available at: umns.umc.org
