THE CHALLENGE OF THE WORLD HOUSE ON SEPTEMBER 11

In the last chapter of Martin Luther King’s final book, "Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?", the concluding chapter is entitled "The World House." In it King tells about a novelist who dies. In his papers are found thoughts for a new book: a widely separated family inherits a very valuable home. In order to get the home, they have to return there and live together. King says that we humans are like that family: widely scattered and divided into nations, races, classes and ideologies, we have inherited the earth–the World House–and we have to learn how to live together in order to receive our inheritance. For we must, says Dr. King, learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we will die together as fools.

One year ago a great atrocity occurred when hi-jacked airliners were flown into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The national headquarters of the Fellowship of Reconciliation where I work are by the Hudson River in Nyack, New York, only 25 miles from what is now called Ground Zero. Like others in the New York City area, we were profoundly affected by these attacks and the subsequent destruction and loss of life. A whole was torn out of the heart of New York City. Families were rent asunder as thousands died. Not only individuals from the New York City area but persons from many countries died that day. Just one example among many: a good friend of two of my co-workers was from Bangladesh, an active member of the local Sufi mosque. When he died at the World Trade Center, he left behind a pregnant Bangladeshi wife with three children. And she has no US passport. Jeremy Glick, a former student of my wife, was on United Flight 93. An athletic and generous young man, he was one of the passengers that brought that flight down in Pennsylvania instead of its intended destination, perhaps the White House. For months the search went on–and even now goes on–for those unaccounted for. Posters of the missing are still found in post offices, restaurants, and other public places. And everywhere, it seems, people feel more insecure, less certain of their safety, and even of the future of the human experiment. Hamburg is particularly related to September 11, we now know, because it was here that a central part of Al Qaeda’s plot developed, through Mohammed Atta and his colleagues.

Tragically, the response of the US Bush Administration is taking the world into a highly dangerous situation: a state of permanent war, one with no apparent end in sight. It is what the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls 11 "the beginning of World War III." President Bush and his small circle of leaders, short on wisdom and oversupplied with testosterone, unilaterally make decisions, breaking treaties and abandoning cooperative approaches to world problems. Heedless of global warming and the depletion of natural resources, they seek an unlimited supply of oil; alternative sources of energy are not a priority. They have recklessly expanded spending on weapons and heightened the danger of nuclear war. Bush has assumed the mantle of warrior and righteous leader who is battling Evil with what the writer Susan Sontag calls "a mandate for expanding American power." He attacked Afghanistan and has stated America’s right to preemptively attack other nations he defines as part of the worldwide network of terrorism. At the moment Iraq is under imminent threat of a US invasion, despite worldwide criticism and the lack of backing from other nations except England. The clear and cogent opposition by Germany to this rush toward war is of great importance at this critical time.

This is not to minimize the danger of terrorism to the whole world community. It is to state that an ongoing state of permanent war led by the world’s superpower will not solve the problem of terrorism that it is meant to address. Indeed, war itself is a form of terrorism and it breeds the conditions that produce more terrorism. As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves the world blind and toothless."

Terrorist networks are not nation states and to attack countries where terrorists are found is like weeding a garden with a bulldozer, or bombing New York City to get rid of the Mafia. This war against terrorism is a highly lethal and indiscriminate form of collective punishment. More innocent civilians have been killed in Afghanistan than were killed on September 11 and yet the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden remain unknown.

Terrorism is a criminal act rather than an act of war. Carefully coordinated worldwide police, intelligence and surveillance agencies, not invasions and bombings, are called for. The United Nations, through its various treaties dealing with terrorism, should be the main actor in solving this global problem, not the unilateral actions of any one nation. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan repeatedly stated this but he was ignored by the Bush Administration. Bush also refused to ratify the International Criminal Court, another avenue critically needed if this problem is to be dealt with through peaceful means.

Once again I turn to Martin Luther King for wisdom. Ten days before his assassination, he met with a national gathering of rabbis. During the question and answer time, he was asked what he would advise for dealing with the violence in the Middle East. He said, "…what is needed in the Middle East is Peace…Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality. Peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need. These nations, as you know, are part of that third world of hunger, of disease, of illiteracy. I think that as long as these conditions exist there will be tensions, there will be the endless quest to find scapegoats. So there is a need for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of economic security."

A new kind of Marshall Plan for the Middle East! What if this wisdom would have been followed in 1968? Or in 2001? People with no hope and in terrible conditions are tempted to listen to persons with desperate answers–charlatans, fanatics, false prophets, preachers of hate and violence. Misery, poverty and oppression are pools in which terrorism and extremism thrive. Why not dry up those pools? Why not draw upon our faith traditions that teach compassion, mercy, goodwill, justice and peace, not retaliation and war?

What if the wealthy nations of the world were to take up this challenge? What if the churches, mosques, and synagogues challenged the world to answer this call to put away swords and feed the hungry, lift the fallen and bring hope to a frightened and bewildered world? Some of the persons who lost family members on September 11 have organized a group called "Peaceful Tomorrows." Their motto is, "Our grief is not a call to war." They believe that mass murder should not be the occasion for retaliatory mass murder but rather should occasion peaceful actions that overcome evil with good.

In March of 2000 I went with an interfaith delegation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation to Iraq. We were Jew, Christian and Muslim. We visited children’s cancer wards where we saw first hand the victims of a decade of sanctions that have left Saddam Hussein in power but have killed over half a million Iraqis under the age of five. We went to the southern city of Basra, near Kuwait. There depleted uranium from the Gulf War continues to poison the people. After visiting the place where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers join, we meditated on these words of scripture (Revelation 22)

"Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,

flowing from the throne of God. On either side of the river is the

Tree of Life, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the

nations."

We were struck by the immediacy of that passage in this parched land where water is so utterly precious. And we grieved for what we had witnessed everywhere we had traveled: instead of bringing life in Iraq today, water–polluted and untreated–brings death. For Iraq’s infrastructure, destroyed by war, is still in ruins. The most comprehensive sanctions ever imposed on any nation prevent the normalization of life, and hence the rebuilding of the nation.

Denis Halliday, who formerly served as coordinator of the UN "oil for food" program and resigned in dismay at the utter inadequacy of that program, said, "Nonviolent solutions can work. The problem is that we do not invest in them. We do not persist. We do not respect the dignity and sovereignty of others. We impose."

Many people say, "Well, nonviolence is ok but it takes too much time." And these same people accept the probability of years and years of war that treat the symptoms, not the sources of violence and terror in our world. Growing up in the American South, I experienced how a disfranchised people changed the course of US history through an unyielding nonviolent campaign. In the Philippines, I witnessed the Filipino people’s awakening to ‘people power’ and bringing down Dictator Marcos and his army of a quarter of a million. I was with Lithuanians who were the first Soviet Republic to peacefully declare independence and then nonviolently withstand the attempts of the Red Army to crush their resistance. Such ‘experiments with Truth’(the title of Gandhi’s auto- biography) are what is required if we are to have a hopeful future. Both the United Nations and the World Council of Churches have called for this to be a decade for overcoming violence and building a culture of peace. We can achieve this goal if we marshal the resources of the world for peace, not for war.

Can Jews, Christians and Muslims–all from the common Abrahamic tradition –not only reject the short-sighted call to arms against Iraq but affirm their God who calls us to beat swords into plowshares, and learn war no more? The World House stands beside the Tree of Life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. This is our call on September 11.