Sharing moral outrage
The recent Yearly Meeting minute on Gaza – along with wider statements and coverage in the Friend – has prompted me to write with concern about what appears to be a disproportionate focus within Britain Yearly Meeting on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
This conflict is undoubtedly tragic, and worthy of moral attention, and bearing witness. But it is only one of many devastating global crises. Consider Russia’s war on Ukraine, where estimates suggest over a million soldiers have been killed or injured on both sides, and at least 13,000 civilians confirmed dead. Then there is: Sudan’s civil war (60,000-130,000 deaths since 2023); the Ethiopia-Tigray People’s Liberation Front conflict; the international coalition’s military intervention in Yemen, which has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times, resulting in widespread famine, disease outbreaks, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians; Syria’s civil war; Myanmar’s campaigns against ethnic minorities; the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh; Libya’s internal collapse; Cameroon’s separatist unrest; jihadist violence in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger; armed group clashes in Colombia; political repression in Venezuela and Burundi; Bangladesh’s violent crackdown on student protesters under former prime minister Sheikh Hasina; and the cross-border atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army, responsible for an estimated 100,000 deaths, more than 20,000 child abductions, and the displacement of over 1.5 million people across Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.
All of these conflicts involve widespread suffering, displacement, and grave human rights abuses. Yet many receive little to no mention in Quaker discourse or publications. This raises difficult but important questions: Why does one conflict so often command the lion’s share of our moral outrage? Is our attention being guided by consistent principles, or does it sometimes reflect selective focus or implicit bias?
We live in a violent and fractured world. Our role as Quakers is not to amplify one tragedy while ignoring others, but to bear faithful and courageous witness to suffering wherever it occurs. Let our testimonies be rooted in equality, truth, and peace, not in partiality.
To speak truth to power with integrity, we must be willing to look beyond the headlines and extend our compassion impartially, holding all people and all suffering in the Light.
Richard Romm
Counterproductive witness?
Sahanika Ratnayake’s thoughtful article about reactions to the Westminster raid (‘Challenging witness’, 6 June) raises interesting questions. I see the impassioned opposition of Youth Demand to climate change policy and Israeli genocide as great, but tactically inept. If protest involves causing a massive public nuisance, it is actually counterproductive.
When Insulate Britain activists blocked motorways in 2021, YouGov found that the proportion of the general public who thought they were damaging the climate change movement rose markedly, and only five per cent thought it helped. Direct action of this kind may soothe activists’ feeling of helplessness, but obliging a young woman to give birth in the back of a taxi, for example, does not win hearts and minds, and has resulted in the curtailment of civil liberties.
In Westminster Meeting House, Youth Demand were in fact conspiring to do the fossil fuel lobby’s work for them, by alienating those whom they need to persuade. On the plus side, the Met’s ham-fisted implementation of the Public Order Act (hilariously described as ‘intelligence-led’) has given activists massive publicity without them doing anything, and garnered far more public support than road-blocking would have done.
Martin Drummond
Inspiring meadows
In response to Andrew Backhouse’s article on the subject of burial grounds (18 April), Preston Patrick Meeting has the care of an early burial ground at Birkrigg, where many of the Westmorland Seekers and other early Friends, including some of the Valiant Sixty, are buried, including John Camm and John Audland. There is only a plaque on the wall to identify it, and it hasn’t been used for burials since the 1700s.
It’s a little stone-walled enclosure, surrounded by what was farm land, but is now a green burial site owned by a national company, Inspired Meadows (I call them Expired Meadows). The company has planted trees and made little ponds in what was once just a rocky sheep-bitten field.
We hope to have talks with Inspired Meadows and to plan for visitors to the burial site to be able to use our plot for quiet meditation, and perhaps to have some information about Quakers in the past, and present.
Meg Hill
Personal complaint
I attended Yearly Meeting online this year, and at Friends House last year, and I appreciated the fact that the clerks and others used phrases like ‘in Friends House’ or ‘in the room’ to refer to those who were not attending online.
It is, therefore, upsetting to see repeated use of the term ‘in person’ in 6 June issue. People attending online at Yearly Meeting, or anything else, are just as much ‘in person’ as anyone on site.
If the Friend staff and editor fail to understand this and/or fail to think of any other term than ‘in person’, I despair of their brain power.
Moyra Carlyle
Well served
I could add to a number of the letters about Yearly Meeting (YM) in last week’s Friend (13 June) but I’ll limit myself to the one where I have personal experience to share. Like Margaret Sadler, I was dismayed and saddened that the clerk had to remind Friends to be more respectful of the Friends House staff. Of course, we don’t know the particular circumstances and I hope the complained-of discourtesy was the result of tiredness or harassment from getting to YM. Nevertheless it should not have happened.
I have been visiting Friends House for over eighty years and have seen many changes. I now spend quite a deal of time there studying archives in the library. I invariably experience the extraordinary quality of the Quiet Company staff as well the librarians. The care I always receive from the staff, the warm atmosphere and the spotless cleanliness of Friends House are constant. I try to go out of my way to express my appreciation and have also passed comment to ‘the management’. Thank you, good friends. We are so well served.
Roger Sturge
Driving force
‘Is there a Quaker attitude towards the internal combustion engine and the way of life that it makes possible?’ This question was asked by Margaret Thompson in the Friend of 26 February 1982. She had been reviewing John Adams’ book Transport Planning. Sadly there were few responses to her question.
Adams’ book presented many of the now-familiar negative themes concerning motorisation, such as the ruthlessness of motorway planning, the horrid deaths of animals, and the manipulation of road death statistics to make our highways seem safer than they are.
Motorisation remains the largest area of modern life to be ignored by the Christian churches, with road deaths and injuries considered less important than gender and sexuality.
The Pedestrians Association, now known as Living Streets, was founded in 1929 by Tom Foley, a journalist who had become concerned about road deaths and injuries. His wife Avis was a Friend in Wales.
Another concerned Friend was the retired schoolmaster John Knight, who co-founded the Campaign Against Drinking & Driving (CADD). He and his fellow co-founder had lost their children, killed by drunken drivers in separate incidents.
Meanwhile, other Friends suggested an addition to Advices & queries: ‘Do you drive to take away the occasion of all accidents?’
Antony Porter
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