Letters - 20 June 2025
From sharing moral outrage to driving force
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
