Ethan Vesely-Flad's blog

From Friday through Sunday, June 20-22, 2008, the National Council (governing board) and national staff of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR-USA), held its semi-annual meeting in Nyack, New York. In response to the deepening political crisis in Zimbabwe and a call from FOR-Zimbabwe for support, FOR-USA issued the following statement by unanimous acclamation:

The Fellowship of Reconciliation is cosponsor of the Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran. Together with dozens of other organizations, we are asking our members to call their representatives in the U.S. Congress to de-escalate the tensions that have been building between our two governments, and to pursue diplomacy with one another.

As we seek to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must also double our peacemaking efforts to ensure that the next war does not begin in the coming months. Please take this one simple action (or three simple actions, depending on how many of your legislators you call!) for a peaceful world today.

Last Friday, June 6th, was the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Occurring just two months after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., his death in the midst of a momentous presidential campaign signaled to many the end of a hopeful era. In less than four years, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, King, and the younger Kennedy had all been slain, and these violent killings laid the foundation for tumult at the summer's Democratic Convention in Chicago, the start of a massive anti-Vietnam War movement, and broader radical forces in the United States fed by the rhetoric of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weathermen, the Young Lords, and other revolutionary groups.

The news from Zimbabwe over the past several weeks has been deeply disturbing to all those who care about human rights and democratic elections. Today's international media reported the arrest yesterday of the opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangarai, who is trying for the third time to achieve victory over President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, which has ruled Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980.

As someone who has traveled to Zimbabwe, a spectacularly beautiful country with a highly-educated population, and been blessed to know many people from that nation, I have personally felt incredible pain and sadness at the reports I have been reading. I know many Zimbabweans who have left the country in recent years, mostly black, and have heard their stories of the economic despair in the country as well as the political repression that has increased each year.

It's the start of June, which not only means that summer is around the corner, but in Fellowship of Reconciliation terminology means that the annual FOR Pacific Northwest conference is coming up. This year's Seabeck conference (named after the conference center 90 minutes west of Seattle, where the gathering is held each year) will be the 50th annual!

I'm delighted to be one of the guest speakers at the July 3-6 conference, "Persevering for Justice and Peace," one of two representing FOR's national staff. My friend and colleague Maryrose Dolezal, co-director of FOR's Youth & Militarism program, will also be traveling to Seabeck from her base in Minnesota to speak and lead workshop's on organizing young people for social change (including information about the Nonviolent Youth Collective).

Earlier this year, on the sixth anniversary of the day that the first group of prisoners were incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay camp in 2002, a couple hundred protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Thirty-four of them then walked up the steps and engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience. They were arrested, and when that happened they did not provide the Capitol Police their "given" names but rather the names of individuals who have been held at Guantanamo for years and who have never received trial. They sought to be names and faces for the nameless and faceless.

History was made yesterday. And I was there to witness it. My colleague, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, was invited to stand before the congregation of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Tehran, Iran. And as I should have realized she would, Lynn claimed the prophetic mantle.

On the afternoon of our first day here in Tehran, five of us within the Fellowship of Reconciliation's 7th interfaith peace delegation to Iran were interviewed by a young adult-focused television program.

It is 5 p.m. in Iran, 8 and 1/2 hours east of New York, and I am sending a first brief report from our civilian diplomacy delegation. It has been an exhausting and invigorating two days, only a few hours of which have actually been spent here in the country.

U.S. Civilian Diplomacy Delegation Departs for Iran;
Woman Rabbi Makes Historic Visit for Peace
April 28, 2008 -- For Immediate Release

In the wake of comments on April 21st by U.S. presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, who responded to a question of a theoretical future attack by Iran on Israel by saying, “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” a 21-person interfaith peace delegation to Iran will depart New York on Tuesday, April 29, 2008. The two-week delegation is organized by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the oldest and largest interfaith peace organization in the United States, and is FOR’s seventh fact-finding and friendship delegation to Iran.