“Faith Over Fear” Conference in Everett

Challenges Islamophobia Industry

By Ron Young

Many of us may know people who fear Muslims, and we may have heard how hate crimes against American Muslims have increased dramatically in the last two years. But only a few of us may be aware that there is a well-funded industry using mis-information and lies to generate the fears and hatred. That was the focus of a conference at Trinity Lutheran Church in Everett, Washington this week attended by local faith and civic leaders, including city and state officials and two Police Officers.

This is one in a series of programs entitled “Faith Over Fear: Standing with Our Muslim Neighbors” being held in a dozen cities and towns across Washington State, sponsored by Neighbors in Faith, the American Muslim Empowerment Network (AMEN), and Faith Action Network.  The program provides a model that organizers hope will be copied in other states. The two speakers were Aneelah Afzali of AMEN and Reverend Terry Kyllo of Neighbors in Faith.

In a time when there is a lot of popular anxiousness and anger, spawned by people’s experiences of economic , cultural and national insecurity, it’s easy to stir-up fear and hatred against other people whom we do not know. Most of us don’t know any Muslims personally. We’re probably unaware but affected negatively by how Islam is featured in primetime news coverage more than any other religion and how the images of Muslims in the media and in movies and TV series are overwhelming negative and frightening.

Suggesting that awful actions of some Muslims are representative of Islam or all  Muslims is like saying that beliefs and actions of the Ku Klux Klan are representative of Christianity and all Christians. But that’s exactly what the multi-million dollar Islamophobia Industry does. Read the report Fear, Inc.: Islamophobianetwork.com. 

Well-documented facts can help counter the false negative images of Islam and American Muslims. See Islamfactcheck.org for common false assertions and factual responses, and visit the Southern Poverty Law Center’s online guide that monitors anti-Muslim extremist groups like “Act for America.”

Here are a few examples of what many of us learned at the conference:

·        A 2009 Gallup Poll found that American Muslim women are the second most highly educated religious community in the U.S. and are just as likely as American Muslim men to have a college degree.

·        A 2011 Gallup Poll found that, “Of the major religious groups studied, Muslim Americans are the staunchest opponents of military attacks against civilians.”

·        Sharia is an Arabic term that refers to Islamic practices and path. American Muslims follow the path by practicing charity, praying, taking care of family and neighbors, and performing other compassionate acts. American Muslims believe in respecting the U.S. Constitution and obeying the laws of the land.

·        Very similar to the “Golden Rule,” in Jewish and Christian teachings, Prophet Mohammad taught, “None of you will have faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”

While facts like these can help overcome false images of Muslims, even more effective is getting to know Muslims personally.  Speakers at the conference suggested that we find ways of publicly meeting and welcoming our Muslim neighbors: arrange to visit a Mosque or invite a Muslim to come speak at our church or host an interfaith exchange or forum. (Neighbors in Faith or the Council on American-Islamic Relations can help organize such activities.)

Speakers also urged us as individuals and as communities to respond actively and publicly to hateful rhetoric and threats toward Muslims. Speak out, including on social media when you hear hate speech directed at Muslims, and encourage your friends to speak out. Show up with signs and support when there is threat to a Mosque or a hate crime incident. Urge your church, synagogue, neighborhood association or work place to post a sign of solidarity with Muslims. Write an op-ed article or letter-to-editor about American Muslims you know and how we must stand together in support of American values of religious freedom, tolerance and diversity.  

People of faith and goodwill in neighborhoods across our state, and all across our country, have power to assert what is central to all our faith traditions: Love of God and love of neighbor. Now is the time to act.  

Ron Young is Consultant with twenty-five American Jewish, Christian and Muslim national religious leaders working together for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Ron lives in Everett and can be contacted at ronyoungwa@gmail.com.

HOW “A NICE GIRL LIKE ME” CAME TO LEVITATE THE PENTAGON

I was cold, huddled amid a mass of others sitting on a concrete ramp leading down toward an entrance to the Pentagon. We had marched, climbed over a falling-down piece of fence, and there we were...six hundred disparate souls come together to say no to the Vietnam War and the draft.  We wanted to raise that symbol of the war off its foundation and say yes to what we believed America stood for.

I was twenty-four years old that October in 1967. A child of refugees who fled Austria after Hitler’s Anschluss, I now often wonder if my parents would gain entry into this country under the current administration’s immigration policies.

In Vienna during World War I, my mother’s family was poverty-stricken and through a program of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), she and her sister were sent to Holland to be housed and fed for a time. When my parents came to America, she, a Catholic and my father, a non-practicing Jew, decided to affiliate with a Quaker meeting. I grew up there, absorbing the teaching that there is a light common to all people and we strive to honor that light which is common to all of us by standing against war and discrimination.

We had music! My father studied and sang opera in Vienna though he later decided on a career in aerospace engineering. We sang. We made music together. There was Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony and Mozart’s Magic Flute, odes to finding and giving voice to freedom. My brother brought home Joan Baez, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers. Music and words were increasingly woven into my expression of belief.  My own “personal troubadour” was Phil Ochs. He once came to a teach-in and even though there were only 5 people in attendance, he sang his heart out.

      ‘I can’t add my name to the fight when I’m gone...

       I can’t try to right what is wrong when I’m gone...

       I guess I won’t be singing on this song when I’m gone...

       So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.’

I still hear your voice, Phil.

As I recall, the night before we levitated the Pentagon, a group of us went to hear Judy Collins. And she sang me to the next day.

I was on the cusp of the Baby Boomer generation, born a year or two before its official start.  So I was in some ways traditional, anticipating college, grad school, marriage, family, job...and in others part of the huge social and personal changes sweeping our country.

In high school I joined members of our Meeting who went to Ft. Detrick to protest against research into biological and chemical warfare. I walked along US 1 with two Indian pacifists who were teaching non-violence along their journey.

In college I joined civil rights and peace activities and along with my passion for the revolutionary writer/artist William Blake, I thrilled to hearing IF Stone and Carl Oglesby. From them I began to understand the connection between individuals and the institutions we people...and what is required of an involved citizenry in times of crisis.

One college professor (of Shakespeare, alas) failed one of my papers because it was late after I attended a peace rally. He told me I would never amount to anything with my attitude and behavior. I told him I wanted both schooling and social action. It shocked him when I won a graduate fellowship and honorable mention in another, despite his rants. It was to further study William Blake and archetypal patterns in literature that I entered grad school in Toronto (William Blake and DH Lawrence: The Politics of Art)... and drove a young draft resister who was refused conscientious objector status across the border.

After grad school I was engaged by the Canadian and American Friends Service Committees to work on peace education and with high school students on social issues. A group of young people wanted to talk with draft board clerks, the women who staffed the Selective Service System offices where young men registered for the draft.  The students thought we could convince these clerks that sending young men to die via an inequitable draft in an undeclared war was wrong.  It wasn’t that simple. Those women showed they believed just as deeply in what they did as we in what we were saying and doing. How to bridge that divide?

We organized a peace caravan that traveled to various cities meeting with civic and religious groups to speak and engage in conversation about the war and the draft. At one meeting in a crowded church basement a man stood up after I’d spoken and said:  “If I had a daughter like you I’d be so ashamed and I’d want her dead.”  Shock. Some fear.  Anger.  I wanted to scream at him all the swear words I knew.  But something in me led me to ask him the question that led us to a conversation, if not resolution: Why?

I went on to a career in nonprofit social action (Women Strike for Peace, Clergy and Laity Concerned, the ACLU, Save the Children to name a few). I was arrested with a group of interfaith clergy for praying for peace in the Capitol rotunda. I visited American POW’s in North Vietnam and brought them letters from family and to one a pair of glasses as he’s broken his.  And subsequently I went on to hold a senior position in a global communications and advertising firm where I focused on helping companies communicate successfully with their stakeholders. Carrying on, I am now an executive and career/life coach working with corporate leaders and individual people in their 20’s to their 80’s to achieve their “next.”

Levitating the Pentagon was my first act of civil disobedience. We sat on that ramp and the police came with huge hoses and sprayed us with icy water as we heard the paddy wagons approach. I got pneumonia.

That levitation and the events of October ’67 were a milestone for disparate individuals and organizations which came together for common cause.  Labor, religious, women’s rights, student, civil liberties and other organizations convened (not always easily and cohesively) because the war had to end... and because we all knew we had to help make that happen together.

As I string together these pieces of my younger life and subsequent living, levitating the Pentagon is one of my proudest stories. In committing to lift that symbol of the war off its foundations, I know that for me and for the many movements that converged, it was we who we who were lifted and, I pray, are rising still.

Trudi Schutz

October 2017

Trudi Schutz was National Coordinator of the March Against Death in Washington, DC November. 13-15, 1969, in which more than 38,000 Americans walked single file in state by state delegations, starting with Alabama, from Arlington Memorial Cemetary to the Capitol, carrying the names and calling out the names at the White House of American soldiers from their state who had been killed and the names of Vietnamese villages destroyed in the war.