by Lorin Peters

“Those who have believed in peace through the sword have not hesitated to die… They have laid down their lives by the millions. Why do we think that our way will be less costly? Unless we… are ready to start to die by the thousands in dramatic vigorous new exploits for peace and justice, we should sadly confess that we really never meant the cross was an alternative to the sword. Making peace is as costly as waging war.”

The world assembly of Mennonites was stunned, and electrified. Ron Sider’s challenge, in 1984, led directly to the creation of a new experiment in the history of Christianity – Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). Together with Fr. Alain Richard and Peace Brigades International in Guatemala, and Gene Stoltzfus and Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, CPT gave birth to the idea of unarmed civilian peacemaking. CPT has had peacemaking teams in Haiti, Chiapas, the First Nations of Canada, and the Arizona desert. We currently have teams in Colombia, Iraq, and Palestine.

Palestine was occupied in 1967. Since then the government of Israel has moved more than half a million “settlers” into Palestine, and done countless things to pressure the Palestinians to “transfer” out (their word, not mine). They have built four settlements on the rooftops, literally, of Palestinian homes and shops inside the Old City of Hebron. In 1994, a settler, Baruch Goldstein, shot and killed 29 Muslims inside the mosque at the Tomb of Abraham. In desperation, the city asked CPT to establish a team as part of their very conservative Muslim community. I have served seven summers as part of that team.

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By Yasmine El-Rashidi

link to story here

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

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Around this time of the year –right before Christmas– a Big Man (BM) comes to a peaceful calm tea house, looks around and returns at closing time to rob it. A friend, who now works there, told me that a big man came earlier with a very unfriendly malicious look, used the bathroom way longer than the time average of a costumer, looked at the photo exhibit, asked for jasmine pearls, bought none, have no tea and left.

She didn’t want to amplify negative vibrations but the reality was that she was about to be in a very uncomfortable situation. The owner of the tea house wasn’t around but urged her to close early and/or to call the police, since this is the typical pattern experienced by the business in previous years before the robberies they have experienced.