February 2006

Tal av Martin Smedjeback i Betelkyrkan, Örebro 2006-01-15, dagen före Martin Luther Kingdagen. King och Jesus råkar vara två av mina största inspirationskällor. Jag har upptäckt att man kan hitta en hel del likheter mellan King och Jesus, men det finns naturligtvis också många olikheter och jag vill inte på något sätt likställa dem. Jag funderar över tre frågor: Varför blev King och Jesus rörelser så framgångsrika? Varför dödades King och Jesus? Varför är King och Jesus rörelser inte längre framgångsrika? Read More.

February 28, 2006 Martin Smedjeback In the early hours of the 5th of August 2005 a group of planters entered AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment) Aldermaston and planted vines and fig trees.They were soon arrested for their conversion of a nuclear weapons research facility into a peace garden.This is the story of the trial that followed in Newbury Magistrates Court the 7-9th of February 2006. An invitation arrived A letter came to my apartment in Stockholm in December 2005. It read: I ask you, who can resist such a kind invitation? Our vine and fig tree community, about ten people from five countries, began preparing for the upcoming trial. We sent out invitations to friends to come to the trial. We received good help from the law firm Bindman and Partners. They sent us a CD with pictures from the action and a DVD with a video recording of “the crime...

LONDON – As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan nears the end of his controversial term the names being banded around to succeed him seem more attuned to satisfying particular regional constituencies than looking for the best person around. A Jacques Delors or Mikhail Gorbachev or Sam Nunn could never have become secretary-general. At the time their names were talked about it had to be an African candidate, and although Annan has some sterling achievements under his belt he has never quite had the freedom to be his own man. He has had to live under the dark cloud of being the person in charge of the UN’s peacekeeping department in 1994 and who failed to see what was going on in Rwanda when genocide was unleashed and the world turned away. He has certainly known that Washington would shamelessly use that against him if he tried to take the bit between...

LONDON – Lost somewhere in the mists of history is the knowledge that it was the pro-American Shah of Iran who initiated Iran’s quest to build a nuclear bomb. And it was the anti-American revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini that initially suspended work on the bomb, from 1972 to 1985. Fanning the panic of proliferation has been a mainstay of the Bush Administration, supported in the wings by the British government and more recently France’s president, Jacques Chirac. It is a high stakes game that can slide too easily into the call for regime change, as it did with Iraq. Yet current would-be proliferators are arguably not as dead set on proliferating, nor even as advanced in their capabilities, as their antagonists suggest. But unyielding critical rhetoric combined with a lack of incentives to back down seems to only have the effect of making the likes of North Korea and...

I Damaskus har Sveriges, Norges och Danmarks ambassader stormats och stuckits i brand. Nordiska medborgare uppmanas att lämna Mellanöstern och skandinaviska företag bojkottas i hela arabvärlden. Hur kunde det gå så illa? Hur ska det sluta? Oron växer. Liksom frågorna: Finns det något man kan göra? Ja, det finns det. Det finns konstruktiva saker att göra också i Göteborg. Detta än inte en konflikt mellan Islam och den västliga sekulära världen. Detta är något som startade som en provokation från en liten klick intellektuella som tror sig vara liberala genom att smutskasta den heliga förebilden för en redan förtryckt grupp invandrare. Nu har konflikten eskalerat till en nivå som få kunde ha förutsett. Många har burit eld till brasan den senaste tiden. Västliga politiker, bloggare och mediefolk har var på sitt sätt försökt att hävda att principen om yttrandefrihet hotas om inte provokationerna får spridas fritt. Alla länder har begränsningar...

LONDON – Iconoclasm – the destruction of the figurative depiction of God and his prophets- was one of the important factors that in the ninth century strengthened the split between Roman Catholicism and Byzantine Orthodoxy. In fact the iconoclastic movement of the Eastern Church was in part a sympathetic reaction to the puritanical values of Islam. Later the Reformation led to similar moves against Catholic practices with Protestants stripping out of their churches images of Mary and the saints and the crucifix became bodiless.   The reaction against the Danish newspaper cartoon drawing of Muhammad with his turban pierced with a bomb should come as no surprise to Christendom. The Danes are going through a strange period of over emphasis, which undoubtedly has something to do with insecurities over their threatened culture and small population on the outer edge of northern Europe. During World War 2 the sense of beleaguered independence...

LONDON – The Western democracies, so keen on exporting their political model to the rest of the world, seem to be perfecting the art of shooting themselves in the foot, and I’m not even going to mention the war in Iraq. The cartoon affair which showed up Danish democracy as religiously illiterate at the onset and by last week’s end defensively bigoted was preceded only two weeks earlier by President Jacques Chirac of France boldly announcing that any (presumably Islamic) nation that supported groups that tried to use terrorism and weapons of mass destruction against France should expect a nuclear riposte. In an age when a terrorist group could at best detonate a so-called “dirty bomb”, conventional explosives wrapped around some stolen nuclear waste and kill at most a thousand people, or biological weapons like the anthrax letters that killed all of half a dozen people in the U.S. four...

By Jan Oberg, TFF directorFebruary 7, 2006 Jyllands-Posten’s drawings are caricatures with a tendency. They associate the Prophet with terrorism, criminality and repression of women. None of them could possibly serve dialogue, mutual understanding or much needed public education between Danes and the Muslims anywhere. They are ill-willed. The intensity of the negative reaction may be surprising. But seen in the context of our contemporary, globalizing world, their publication was both thoughtless and purposeless. It reveals a mind-boggling deficit in general education and good (journalistic) manners. The Danish government has lost it Worse, the Danish government understood neither the affair nor the need for early damage-limitation. Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen turned down appeals for dialogue, following an established pattern also in relation to Denmark’s policy on Iraq and immigration issues: by definition we make no mistakes and have nothing to learn from anyone. If the government had understood the world...

Some reflections on the electionsin Palestine and on the tasks ahead Elections in Palestine – a major achievement All Palestinians and other friends of Palestine should be congratulated with the elections! Despite occupation, travel restrictions, checkpoints and a number of other obstacles from the Israeli side, the PA, the political parties and the constituency managed to hold the campaigns, the actual voting, the counting of votes and the presenting of the results at a remarkably high standard. No state in the region has ever been able to deliver such a standard under such conditions! The formal parliamentary democracy is now established in Palestine. For it to become a real and functional democracy there is still a way to go, but this a very important step in the right direction. In this perspective, let us not forget that only a few, if any, countries that brag about being democracies are doing...

LIMA – In Bolivia, with the election as president of a representative from the excluded Indian majority, Evo Morales, it is clear that belatedly the Indian community has expressed its deepest longings, albeit by voting for a leader who if he walks like he talks will destroy any hope they may have for escaping the worst poverty in Latin America. In Peru, whose election is only a few weeks away, the Indian question, although not as polarised as in neighboring Bolivia, threatens to undo the good economic work done by president Alberto Fujimori (who had to flee to Japan in 2000 after scandal felled him) and the present president, Alejandro Toledo. Even though Toledo is an Indian, and even though he has been able to maintain GDP growth rates at a healthy 5% a year, he is probably the least popular president in Latin America. In this polarised situation there...