Opinion Editorials, September 2009

IMAGINE:

A President who keeps Promises, True Christians, a Holy Land, and a Nuke Free World

By Eileen Fleming

ccun.org, September 24, 2009


You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

September 18, 2009, was a very good Friday, for people of conscience, truth, justice and peace when the UN's 150-nation nuclear conference passed a resolution that directly criticized Israel and its atomic program.

It was a bad day for the Jewish State, America's Industrial Military Complex and their backers, when 49 votes were cast for the non-binding resolution at the UN nuclear assembly which is urging Israel to put all of its atomic sites under UN inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty/NPT.

It was no surprise that Israel denounced the measure and exposed once more its paranoia when chief Israeli delegate David Danieli told the chamber, “Israel will not cooperate in any matter with this resolution, which is only aiming at reinforcing political hostilities and lines of division in the Middle East region.” [1]

Western states also moaned how unfair and counterproductive it is to isolate one member state, claiming that an IAEA resolution passed the day before urging all Middle East nations to fore-swear atomic bombs, included Israel and made Friday’s proposal unnecessary.

Glyn Davies, the US ambassador, spun the resolution as "redundant ... such an approach is highly politicized and does not address the complexities at play regarding crucial nuclear-related issues in the Middle East". [2]

The Arab nations inadvertently noted the law of Karma when they responded that Israel had brought the resolution on itself by having never signed the 40-year-old NPT.

Diplomats from the non-aligned movement of developing nations noted that "times had changed with the advent of the US administration of Barack Obama, the US president."

Reuters news agency quoted one truth telling diplomat, "People and countries are bolder now, willing to call a spade a spade. You cannot hide or ignore the truth, the double standards, of Israel's nuclear capability forever. The new US administration has certainly helped this thinking with its commitment to universal nuclear disarmament and nuclear weapons-free zones." [3]

In 2005, the truth teller of Israel's WMD Program, Mordechai Vanunu told me:

"The Israelis have 200 atomic weapons and they accuse the Palestinians and Muslims of terrorism. The Dimona is 46 years old; reactors last 25 to 30 years.

"The Dimona has never been inspected and Israel has never signed the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty but all the Arab states have.

"Twenty years ago when I worked there they only produced when the air was blowing towards Jordan ten miles away. No one knows what is happening now. The world needs to wake up and see the real terrorism is the occupation and the Palestinians have lived under that terror regime for 40 years.

"When I became the spy for the world, I did it all for the people of the world. If governments do not report the truth, and if the media does not report the truth, then all we can do is follow our consciences. Daniel Ellsberg did, the woman from Enron did, and I did.

"The United States needs to wake up and see the truth that Israel is not a democracy, unless you are a Jew. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where America can right now find nuclear weapons.

"America can also find where basic human rights have been denied Christians: right here in Israel. The time has come for the United States to see the truth of Zionism. It began as a secular nationalist movement, not a religious one. Then some Christians believed that when Israel became a nation, it was the beginning of the second coming. They are deluded if they believe peace will come through atomic weapons. Atomic weapons are holocaust weapons. Christians should be the first people against them." [4]

While campaigning, Obama once admitted that if we took the Sermon on the Mount seriously, it would lead to the abolishment of the Industrial Military Complex and as "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system… [and] Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers…not the bombardment of open cities…not killing."-Dorothy Day

The time is ripe, "To blow the dynamite…It is about time to blow the lid off."-Peter Maurin

"We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living."- General Omar Nelson Bradley, Armistice Day, 1948.

"You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police. Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased...to obey the laws of life."- Lewis Mumford, 1946

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."-Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953.

America possesses 11,000 nuclear weapons with many in excess of 20,000,000 tons of TNT [the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 12,000 tons] yet claims to be based on Judeo-Christian ethics, but “How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment: ‘Thou shalt not murder’?”– Leo Tolstoy.


"A country that has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality…Praying for peace is like praying for a weedless garden. Nothing will happen until you get your hands dirty." -John K. Stoner, co-founder of Every Church A Peace Church

 
"The duty of the Christian at this time is to do the one task God has imposed upon us in this world today. The task is to work for the total abolition of war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished; the world will remain constantly in a state of madness…The church [meaning all Christians] must lead the way on the road to the abolition of war…Peace is to be preached and nonviolence is to be explained and practiced…It is the great Christian task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it."- Thomas Merton

When FDR met with labor leaders in 1934, after four hours of meeting, he said, 'You've convinced me that you are right. Now, go out there and FORCE ME TO DO IT.'

What he meant, was that the pressures on a President to stay with the status quo, the forces of the economic and political elites of the country so enormous, that even when a President wants to change direction, he requires the support of forces that will push him in the correct direction.


On September 24, 2009, President Obama is organizing a nuclear weapons summit in New York and another in D.C. in 2010.

On April 5, 2009, President Obama raised the hopes of millions with his promises in Prague:

"We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We're here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people.

"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked - that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

"As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act…It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, 'Yes, we can.'

"There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.

"Let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. Let us bridge our divisions, build upon our hopes, and accept our responsibility to leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it. Together we can do it.

"Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people…[and] Human destiny will be what we make of it."



We do not know the future and so, there is no way to ascertain the impossible. De Gaul pulled all of France's million settlers out of Algeria when few believed he would. For decades, South African whites refused to share power with the country's black majority, and then, overnight, they agreed to do exactly that! The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall both fell; and the struggle now is to break down the walls of cynicism and apathy that block change and the imagination.
 
Imagine nothing to kill or die for
Imagine all the people living life in peace
Imagine no need for greed or hunger
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one-John Lennon


 
If everyone who has read this far would do something:

Send an email of support to President Obama for his Nuclear Agenda and remind him that Mordechai Vanunu also dreamed of a Nuclear Free Middle East and World back in 1985.

Ever since Vanunu has been paying the price for telling the world the truth about Israel's WMD program and Israel continues to deny him the right to leave the state.


The Council for a Livable World, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization dedicated to reducing the danger of nuclear weapons and increasing national security extends the opportunity with an editable email @