New Quaker Notebook

Jesus behind the closed door. The trial over the existence of Jesus, initiated three years ago against a Catholic priest after he criticized an atheist's contrarian book, began yesterday in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome. What could have been a show trial is merely going to be a quiet adjudication in judge's chambers. Arguments were heard yesterday in a closed-door hearing before Judge Gaetano Mautone.¹

Now what's at issue is not whether Jesus of Nazareth existed, but whether fraud occurred when Fr Enrico Righi wrote in a parish church bulletin that Jesus Christ was a historical figure. Luigi Cascioli brought the suit against don Righi after the parish priest denounced his book, La Favola di Cristo (The Fable of Christ) which contended that early Christian writers erred by confusing Jesus with John of Gamala, an anti-Roman insurgent in 1st-century Palestine. Cascioli is accusing the priest (and the Roman Catholic Church) of "abuse of popular credulity" and "impersonation," both of which are crimes under Italian penal law.² His underlying aim, he said, is to accuse the church of "religious racism" before the European Court of Human Rights.

1. "Arguments Heard in Court Battle over Christ's Existence," Christian Post, January 27, 2006.
2. "Judge tells priest to prove Christ existed," The Australian, January 4, 2006. See Luigi Cascioli's original complaint at his book's website: "According to article 661 of the Italian Penal Code, there is an abuse of popular credulity when someone, by means of fraud, deceives a great number of people. In this particular case, the ministers of religion of the Catholic Church, like Righi in the present case, by committing historical falsity, therefore presenting invented facts as if true and actually occurred—but useful to religious doctrine—they deceive all the people that come into contact with the teachings of such religion, by inducing them to believe in that religion, not on the basis of purely theological reasoning (totally legitimate and admissible), but on the basis of a deceptive representation of the facts.... As to the offence of impersonation, this occurs when a party gains benefits by attributing to it, or to others, a fallacious name."

Sticks and stones ... but the news hurts more. Read on—or at least make the attempt:

A Letter from Prison: Diane Wilson Reports From Texas County Jail

Diane Wilson, author of An Unreasonable Woman, is almost two months into a 150-day sentence in a Texas jail for a misdemeanor trespassing charge. The conditions in the Victoria County jail are deplorable, according to Wilson, a dedicated activist exposing injustice wherever she goes. Now Wilson is breaking through the walls of fear that prevent so many inmates from speaking forthrightly to the administrators of the penal system. She has written a public letter, addressed to Victoria County Sheriff T. Michael O'Connor, describing abusive conditions within the jail, violations of basic inmates rights, horrifying reports of the withholding of medical treatment from ill women who were jailed on non-violent charges, and the lack of a functioning avenue for inmates to address these problems within the system.

Wilson's jailing stems from a political action at a Dow Chemical facility in her hometown of Seadrift, TX, in 2002, when she climbed a tower at the plant and hung a banner reading "Justice For Bhopal," in reference to the thousands of Indians killed following a toxic release of methyl isocyanate in 1984 by Dow subsidiary Union Carbide.¹

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Torture School Protesters Face Six Months in Prison

Washington - On Monday, January 30 thirty-two people ranging in age from 19 to 81 will begin federal trials for peacefully walking onto a military base in protest of a controversial Army training school. Each person faces up to six months in prison and a $5,000 fine for this act of nonviolent civil disobedience.

The 34 were among 19,000 who gathered on November 18-20 outside the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia to demand a dramatic shift in US foreign policy and the closure of the controversial US Army's School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC). The group peacefully crossed onto Ft Benning, site of the school, at the culmination of a symbolic funeral procession in memory of those killed by graduates of the institution.

"People speaking out for justice and accountability will most likely be sent to prison next week," said Fr Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, "while the SOA and its graduates continue to operate outside a system of real accountability."

Those arrested at the demonstration—40 in all—cited the Bush Administration's opposition to banning torture techniques, pictures of abuse at the hands US personnel, and reports about secret CIA detention facilities as catalysts for this growing grassroots movement for human rights. The demonstration was the largest yet in a 16-year history of opposition to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers.

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Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2006

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1. See the original for this here, along with other information about Diane Wilson's situation in Texas.

Photos of Abramoff with the President are disappearing. Remember this scene in Back to the Future? Marty McFly learns that he's changed the past by inadvertently making Lorraine (his mother) fall in love with him (as "Calvin Klein") instead of George (his father) and he ends up watching as the "future" McFly family begins vanishing, one by one, from his wallet photo. Well, that seems to resemble what's going on with actual photos showing George W. Bush with Jack Abramoff. They're disappearing.

Yesterday's Talking Points Memo has the curious story. Somebody's cranked up the shredding machine.

I really find CodePink women attractive. Maybe it's because I like women in pink, or perhaps because I favor intelligent women of principle—but that's not why I want to plug their latest venture. We all want to know why the women of the United States haven't all stood up in outraged opposition to the blundering mess in Iraq, if not to the unceasing incompetence of the Bush administration.

That's pretty much what Medea Benjamin asked in her short Nation article on Tuesday. "When Will US Women Demand Peace?" not only asks the question, but also revisits CodePink's Women Say No to War program and its Global Women's Call for Peace in Iraq with the idea of asking women around the world to sign on and then march to US embassies on International Women's Day, on March 8th this year. Their aspiration was that "the idea of women worldwide putting pressure on the US government would inspire US women to stand up as well." They sent their overseas friends a draft of the prospectus, including "withdrawal of foreign troops, no permanent bases, rebuilding funds going directly to Iraqis instead of US companies and equal rights for women." It "went viral," she says, "with women from Mongolia, Mexico, Australia, Albania, the Philippines and Pakistan requesting to be among the initial endorsers." Beginning with a goal of 100 prominent women signing on to their springboard website, they already had well over 3,000 women and men endorsing the program even before it was officially launched.

She appeals to each of us:

So please join us in building this global call, sending it to our friends at home and abroad to get at least 100,000 women on board. Please commit to doing a local action on March 8—shut down a recruiting center, sit in at a Congressional office, hold a vigil on a crowded street corner, paint a peace mural. Or join us in Washington, DC, where Iraqi, US and British women—including Cindy Sheehan—who have lost sons in this war will try to meet with US women leaders, from Condoleezza Rice to Hillary Clinton, to push our peace plan.

Let's make March 8 a day when we revive the fighting spirit of International Women's Day and unleash the power of women across generations, races, ethnicities, religions and borders. Let's make it a day to show our anger over the war, our compassion for our sisters in Iraq, our disgust with our leaders and our determination to change course. And let's commit to building, over the long term, a women's peace movement that will make our global sisters—and our grandmothers—proud.

I'm planning to be there with them—and I assure you, not just because I like CodePink women.

Justice is blind because her eyes have been gouged out. The following two news stories in today's Democracy Now! have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, and yet both are inextricably connected:

Military Jury: No Jail Time For Interrogator Who Killed Iraqi
In other Iraq news—a military jury in Colorado ruled last night an Army interrogator who killed an Iraqi general would not have to serve any time in jail. The interrogator—Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr.—killed the Iraqi man after putting a sleeping bag over his head, wrapping him in electrical cord, sitting on his chest and covering his mouth. Over the weekend the military jury convicted Welshofer of negligent homicide which carries a maximum prison term of three years. But the jury chose instead to fine him $6,000 and ordered him to spend the next 60 days restricted to his home, office and church. The Los Angeles Times reports soldiers and officers inside the courtroom broke out in applause after the jury announced Welshofer would not be jailed for the killing.

Peace Activist Gets 6 Months in Jail For Recruiting Station Protest
In upstate New York, a peace activist has been sentenced to six months in jail for pouring blood inside a military recruiting station in March 2003 in order to protest the invasion of Iraq. The man, Daniel Burns, 45, was one of a group now known as the St Patrick's Four. The other three members will also be sentenced this week.

Say, I have an idea: Let's promote a Culture of Life so that more deaths may be the result.¹

1. All cynicism aside, Noam Chomsky puts this into perspective in his Amnesty International Annual Lecture, "The Terrorist in the Mirror," published in today's issue of CounterPunch.