Give Peace A Chance
Dissent’s post-September 11th struggle for mainstream airtime
An interview with Judith McDaniel by Bruce Campbell

To spend time with the major media in these weeks and months following September 11, one would have the impression that the American public was unanimous in support of military action against terrorism. Witness media editor Bruce Campbell spoke recently about the post-September 11th peace movement with Judith McDaniel, a writer, teacher and activist who is director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Peacebuilding Unit, headquartered in Philadelphia. According to McDaniel, the peace movement is not only alive, it is international and it is regrouping. Getting airtime has not been impossible, but it has been a lot of work and it has been risky.

McDaniel’s background in peacebuilding was developed in domestic and international peace campaigns, most extensively in working with Central American refugees as part of the Sanctuary Movement. Her book about that work, Sanctuary: A Journey, was published in 1986. Before her post at AFSC, McDaniel taught in the Religious Studies and Women’s Studies Programs at the University of Arizona. She is currently writing the biography of Barbara Deming, a nonviolence, peace, civil-rights, feminist activist. McDaniel is a member of Albany Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and served on the AFSC Board of Directors from 1996 until her appointment to her current post in July 2000.

Sidebars:

• Spanish-language version
• A lone vote of conscience
• Just War Theory
• Move over, Garry Trudeau

Bruce Campbell: Even given our climate of national emergency, it seems remarkable to me that we have heard almost no voice whatsoever in the major media calling for bona fide alternatives to the current military action – even ways of thinking about it differently. Am I wrong? Are you aware of any?

Judith McDaniel: Absolutely none. You could without equivocation say that there has not been a prominent voice. There have not been even a collection of non-prominent voices that would make one voice. So it’s just not there. I work with the National Coalition for Peace and Justice. That’s a coalition of about 40 different groups, with a steering committee of about 10 of us, about 10 groups that have national or international constituencies. We came together the Friday after September 11th and had a meeting in New York in the War Resisters League office, and we decided that we would do coordinated actions, coordinating a day of peace response. We wanted to ask that there not be a violent retaliation. The theme was based on what the New York-based groups were doing, which was "no more victims," and we would try to get the media to notice. Well, we have done all of the above, and the media has barely noticed. We have had a very hard time.

There are some exceptions. On October 7, the National Coalition of Peace and Justice groups organized peace rallies around the country. An hour before the East Coast marches stepped off, the Bush administration started bombing Afghanistan. It looked as if we had been ready and waiting to step out. It was very fortuitous. I think it was Peter Jennings who opened his six o’clock newscast that night with, "Bombing begins in Afghanistan," and that there were peace vigils and marches around the country.

Bruce Campbell: When I caught up with you about this interview, you had just completed an interview for a Philadelphia radio station, yes?

Judith McDaniel: I’ve done a number of radio talk shows; some more successful than others, and some very unsuccessful. I was on a talk show in St. Louis where I was told by a call-in listener that if I hadn’t lost a relative in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon disasters, I certainly was not allowed to have an opinion about them. Because the speaker was a fireman and "I lost 200 brothers." That kind of patriotism – that’s been the tone of the call-ins. The other norm has been that people put the microphone in your face and say, "So what would you have done?" In other words, "What are your alternatives?" We kept trying to talk about the rule of law rather than creating a war situation. But it’s very difficult to talk about something that doesn’t exist. There is no international criminal court at this time, because enough countries haven’t ratified it yet – and the U.S. is one of them. So we can talk about tribunals; we can talk about the kinds of situations that were used for Lockerbie, and for Milosevic, and for Rwanda. But we don’t have really good answers when they insist, "Well, how would you capture him?" So it’s not just the tone of the country and of the media and of the interviews, it’s our own inability as peace groups to articulate a viable response.

Bruce Campbell: What is at the root of that inability?

Judith McDaniel: People are stunned. In terms of the American public, it happened to the U.S. In no way does Pearl Harbor compare with this – that was only U.S. territory; Hawaii wasn’t even a state when it happened. It wasn’t on the mainland, and it was an act of war – and we responded in kind. But to contemplate what happened on September 11th is of a totally different magnitude. And then there is the kind of cocoon that the media has allowed the American people to live in which says that "If it hasn’t happened to America, it has never happened." Hey, terrorist attacks happen all the time. Certainly Britain has known them. Germany has known them. The Middle East has known them. But the fact that other European countries have experienced some of those attacks – not quite the same magnitude, but certainly quite a horrendous magnitude – didn’t compute for Americans.

Bruce Campbell: Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann have written about "manufactured consent," meaning that interested corporations are colluding to manufacture consent for pre-determined government policy. In other words, it’s all decided, and the media are the great cheerleaders out there – and they’d better be because there’s a great deal of money at stake for them. Do you think it’s fair to say that’s what’s going on in this instance?

Judith McDaniel: That’s a great part of it. Noam Chomsky spoke at an AFSC panel up in Boston in December, and we have an hour transcript of him saying some of those things on our website (www.afsc.org/nero/pesp/911.htm). We see how little space there is for any kind of questioning dissent, any kind of discussion. The fact is that democracy requires us to participate, not to say "yes, yes, yes." But democracy at this moment has been redefined to be, "We’re all good fellows together; we’re going to support the administration." You define out the ability to even have a discussion, as the Congress has done in so much of what they’ve adopted. They have not discussed it. There have been no hearings. There has been very little in the way of public commentary allowed. All we have are the votes.

Bruce Campbell: Sometimes someone in the media will tell you that what they try to do is bring on people to comment in proportion to the size of the voice being exercised by ordinary people. So if there’s enough people in the streets, let’s pull in someone who can articulate what they’re saying. If there’s no one in the streets, we’re not bound to bring anyone in. I’ve seen no one in the streets. Do you think that justifies the media not bringing in spokespeople on behalf of a peaceful alternative?

Judith McDaniel: Of course not! When has the media ever been representational? And that’s certainly not in their job description. Their job is about investigation, about truth, about looking at the hard questions.

Bruce Campbell: Sometimes in the pursuit of that, the media are often accused of not being shy to whip up a fight even if there isn’t one. And at times they exercise a kind of bi-polar disorder whereby they set up extremists and let them go at it, which may obviate any middle-ground discussion. They haven’t even done that in this case, as I can see. Where have the peace extremists been anywhere on the media?

Judith McDaniel: They haven’t been there. And again, it’s a real hard call. I mean, what would a peace extremist look like? We’ve been accused – those of us who are pacifist – of being immoral and irrelevant. We’ve been defined off the page. We’re not even an extreme at this point. If you are a pacifist that means that you support bin Laden because you’re not going to go out and annihilate him. It’s what Bush has said over and over again – and has been echoed by Ashcroft and Rumsfeld: "If you’re not with us, you’re against us." And I’m sorry, that’s an insane proposition. During the Central America conflict, I spent some time working with the Sanctuary Movement and came back from Nicaragua at one point and was on talk shows. People said, "Well, if you dislike this country so much, you should go live in the Soviet Union." I wanted to say, "Excuse me, I’m living here and this is my work, this is my life, this is my country." They would quote, "My country, right or wrong." But no one ever uses the complete quote, which is: "My country, right or wrong. When right, defend it. When wrong, correct it." That’s patriotism to me.

Bruce Campbell: In terms of media positioning and this almost blackout on the peace perspective these days, how is the situation that we are in right now different in your recollection from the time of the Gulf War, which also had a couple of qualities in common with this one? You didn’t have the factor of horror right in people’s own backyards. But it was quick response, it was "over there," and it had the Arab angle to it.

Judith McDaniel: I don’t know yet. Some of the Gulf War protests may have shifted public opinion enough to stop the taking of Baghdad and the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, although we’ll never know for certain. I will be interested to see if the anti-war movement goes back to the streets. Right now, there’s a tremendous effort in the peace movement to stop the expansion of the war into Iraq, because the careful preparation that’s being done to make it okay for this Bush administration to go back into Iraq is frightening. We quickly put up a piece on the web, trying to get people to pay attention to a congressional vote on this, but one of the problems with getting our voices heard is that things are happening so quickly and without discussion. Congress is not going to hold hearings on this if it doesn’t have to. They’re working behind the scenes in the United Nations right now with the "P5," the permanent five in the United Nations Security Council (U.S., Great Britain, China, Russia and France), trying to get some assurance that the Security Council will not stop the move into Iraq. Somalia was included in that resolution that was passed on September 12th, that allowed us to bomb Afghanistan. Iraq was not. And so, we don’t have permission at this point – from ourselves or from the United Nations – to go into Iraq.

Bruce Campbell: There have been some interesting encounters, if not in the media then about the media. There were rows at some news stations when editors told their reporters to take off their flag pins while they were reporting on the air, which prompted an enormous backlash, and free speech was evoked as a defense.

Judith McDaniel: Right – at the same time that the media were told that they couldn’t show certain tapes on CNN or any other U.S. news station that were being shown everywhere in the world except the U.S. So much for freedom of speech.

Bruce Campbell: And there was an incident in which ABC News held a press conference to issue a public apology for Peter Jennings’ remarks to the effect that President Bush had been slow in coming out and issuing a statement after the attacks. I don’t remember the last time that a news organization apologized for being unpatriotic.

Judith McDaniel:Yeah, right.

Bruce Campbell: What do you think a neutral media should look like in this situation? If you could turn on the television tomorrow and see something you thought was valuable, what would it look like?

Judith McDaniel: Oh, it would be the kind of in-depth discussion that we have not had. Having said that, media cannot create a discussion that does not exist. It can stifle discussion that is attempting to exist, but I don’t think it is entirely up to media to create the discussion. I want to see the U.S. Congress hold hearings, public hearings, that invite people to comment, and I would like to see those on television. I would like to see some in-depth reporting on, for example, the oil interests in the Middle East and Middle Asia and the necessity of a stable Afghanistan so we can run a pipeline through the country. I would like some discussion of what that might mean. I would like us to talk about the fact that we are not going to even discuss conserving energy. We’re only going to discuss making the world safe for U.S. oil consumption.

Bruce Campbell: There was a letter to the editor in the regional Gannett newspaper here in Westchester County about an editorial cartoon that had run, and of course the author chose his words very, very carefully, but what he wanted everyone to consider was whether or not the cartoon was "treasonous." I’ve heard that word bantered around by the media more in the last couple of weeks than I think I’ve heard in my life. I mean, what is treason? Truthfully, what is it?

Judith McDaniel: In the context of today it’s criticizing your country.

Bruce Campbell: As opposed to the real definition, which is fighting on the side of the enemy?

Judith McDaniel: That leap has been made. Criticizing your country is seen as giving aid and support to the enemy.

Bruce Campbell: There was a phrase that was used on your website: "patriotic peacenik," I believe it said. What should be the role right now of a patriotic peacenik? Especially maybe one that doesn’t live in Washington, D.C., or have the media savvy to participate in what it would take to get congressional hearings going? What could someone out there do who felt the stirrings of an alternative voice?

Judith McDaniel: We should be asking questions. We should be informing ourselves and trying to educate ourselves. There are some enormous questions to be asked and you don’t have to be a pacifist to be asking those questions. When I look at the kinds of things that are happening around the country, with layoffs, with the destabilization – the Bush administration wants to spend umpteen billion dollars on a space shield – I want to know why we can’t use that money to educate our children, to provide health care, to provide the kind of real security that Americans need. Those are the questions we can be asking. What does security look like if you are someone who’s exposed to anthrax and you don’t have health care insurance?

The thing that heartens me is that when individual people – never mind the government, never mind the media – when individuals start talking to one another, we have hope of reclaiming ourselves as humans.

Bruce Campbell: Have you had any indication that there’s more grassroots interest in alternatives than is getting coverage right now?

Judith McDaniel: Absolutely. And part of this is how you define peace and security. When we think about the peace movement, we think about people marching in the streets, we think about the ban-the-bomb movement, the vigils, the pacifists. But the peace movement is redefining itself. I just got back from 10 days in Europe and it’s real clear to me that European peace groups are going through the same kind of discussions: "What is happening to us as a result of U.S. hegemony, U.S. power, the fact that there is only one way to be – and there’s only one army, there’s only one perspective, and it’s the U.S. perspective?" In Europe, some of the young people are questioning not globalization per se, but the ways in which globalization is taking away workers’ rights, or overrunning environmental safety, etc. In the U.S., we’re trying to open up that discussion about the peace movement, so that if you happen to be working with immigrants in the U.S., immigrants’ rights becomes part of the peace movement, because those rights are the things that are being threatened by the Patriot Act. AFSC has a huge constituency of people who work on issues around immigration, criminal justice and anti-death-penalty work, welfare and poverty issues. If we can call those constituencies part of the peace movement, and they ARE part of the peace movement, it seems to me that we are not talking about a marginalized movement.

Bruce Campbell: To leap over to the church for a minute, I have a friend who’s a seminary student at an Episcopal seminary. She was in her midday chapel between classes in the days after the attack, and she prayed out loud for Osama bin Laden as an exercise of what she understood to be the gospel imperative to pray for one’s enemies. Apparently that action completely disrupted her noon worship service. She was shocked by that at a seminary. Why is it, do you think, that the organized church feels that the default response is military action? I mean, even Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal Church came out in an open letter to the church saying that of course we must pursue military action now.

Judith McDaniel: Well, I’ll just jump right off the end of the dock here. I think the default position of the church for many, many years has been conservative and unchristian. I think that we are terrified of actually being Christian, of following the leadings of the New Testament, and it’s why the Christian church refers to "just wars" as though that were not something that became impossible to imagine or even define by the end of the First World War. No one who ever originated the concept of a just war would recognize it today. I think that the kind of risk-taking that is required by attention to the Gospel is not being taken.

Bruce Campbell: When you were asked point blank on the radio about what would be your alternative, what did you say?

Judith McDaniel: I said that we are working against the root causes of terrorism when we do the kind of long-term justice work that we do in this organization.

Bruce Campbell: The Episcopal Bishop of California, William Swing, has said that "what’s happened in Kosovo is the result of 600 years of hatred across religious and cultural/ethnic lines. You only get rid of it by 600 more years of dealing with the hearts of the people on the ground" (see TW 12/01). Is that the right equation?

Judith McDaniel: I don’t think so. We were asked, regarding Kosovo, in effect, "What would YOU do? Do you want this evil thing to continue, or do you want us to bomb them?" We said that, in Kosovo, we knew for five years this was going to happen. We had a number of points along the way where we could have done something differently as a religious community, as a peace community, as the United Nations. If instead of dragging the United Nations peacekeeping force out of Kosovo because they were attacked, we had put 5,000 more people in there, none of that would have happened. So it’s not about the 600 years of creation of conflict; it’s about the four or five years of the descent into the violence. We do have a project that began out of the Quaker United Nations office in New York and Geneva, which is nonviolent conflict resolution, and it is exactly about how do we intervene at that point when you can still intervene (see www.afsc.org/quno/PBDprevent.hetm).

Regarding September 11th, we know many families of people who were victims who do not want violence to be the response to the loss of their loved ones. Those people are starting to speak out, and I think we’re going to find that really interesting. Voices in the Wilderness, an organization that has taken delegations to Iraq to let people see firsthand what sanctions have done to Iraqi children, did a walk from Washington to New York in November with some of the family members who wanted to make statements against the violence.

Bruce Campbell: Are you aware whether the families that have done this were people who were already, let’s say, patriotic peaceniks before all this happened?

Judith McDaniel: No, some of them were in the military.

Bruce Campbell: No kidding!

Judith McDaniel: The families of stock brokers in the case of the World Trade Center, and the families of kitchen workers. In the case of the Pentagon, the people were military and they were government. It’s not where I would have expected those voices to come from.

Bruce Campbell: I should think that those people would be very attractive to media outlets to talk to.

Judith McDaniel: I think they’re a little afraid of them. Some of them have been putting an occasional letter or op-ed piece in the papers. But the responses to them have been, in some ways, really negative. It’s very brave of the people to speak out at all. l

Bruce Campbell is a media editor for The Witness. He lives in Tarrytown, N.Y. This interview can be found in Spanish at <www.thewitness.org/agw/espanol.html>.