The Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice (ICPJ) is a non-profit education/social action organization which brings together people of various faiths who believe the world is one family. ICPJ believes that love, commitment to future generations, wise stewardship of the environment and promotion of social, political, and economic justice are religious responsibilities.
ICPJ empowers people of faith and people of conscience in the Washtenaw County/Ann Arbor, Michigan area to act on their moral and religious values to build a better world.
History of the conflict in Iraq
September 11, 2001 marked a huge turning point in the United States in terms of security and foreign policy, and led to an extraordinary surge in nationalism around the country. However, it has come to light that the response to that momentous moment in history, the 2003 Iraq War, has led to devastating consequences especially regarding women’s lives and rights.
United States President Bush began formally making his case to the international community for the invasion of Iraq in September 2002. The majority of the international community was against the invasion, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”[1] The following month, October 2002, the U.S. Congress authorized the President to “use any means necessary” in Iraq. The U.S. public, however, widely favored further diplomatic action over an invasion in a poll in January 2003; thus, the Bush administration engaged in an elaborate domestic public relations campaign, playing on the fear caused by the September 11 terrorist attacks, to market the invasion of Iraq to U.S. citizens, and by the end of 2003, the majority of Americans supported the invasion. The rest, so to speak, is history.
But for Iraqi citizens, especially women, the ongoing violence caused by the U.S. invasion is not the only consequence that has become part of the everyday struggle to rebuild their country. Before the U.S. invasion, 75% of Iraqi women had college degrees, and 31% of Iraqi women had graduate degrees (compared to 35% of European and U.S. women). Only 10% of women in Iraq now continue to work in their professions, and they have to contend with the thousands of more experience and better-educated Iraqi women who fled Iraq at the onset of the war and are now returning. However most women stay away from their work, schools, and universities due to extreme safety concerns: Since the beginning of the war, rates of abductions and kidnappings targeting women and girls, most often related to sex trafficking, female suicides and honor killings have increased.
Continue Reading »
Each day we make choices about what we are going to eat. Sometimes those choices are made deliberately with care and thought, a special meal prepared for friends and family, but more often we unreflectively choose the food at the end of our forks.
Americans eat 31% more processed foods than fresh, whole foods. These processed foods, loaded with high levels of salt and sugar, not only harm our physical health but their production also brings the added environmental cost of excess packaging and processing. Even the fresh food we do eat is produced by an industrial agricultural system that relies heavily on petro-chemicals and deadly pesticides. This reliance on fossil fuels in fertilizers and pesticides ultimately strips the soil of its fertility and ability to hold carbon.
According to the USDA, Americans consumed 26.4 billion pounds of beef in 2010. We are eating meat at twice the global average and we are consuming over three times the amount of protein needed for our health, the majority of it from animal sources. Our insatiable appetite for meat is raising our risk for heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. And the way we raise animals to feed that appetite is taking a huge toll on our environment with deforestation, increase emissions of climate-change gasses, and pollution from animal manure.
Over one billion people face food insecurity. Big agricultural companies and wealthy nations exacerbate the problem of hunger through land grabs, commodity speculation, and bad governmental policy. Our excessive use of fossil fuels affects the climate causing longer droughts and more severe flooding. Farm workers who bring us our food face exposure to unhealthy pesticides as well as abuse and harassment. It is the poor and most vulnerable who suffer the most.
The way we produce our food is making us sick; it is making our communities sick and it is making our world sick. We need to change.
We need to begin eating for a healthy world.
The Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice is launching Eating for a Healthy World to encourage people of faith and people of conscience and their congregations and groups to put their faith and beliefs into action by making healthy food choices that will reduce the effects of climate change, protect the environment, and provide access to healthy, sustainable food to everyone especially the poor and vulnerable. Learn more on our Eating for a Healthy World page.
Join us as we investigate the ways that our economic system could be the root cause of war, poverty, and environmental destruction, by using film as a medium for exploration and discussion.
AbUSed presents the devastating effects of US Enforcement Immigration Policies on communities, families and children. The film tells the gripping personal stories of the individuals, the families and the town that survived the most brutal, most expensive and largest immigration raid in the history of the United States.
Thursday, April 26th 6:30pm refreshments, 6:45pm film followed by discussion The Wesley Foundation Lounge (First United Methodist Church, 120 S. State St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104)
Open to the public.
Details: gracek@icpj.net, 734-663-1870.
Sponsored by ICPJ’s Latin America Task Force. Co-sponsored by the Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Social Action Committee of Beth Israel Congregation, St. Mary Student Parish, and the Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Group (LACEG) at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment.
Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the fight for workers in Madison, Wisconsin, the 99% will rise up this spring.
In the span of just one week, from April 9-15, 100,000 people will be trained across the country.
Join ICPJ and WCAT for direct action training and learn how to tell the story of what happened to our economy, learn the history of non-violent direct action, and use that knowledge to take action on our own campaigns to win change.
When: Saturday, April 14th from 11:00 AM-6:00 PM
Where: Northside Presbyterian/St. Aidan’s Episcopal Churches (1679 Broadway St., Ann Arbor)
Click HERE to sign up today!!
History of the conflict in the Solomon Islands
Following an Anglo-German Treaty of 1886, a German Protectorate was established over the northern Solomon Islands, followed shortly thereafter by the establishment of a British Protectorate over the southern Islands in 1893. In typical colonial fashion, the German Protectorate was transferred to the United Kingdom in exchange for Western Samoa in 1899. Beginning in January 1942, Japanese forces occupied the Solomon Islands; in August 1942, the United States led a counter-attack against the Japanese, and fighting ensued on the islands for almost three years. The destruction caused by the intense fighting, as well as the long-term consequences of the introduction of modern materials, machinery, and western cultural artifacts, transformed the Islands and traditional ways of life. Due to the massive destruction of pre-war plantations (formerly the mainstay of the Islands’ economy) and the absence of war reparations, reconstruction was slow, and stability within the Islands was not restored until the 1950s when the British colonial administration built a network of official local councils.
The first national election was held in 1964 for one seat on the newly established Legislative Council, and by 1967, the first general election was held for all but one of the 15 representative seats on the Council. A new constitution was introduced during the elections of 1970, replacing the Legislative and Executive Councils with a single Governing Council, and established a “committee system of government” with the aim of reducing divisions between elected representatives and the colonial bureaucracy and providing opportunities for training new representatives in managing the responsibilities of government. However, many elected members of the Council opposed the new constitution and so a new constitution was introduced in 1974 which established a form of government more closely related to that of Great Britain, a “standard Westminster” form of government.
With the first oil price shock of 1973, the financial costs of supporting the Solomon Islands became too large to bear for the British, however despite the imminent independence of Papua New Guinea (which achieved independence in 1975), there was little in the way of an indigenous independence movement in the Islands outside of a small group of educated elite. Nonetheless, the Solomon Islands became self-governing in early 1976 and fully independent in July 1978.
The ceasefire agreement ending the 1991 Gulf War (during the administration of the first President Bush) mandated that Iraqi chemical, biological, nuclear, and long range missile programs be halted, and that all such weapons be destroyed under the control of the UN Special Commission. While the UN weapons inspectors were able to verify the destruction of a large amount of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) material, the inspectors left in 1998 prior to a four-day bombing campaign in Iraq led by the US and the UK. US President Bill Clinton and the US Congress called for regime change in Iraq during this period.
On 17 December 1999, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1284, creating the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). UNMOVIC replaced the former UN Special Commission but continued the latter’s mandate to destroy Iraq’s WMDs and to check Iraq’s compliance with its obligations not to reacquire the same weapons.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein allowed UN inspectors to return to Iraq in November 2002, at which point UNMOVIC inspected alleged chemical and biological facilities, but found no WMDs. Continue Reading »
Next »
Join our weekly email announcement list on important peace events, interfaith perspectives on justice, and action alerts to build a better world.
