February Agape

Pax Christi Victoria Inc., International Christian Peace Movement

You are invited to the First Agape of 2011

Youth: Towards a Global Culture?

Dahlia Khatab & Rashid Alshakshir

are two LaTrobe students who have taken part in the Young Muslims leadership Programme of the Centre for Dialogue.

Pax Christi sponsored them to attend the Fourth Inter-Civilizational Youth Engagement Program 2010 Consultation in Kuala Lumpur on

"Youth: Towards a Global Culture?"

The purpose of the consultation was:

* To develop a deeper understanding of global challenges and how the young can help in their resolution and
* To identify and examine universal spiritual and moral values that can contribute towards justice, peace and harmony among the different communities and nations of the planet

Larry Marshall, the Director of the Young Muslim Leadership programme, will facilitate a dialogue with Dahlia and Rashid in which they will report on the consultation and invite us to dialogue with them on the issues.

Sunday 20 February 2011

at St John’s Uniting Church, cnr Glenhuntly Rd and Foster St. Elsternwick, Melways 67 J3, Elsternwick Station (Sandringham line,) Tram 67

Please note change of Venue

12.30 for 1 p.m.

We will begin after a SHARED MEAL and finish around 3.30 p.m.

Please BRING SOME FOOD TO SHARE
(If food needs to be heated please arrive by 12.30)

ALL WELCOME

Observations on events in Egypt

by Joseph Camilleri

There is one aspect to recent events in the Arab world, which has not drawn the attention it deserves. What we have witnessed first in Tunisia, and now more dramatically in Egypt, is one of the great nonviolent revolutions of the last 100 or more years. The revolution is all the more far-reaching in its implications in that it was forged entirely at the initiative of the Egyptian people with no support from and little understanding by the outside world. This was a pervasive revolution that touched and spread across the whole society and was constructed implicitly if not explicitly on the philosophy and techniques of nonviolence. I would venture to advance four additional propositions:

1. The significance of this revolution is that it was nurtured and executed by an Arab and predominantly Muslim society - a possibility which the world generally and the West in particular had until now dismissed as beyond the realm of the feasible -- the conventional wisdom has been that Arabs and Muslims were simply not equipped to envisage an alternative to, let alone directly confront, the politics of tyranny and repression.

2. The revolution has once again demonstrated the power of nonviolence. The key to this does not lie so much in the fact that a tyrant was eventually removed from office. Rather it lies in the fact that the moral integrity of the revolution was so potent that even political elites in the West and in Israel, strong supporters of the Mubarak regime for more than three decades, were reduced to little more than passive spectators. Indeed, the revolution was emotively and intellectually so powerful that in the end the President of the United States had no option but to give it his public and unreserved support. In this there are immense implications for other parts of the Arab world, not least for Palestine.

3. This revolution is not just another re-enactment of the revolutions led by Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It is innovative in ways that will take a long time to assess. But even now we can fairly say that never before has a movement of this kind made such effective use of the new information technology to foster the politics of empowerment and participation - and never before has such a symbolically effective use been made of the uninterrupted occupation of public spaces, and in particular of the city square as the preferred site for the expression of the popular will.

4. To date much western official and unofficial comment has emphasised the prospects for 'freedom' and democracy, with particular reference to free and fair elections. Yet, this is but one part of the story. The social movement that has spread across the Arab world is first and foremost a movement crying out for social justice - for an end to corruption, to abject poverty, to grotesque inequalities, to patterns of aid, trade and investment that have consistently favoured the rich and disadvantaged the poor. Should the protests of the last few weeks result in democratic elections that leave the unjust economic arrangements of the last few decades more or less intact (possibly with tacit Western support), this would indeed be a pyrrhic victory.

Also see the article by John Horgan, ‘Egypt's revolution vindicates Gene Sharp's theory of nonviolent activism’, http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=egypts-revolution-vindicates-gene-s-2011-02-11