The Way Through Walls Without Explosives

Roots shatter concrete through their persistent striving, vital force. Even small, determined flowers may find a way to rise from pavements’ desert of stone. Will you, surrounded by walls on every side, be and become a conscious light coming to fruition on the other side?

God knows best what the wall builders of our cities have in mind for the grassroots. Gentrification as usual and people priced out of their homes. Foreclosures increasing. High rises rising on foundations of sand and shifting business alliances. Fault lines everywhere. Everything is constantly changing. We must move ahead not blindly but riding the earthquake with agility and awareness.

As the fifteenth of Shaban arrives, we learn that Alberto Gonzalez has stepped down. We may give thanks and pray in our fasting and reflection that the next Attorney General is very different and actually respects human rights. Let us be skeptical that will happen but be open to the possibility!

Insha’Allah some day soon Mr. Gonzalez will be in jail along with recently departed Karl Rove, and most of the current administration. But like the despots of Muslim nations that settle for sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, they will probably be allowed a comfortable exile, where they will hope that former Mayor Guiliani gets elected and brings them back to power. They will then try to active their own grassroots—or at least the astro-turf of well-paid lobbying firms.

Private arms of the current neo-conservative ruling class are becoming desperate. To try to create resistance to “multicultural” acceptance of Arabs as well as Muslims, well-paid provocateurs have been bugging the meetings of our coalition to Save the Khalil Gibran School in Brooklyn, New York—they have posted their tapes on their website. Even Nixon’s folks never did that.

Within the rising walls around us, the “War on Terror” has a widening network of whispering underground and overhead. The current “anti-Terror” database contains over 235,000 entries now. Moreover, according to a notice in the Federal Register last week the government said private-sector entities with a "substantial bearing on homeland security" could also gain access to the data, which is kept for 99 years. It is not clear if that would include Daniel Pipes’ affiliated groups or not.

Such private vigilante groups have also been going after interfaith partners and colleagues including sympathetic Rabbis. Moreover, Islamophobe David Horowitz plans a week of anti-Muslim “terror awareness” programs on campuses around the nation at the end of Ramadan. These are also designed to attack the idea of Global warming and other issues the corporate backers of the Christian Right would rather not hear about.

What is clear is that the Right is desperate and will use national security as an issue from now until Election Day 2008. They will continue to try to scare the average citizen. Will Americans finally get tired of fear for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

Of course, there are many reasons for concern, at home and abroad. A pair of synchronized explosions tore through a restaurant and a open air auditorium in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad on Saturday evening, killing at least 30 people and wounding 60 others. Violence echoes from wall to wall.

Another concern: a United Nations report due this week will announce that Afghanistan is now producing nearly 95 percent of the world's opium, up from 92 percent in 2006. This marks the sixth straight year of rises since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001. At the same time, a new 'super-weapon' being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the "thermobaric" principle using heat and pressure to kill people across a wide area by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs. So it the drugs don’t kill you…. Nice British soldiers will.

In their own ways, the Taliban and the allied Occupation would each like to minimize violence through control, but there is so much corruption and so little useful investment. What is the 20-year economic plan and how are Muslim nations helping? Is there no public discussion of this in Muslim-Land? Is that some vast murmuring, or is it just the sound of a billion heads turning to look the other way?

US tax money continues to flow to the usual suspects. Overseas, 30 billion is proposed to assist Israel while 20 billion is proposed for Saudi Arabia. This is political pork for Muslims and Jews. And at home, pork is produced for local consumption: since the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the number of local earmarks jumped from 4,155 valued at about $29 billion in 1994 to 14,211 worth nearly $53 billion 10 years later, according to the Congressional Research Service."

How about our halal dollars, what will happen this Ramadan? Since 9/11, over six charity groups have been shut down, accused of providing aid to groups and individuals included on the U.S. terror list. Often the closure is just before Ramadan. However it may be that the current trial of Holy land Foundation will send sufficient political message this year. It may be that a fast food diet of entrapment cases will keep the public sufficiently paranoid of “Islamic Terror.” And yet, Muslims must give.

These highly wired Walls of Fear should be seen as a political liability like Rove and Gonzalez. That perception might actually lead to some change. And as we share our positive insights with others, our faith can see us through these walls. Faith is not rational or reactive. Nor need it be blind. We sense the sunlight on the other side of the concrete; we smell our mother’s cooking. We are called. God is where freedom is, as we move from isolation to connection to greater being.

The earthquake is the way concrete opens all around us. We cannot do it from ourselves in a violent angry way. It is finally an earthquake of Love that we need, here in the world-- dear reader, determined flower pushing through into the light.