Statement at Public Meeting of Biblioteca Pública,
August 31, 2006
on behalf of Center for Global Justice

The regular August 25 Global Justice column by Mike Rivage-Seul titled “Report from Palestine” has sparked intense controversy.  While Center leaders exercise control of the column, it is open to all members of the Center to discuss issues important to the Center’s work and of general interest to our community.  We want to underline what should already be clear:  that the views expressed in the column are those of the authors, in this case a valued participant in the life of the Center.  The Center for Global Justice takes no position as an organization on the issues raised by Mike and would welcome reasoned articles from opposing points of view. Through this column we seek to promote thought and debate and above all resolution of problems in building a new, just world.  

Since the inception of the Global Justice column over a year ago, we have written 18 columns, published every third week on topics ranging from cooperatives, migration, and water issues to Latin America’s solidarity economy and hurricane Katrina.  None have brought any criticism, but rather have been widely praised as valued contributions to public discussion in our community.  The same can be said of the many talks and film discussions we have held, often on very controversial topics –- a total of 50 in the last eight months alone.  We are proud of having made this contribution to the civic life of this community.  And it makes us doubly sad that the present column has so deeply offended some people.  To them I want to say personally, I am sorry, profoundly sorry to have opened this rift in the community, with many whom I call my friends, and to have brought such criticism down upon the leadership of the Biblioteca and Atención.

Regarding the recent armed conflict in the mid-East, we are in full sympathy both with the Jewish mothers huddled in shelters in Haifa and with the Arab mothers huddled in the suburbs of Beirut.  In working at the Center our aim is world peace through global justice, it is not to set people against people but to bring them into dialogue.  To honor all victims of such unwarranted conflicts we seek to create spaces in which enemies in battle can become adversaries in debate, honestly working out a better understanding by all sides. Because this is our overriding aim in pursuit of global justice, we regret the tone of Mike’s piece, which has been understood as demonizing  -- an interpretation we know was far from his intention, and certainly from ours. 

We regret the needlessly provocative tone of Mike’s article  --  which we should have caught and called Mike on.  We submitted it to Atención because it represents a fairly standard statement of the Palestinian position.  Readers of the Israeli press recognize it as such.  As a position that is widely-held in the Middle East we judged that it needed to be heard in the Center’s ongoing dialogue on global justice.  The Center believes Atención’s readers deserve a share in the dialogue over this pursuit. We believe viewpoints critical of the standard one in the mainstream media need to be heard. The article was first given as a talk at the UU where it caused some controversy but was taken in stride.  Based on that reception we thought the piece could be taken as intended:  one side of a debate that would elicit another side.  We still hope for that.  And in that spirit Ben-Zion Ptashnik, a well- informed Israeli whom we are lucky to have as a San Miguel neighbor, has offered to write an article refuting Mike’s article.

But, the Center’s column has been suspended for the moment by the editor of Atención with the backing of the Biblioteca leadership.  We have been asked to accept this situation in the interest of having a cooling off period.  We agree that passions have been aroused to the point that serious debate is very difficult. So we have accepted this suspension as an act of faith in the new, transparency with which the Biblioteca is being operated. 

Unfortunately we also understand that there is discussion in the editorial committee of Atención and in the Biblioteca leadership of not just suspending but terminating the Center’s column.  This proposal is being discussed alongside of others involving setting guidelines that limit contents of Atencion articles and columns, and narrowing the paper’s scope so as to exclude future articles taking sides on international politics. Either policy would be a lamentable retreat from faith in free speech. We strongly oppose these proposals when more rather than less free speech is needed, from all quarters (including little San Miguel) if the imaginative solutions needed to intractable problems of our world are to find solutions.  At the very least, since they are of such central importance to the civic life of our community, we hope that before any new guidelines for writers, mission statement, or definition of the scope of Atención go into effect, the proposals made by the Biblioteca leadership be subject to public examination and discussion, with reformulation, editing, and amendment as real possibilities, followed by a vote of the Biblioteca membership by which the leadership will be bound.

We would like to express our strong support for Suzanne Ludekens and for her judgment as a newsperson and editor.  By opening the pages of Atención to a variety of points of view, even sometimes unpopular ones, she has made this paper a lively and interesting venue for discussion and thought –an important contribution to this unique community of San Miguel.  This is a very cosmopolitan town and deserves the kind of newspaper Atención has become.

We have learned from this experience and will alter our procedures when our column is restored.  We will collectively review articles more carefully, taking into account the sensitivities of readers.   We stand ready to work with Atención’s editor in assuring that our writings will stimulate thought and reasoned debate rather than divisiveness.  

We acknowledge we have made mistakes.  As human beings we expect we will make more in the years ahead.  We count on our members, readers and neighbors to let us know when we fail.  We believe such correction, inherent in free speech as such, is the way to solve this problem, not to censor or limit speech in advance. We persist in believing that persons of good will, able to listen to each other and hear new perspectives on issues considered settled, can in the long run find solutions even to seemingly intractable problems like this conflict.  We will not be dissuaded from that faith.  The imposition of guidelines and restrictions on the content of speech results not in harmony  --  which requires two or more different voices  --  but in monotony.  San Miguel deserves better.