| September/October 2000 Racism Fuels the Iraqi Sanctions An Interview with James Lawson
Anthony Arnove talks with James Lawson during the F.O.R. delegation's visit to Iraq, March 2000. Arnove: Could you describe the reception you received during your visit in Iraq? Lawson: I imagine that if Iraq were bombing a part of the United States for ten years and imposing sanctions on us, we Americans would be filled with rage and might not be able to tolerate the sight of an Iraqi. But in Iraq we found again and again just extraordinary hospitality. In Basra, we went into the home of a woman who had lost her small boy in a bombing raid in January, 1999. She and her husband invited us into their home, offered us tea, and told us that we were "most welcome, very welcome." And then Iqbal Ferdous, who now calls herself Umm Haydar ("mother of Haydar"), told us the story of the death of her son Haydar in a bombing of her street by an American plane. Her five-year-old son Mustafa was severely wounded. He was there, with shrapnel in his body, pieces of the missile under his skin that still need to be removed. On our way to Ur, a tall, very handsome young man spotted that we were Americans, and said out loud in English, "I hate America." We showed him our brief statement in Arabic about why we were in Iraq and that we were opposed to the sanctions. He said several times, "You are most welcome." We introduced ourselves to him; it turned out he was a college student and spoke English well. Over and over again, wherever we went, we found that kind of reception. I'm very, very touched by it myself, because, after all, my tax dollars are wreaking havoc on that gracious country and these people do not deserve the treatment our government is giving them. Arnove: You visited schools during your trip. Could you describe some of the conditions you saw and the conversations you had with educators? Lawson: With the sanctions in place, which for years have kept Iraq from being able to pump and sell its oil freely, the country's gross national product has been reduced by ninety percent. At one secondary school we went to, the students did not have pencils or textbooks or tablets to write on. I visited a chemistry class. There was no book in the classroom, no laboratory of any kind, and the youngsters had no pencils, so the teacher obviously had to teach entirely by getting everyone to memorize his lecture. Appalling. The principal, who apparently was a very creative man, was telling us of the needs in the school itself. There was a need for repairs and there was no money for them, and this is in a country that has made the eradication of illiteracy, and education for everyone, a priority for many years.
I was especially moved in an elementary school where we gathered in the principal's office and teachers (who were all women at this school) literally filled all the doorways and the window. As the principal was talking with us, they were making all sorts of comments. It was clear they were people who loved their work, women who had much to say and who were teachers because they loved the children. The teachers received us and greeted us. And one, in fact, did say, "We have no ill will toward the American people. We feel that it is the American government that is doing this to us." But I have to say that this is a democracy, and we the people of America ought to have enough insight and courage that we not permit our government to do such criminal acts against people anywhere in the world, at home or abroad, when they use our money for it and our technology. Arnove: Your work with Dr. Martin Luther King focused not only on domestic issues of civil rights but also on questions of militarism and imperialism raised by the Vietnam war and Dr. King's courageous opposition to that war. Can you talk about how those views shape your analysis of what's happening in Iraq today? Lawson: In the struggle for desegregation of the country and for what we called justice and freedom in the 1950s and early 1960s, it became very clear that the problems we were fighting were more than simply issues of color prejudice; that racism and segregation had held in the United States for 400 years because there was an interlocking of racism and economic injustice; and that this was also related to the violence that was used - the lynching, the general police harassment, the enmity of the FBI toward our whole movement. So it seemed to me completely necessary that we combine nonviolent analyses of our policies abroad and domestically. I became very much persuaded that our wars in Southeast Asia, in Angola, and Mozambique; our hostility toward the African National Congress in South Africa; and our opposition to every self-determination movement anywhere in the world was, in fact, a racist opposition, rooted in a need for domination and control. Arnove: How would you explain why the United States has an interest in maintaining these sanctions and why do you think it continues to impose these conditions on Iraq? Lawson: The United States directed so much of its energy during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism. It was clear, however, to many of us that this anti-Communist stance was actually a way of resisting any effort to change the status quo of racism and segregation, especially in the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, major figures in American politics today such as Trent Lott and Jesse Helms were calling us in the movement "Communists" and "dupes of Moscow." That clearly marked to me the fact that anti-Communism was really another form of racism. Iraq is yet another chapter in that story. It's a complicated affair, because Iraq was our ally and we armed them and trained their military for any number of years; and then we supported Iraq in the war against Iran. Now we've turned on them. With this trip to Iraq, I am now persuaded that Iraq represents another situation like Nicaragua, in the sense that Iraq had its oil nationalized and had perhaps the best standard of living in the Middle East, with many facets of equality for women, universal education, and a modern health care system built with the oil money. I have the feeling that here again certain powers-that-be in the United States want to crush Iraq and prevent it from becoming a model of a modern state using a different kind of economy from ours. The US government's globalization effort wants all of these countries to imitate us by their government not taking responsibility for the quality of life of all its people, and therefore allowing wealth to be concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations and people. Arnove: The delegation you were just on was interfaith. Can you comment on the significance of that for you personally? Lawson: Increasingly, it seems to me, religion needs to cut across creeds and especially to cut across belief systems, to put the emphasis upon a faith that tries to be hospitable to the neighbor and to create a community where opportunity and justice become norms for all people. So I've worked on an interfaith basis in Los Angeles for a number of years with Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Jews on the issue of peace. The US holds people of all the major groups that trace their origin to Abraham and to Iraq - Catholic and Protestant, Jewish and Muslim - who want peace and justice in the Middle East and want the sanctions to end. Iraqis need to know, I think, that the behavior of our State Department and Pentagon do not represent the will or the mind of the compassionate people and the religions of the United States. Arnove: One of the issues you've been very active on in the past few years has been gay rights. Can you talk about what's motivated you to be part of that struggle? Lawson: As a pastor, I have for over thirty-five years had people who were gay and lesbian in my congregation, and I've baptized them. I've counseled them and helped them as my friends, and they've counted me as their friend.
The religious Right recognized at the end of the 1960s that it could not continue to bash black people openly, as it had been doing. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell all used the Bible to insist that segregation was God's way, that black people were inferior and immoral, and that black people had all the civil rights they needed. Go back and examine their language in the 1960s, and you'll see that. Then they began bashing gays and lesbians. Gay people are "immoral" and "oversexed." They said that about black people 300 years ago. A whole litany of similarities could be discovered. So I've resisted that, dismayed that hostility toward gays and lesbians is pouring out of the churches, which ostensibly are supposed to be teaching and preaching about the love of God for all of humankind. Whenever there has been an opportunity in Los Angeles for me to speak up, I have done so. Arnove: Can you discuss what motivated you to go on this trip to Iraq? You're retired, you probably have many demands at home. Why did you think this was important? Lawson: I had been reading about the Iraq crisis and talking about it in my lecturing. I have long connected the sanctions against the Iraqi people with my discussions on nonviolence, on Dr. King, and on justice struggles in the United States. So I decided that a first-hand view of the situation would be an important way to enlarge my understanding. And I am glad that I came, because I have felt very moved by the experience and recommitted to the work of peace and justice. I see the Iraq situation as maybe the key piece of that right now. But I should add one other word, and that is this: on April 4, 1967, Martin King said that if we could not create a spiritual or moral revolution in the United States, a revolution of values, a revolution of spirit, a revolution of priorities, which was the theme in the movement of the 1960s, then he said that fifty years from now, we'll be picketing over South Africa, we'll be marching on Central America, and so on. And that is my pitch to the peace movement and the people of good will in the United States. We have been antiwar for fifty years or more. We haven't changed the policy. Now how long are we going to continue to march? I've been engaged on the picket line on these issues, including Central America in the 1980s and protests against our treatment of the movement for freedom in South Africa. We've been doing that for fifty years, yet this policy continues. There's an urgent need for the FOR, the American Friends Service Committee, the peace churches, all the various people in the country who are concerned about Iraq, to come together and concentrate on how we get this policy changed.
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