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12/02/2003 Entry: "Religious leaders encourage Bush in Middle East peace efforts"

From the United Methodist News Service:

WASHINGTON - As Bishop Sharon Zimmerman Rader rode in a taxi from Reagan National Airport to the heart of the nation's capital, she heard a story on the radio that was all too familiar.

A 9-year-old child was killed in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

"There should be no more of this killing," she said.

That message was at the heart of a press conference Dec. 2, where 32 prominent interfaith leaders gathered at the National Press Club to encourage President Bush to continue his efforts at building peace in the Middle East.

Rader, bishop of the United Methodist Church's Wisconsin Area and secretary of the denomination's Council of Bishops, attended the meeting as a representative of the council.

"The significant thing about this group is that it involves Jews and Muslims and Christians together," Rader said after the press conference. "It involves not only Protestant Christians but Roman Catholic Christians, evangelical Christians as well as mainline, and that's very significant."

The delegation urged Bush to immediately reactivate the call in his "road map to peace" for ending all violence between Israelis and Palestinians and to work to achieve a ceasefire agreement between the two sides.

In a document titled "Twelve Urgent Steps for Peace," the delegation also called for the return of the special presidential envoy to the region, a determination of specific steps that the two sides could take simultaneously towards peace, and benchmark principles for mutually acceptable solutions.

"The first and foremost step is to encourage the president to take up once again the initiative that he established in the road map to peace," Rader said, "and to begin to move that forward - most specifically, to call for an end to the violence there."

The delegation is seeking to meet with Bush, and it sent a letter Nov. 25 to the White House. According to Bishop Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the delegation has yet to meet with the president, but the members remain hopeful.

"We have a commonality with Bush on this issue," Hanson said. "We're with him on this issue."

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, told reporters the delegation is pushing process more than a particular program of any administration.

"We rejoice in all the programs for peace," he said. "But the world is saying, 'Let us begin the process of peace.'"

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder of the American Sufi Muslim Association, an organization that seeks to build bridges between Muslim Americans and society, admitted that getting together this many religious leaders - and their firmly held beliefs - wasn't easy.

"We've come to affirm the value of dialogue," he said. "We believe that 100 more years of suicide bombings will never drive Israel into the sea. Most Muslims believe that the path to peace runs through Washington. We affirm also that Islamic teachings support our efforts for peace."

Rabbi Paul Menitoff, executive vice president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, said the delegation represented an effort to mobilize moderate voices for peace. "We ask, on the backs of how many more dead Israelis and Palestinians will peace by achieved?"

Rader and several other speakers were strong in their encouragement to the president: the United States must take leadership on this issue and do all it can to achieve peace.

"We must move this nation into taking leadership in response to what's going on in the Middle East," Rader said.

"The United Methodist position is clear," she said. "One of the things we say is that war is incompatible with the Christian faith. We have spoken out clearly in our resolutions about our care for Palestinians to find security where they live; we want security for the Israelis as well as the Palestinians, and the violence must stop."