Video: Sami Awad on The Power of Nonviolence
Today we'd like to share a video interview with one of our favorite peaceworkers, Sami Awad, as he describes how nonviolence empowers people to deal with injustice and oppression and breaks down the barriers that prevent people from relating to one other. Sami is the founder and Executive Director of Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian non-profit organization established in 1988 to promote nonviolent resistance and work toward peace in the Holy Land.
The argument for nonviolence needs to come from people who know what violence actually costs, not just from scholars who've read about it. Veterans need to be the primary voices calling the church to account. So here’s what I think the church actually owes to veterans and others, and what it looks like for the church to repent.
Discussions about war and violence often focus on immediate solutions: how to stop the bloodshed, how to negotiate a ceasefire, how to restore order. While these are necessary conversations, they often fail to address the deeper systems that enable and perpetuate violence. This is why nonviolent co-resistance does not simply seek to end war but aims to dismantle the very systems that make violence seem inevitable.
Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage is a global network of 40 + autonomous Christian groups (including Peace Catalyst) who are engaging in a peaceful and prayerful show of solidarity with the people of Gaza by walking the length of the Gaza strip in cities around the world during Lent. As peace catalysts, we’re helping to organize a few walks around the United States. So far, we have one scheduled in the Twin Cities on March 23rd and one in San Diego on March 30th.
If you’re excited about learning Nonviolent Communication in a way that can support your desire to address larger systemic inequities in addition to supporting personal change, join us for this new eight-week training course!
Hate groups will continue to poison hearts, stir up violence, and polarize people in 2018. So to gear up for these challenges I began re-reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s Strength to Love. Peacemaking is not for the faint of heart. It demands an uncompromising rejection of the unloving ways of the world and a radical embrace of the enemy-loving way of Jesus.
Don’t believe all the negative press about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Seeds of peace are being sown by both Israelis and Palestinians in this entrenched conflict.
Peaceworker Sami Awad describes how nonviolence empowers people to deal with injustice and oppression, and breaks down the barriers that prevent people from relating to each other. Sami is the founder and Executive Director of Holy Land Trust, a Palestininan non-profit organization established to promote nonviolent resistence and work toward peace in the Holy Land.
I lectured at the Bethlehem Bible College for several years, and for my youth ministry courses, I required students to make several visits to the YMCA Rehabilitation Center in Beit Sahour, where they spent time with Muslim young men who had been shot or tortured by the Israeli military.
What do the recent events in Egypt and Black History Month have in common? Other than both being the theme of our last Peace Feast, the main commonality, I believe, is the use of cultural power over political power.
Are you fed up with hate speech, inflammatory rhetoric, and uncivil discourse in politics and social media? We in Peace Catalyst International are… so we are beginning the Waging Peace Campaign!