Letters - 10 April 2026
From political language to peaceful schools
Political language
I have just received the 27 March edition of the Friend, in which there is the most curious letter from Paul Davies. He claims that the politics of ‘the far left’ (whatever that may be) have ‘infiltrated Quaker thought and practice’. Furthermore, he says that is ‘certainly true of the peace movement where Stop the War and CND are led by the revolutionary left’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I have been an active member of CND for over forty years and I have never thought that campaigning against weapons of mass destruction was anything but good sense. CND has not been taken over by something Paul calls the ‘hard left’. It is a democratically run body which campaigns as it has always done, against militarism, weapons and war. Paul himself uses odd political language, such as ‘infiltrated’. Many of my Quaker Friends are active in both CND and the Stop the War Coalition and I don’t think we have been infiltrated.
Rae Street
Unlike Paul Davies, I was pleased with the caption ‘If Palestine Action were terrorists then so is Jesus’ on the 27 February cover.
I had already come to believe that Jesus was a subversive disruptor; that was surely at least part of his mission. Nobody said that Jesus was supporting Palestine, but he was unsettling the establishment and powers of the time in what is now Israel – the pharisees, chief priests and scribes, king Herod and the Roman empire represented by Pilate (Luke 11:37ff, 20 and 23), all of whom were presumably satisfied that Jesus should be tortured to death.
We might assume that Jesus also believed that swords should be beaten into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4), the inspiration for many nonviolent direct actions against the suppliers of weapons likely to be used indiscriminately and in a genocidal manner.
Dilys Candler
