Daily Archives: September 7, 2022

Last month, amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International, the nongovernmental organization that serves as an umbrella group for the worlds largest sect of Nichiren Buddhism, pleaded for the five nuclear weapon statesincluding Russiato commit to never being the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

In a world where divisions are as deep as they have ever been, it is crucial that all the nuclear-weapon states clearly declare that they intend to maintain the stance of self-restraint with regard to nuclear war, he said, ahead of the review conference for the states party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which concluded on August 26.

While for many the issue of nuclear abolition has faded to the background after the Cold War, members of the Soka Gakkai movement have been fighting for nuclear abolition for more than 60 yearsand say that the war between Russia and Ukraine should be a stark reminder of the imminent and existential threat nuclear weapons pose to humanity.

As Buddhists, we believe in the utmost dignity of life, that life is so precious, said Anna Ikeda, a representative for SGI at the UN. Nuclear weapons destroy life on such a broad scale in an instant, so of course we should be enraged at them.

This commitment to nuclear abolition is actually intertwined with the foundation of SGI itself, Joan Anderson, of the groups international office of public information, points out.

Soka Gakkai traces its roots to 1930s Japan, during the lead up to World War II. Its two founders, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Josei Toda, were schoolteachers who opposed Japans growing militarism and imposition of the Shinto religion, and were later imprisoned for publicly resisting it, Anderson said. Makiguchi died in prison.

Resistance to nationalism and to the war is in-built in SGI members, Anderson said.

Toda was released from prison in July 1945, one month before the United States dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed more than 200,000 people, most of them civilians, and leaving thousands of survivors, known in Japanese as hibakusha, with cancer and other health effects from the radiation. Toda then began rebuilding Soka Gakkai in the wars aftermath.

In 1957, at the height of the Cold War and months before his death, Toda delivered a declaration on the abolition of nuclear weapons, which became the foundation for Soka Gakkais work on nuclear abolition.

We, the citizens of the world, have an inviolable right to live, he said. Anyone who jeopardizes that right is a devil incarnate, a fiend, a monster. I wish to declare that anyone who ventures to use nuclear weapons, irrespective of their nationality or whether their country is victorious or defeated, should be sentenced to death without exception.

His strong language was a response to the global arms race and ballooning of nuclear stockpiles at the time, Anderson said.

I think he felt that its not the case that there are good nuclear weapons and bad nuclear weapons, that having nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States is fine, but in the hands of the Soviet Union is bad, she said. What he said was, we have to stop this kind of thinking, nuclear weapons are a threat to all life, and theres no such thing as a limited nuclear war.

After Todas declaration, Soka Gakkai started an extensive international campaign for nuclear abolition. One of the organizations first activities was interviewing hibakusha to document their experiences with nuclear war and suffering. By tasking young members with collecting these testimonies, he was able to educate a new generation about nuclear weapons, Anderson said.

Soka Gakkai also put together exhibitions about the human toll of nuclear weapons, which have been showcased around the world, and launched other public education campaigns. In 1983, Soka Gakkai International registered as a nongovernmental organization with the United Nations, where its also been pushing for abolition on a global scale.

SGI is a partner organization of the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. SGI also works on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)an agreement among the worlds five nuclear powers to prevent the spread of nuclear weaponsand the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponsan agreement among non-nuclear countries to not develop or produce nuclear weapons.

And in the United States, SGI-USA is currently working with the Back from the Brink campaigna coalition of faith and civic groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club, and several mainline Protestant denominationsto push a domestic policy platform that includes renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons; ending the presidents sole, unchecked authority to launch nuclear war; taking nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert status; and abandoning the plan to update the USs arsenal with enhanced weapons.

Anna Ikeda said that as a Buddhist civil society organization, SGIs role in the fight for nuclear abolition is to strengthen international norms and remind people of the human toll thats at stake, since governmental discussions about nuclear weapons are typically sanitized and focus on numbers and military strategy.

Its to the point where you dont really hear about human suffering, she said. So its the role of SGI, ICAN, and others to put human suffering at the center of the debate.

Another noteworthy attribute of SGIs nuclear abolition work is that youth have always played a significant role, Danny Hall, public affairs director for SGI-USA, pointed out. (Daisaku Ikeda wrote in 2009, It is the passion of youth that spreads the flames of courage throughout society.) Student groups have for decades hosted exhibitions on their college campuses and disseminated petitions to raise awareness.

Even though nuclear abolition isnt often at the forefront of the minds of young people, who werent alive during the Cold War, Hall said it should be. By some measures, the risk of nuclear war is even greater now than it was during the Cold War, he said, since the number of nuclear weapons has once again started to grow. In addition, he said, nuclear weapons dont exist in a vacuum; they intersect with issues young people care about.

Nuclear weapons can exacerbate the climate crisis, and nuclear testing and waste have disproportionately impacted marginalized people and communities of color, he said. Its also an issue of economic justice: The US will spend $1.7 billion over 30 years to update its nuclear arsenal, money that could be used for housing, healthcare, or schools, he said.

Finally, for SGI, nuclear abolition isnt just about politics; its also about spirituality.

Anna Ikeda said that in SGIs view of Buddhism, nuclear weapons are a manifestation of what we call the fundamental darkness. Its our inability to see our own dignity and the dignity of others. Because of this, she said its critical not just to abolish nuclear weapons themselves, but also the types of thinking that have led people to developand usethem in the first place. We could destroy all nuclear weapons from earth, but if you dont change human tendencies, its going to be something else, she said.

Her views reflect that of Daisaku Ikeda, who in 2009 wrote, If we are to put the era of nuclear terror behind us, we must struggle against the real enemy. That enemy is not nuclear weapons per se, nor is it the states that possess or develop them. The real enemy that we must confront is the ways of thinking that justify nuclear weapons; the readiness to annihilate others when they are seen as a threat or as a hindrance to the realization of our objectives. This is the new consciousness we must all share.

SGI members understand that they face an uphill battle to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.

Is it possible? I dont know, Hall said.

But its a matter of faith to continue to make this effort for a world free of nuclear weapons, he said. Our goal is not to be resigned to nuclear war as an inevitability, but to believe that a better world is possible and that we can make a difference.

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Soka Gakkai International's Nuclear Abolition Work - Tricycle

An organization founded by Hillary Clinton in the wake of her 2016 election defeat funneled $75,000 to a left-wing defund the police group whose affiliate worked on a failed campaign to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department, according to a report on Wednesday.

Onward Together, which the former senator from New York and secretary of state created in 2017 to advance progressive values, provided the general support grant to the Alliance for Youth Action sometime between April, 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, Fox News Digital reported, citing a review of tax documents and annual reports.

The Washington, DC-based Alliance said in a June 2020 press release that it would join in solidarity with other radical groups to demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other minorities who died at the hands of police and joins their calls to defund the police and defend Black lives.

In the statement, the alliance condemned the publicly-funded policing system that was founded on slave patrols and continues to target and murder Black people.

Centering Black people in our work means it is time to divest from police, and invest in Black futures, the group continued in the statement. Defunding the police as part of the path towards abolition is one of the many steps that must be taken to ensure that Black people are able to thrive.

In its 2021 annual report, Alliance for Youth Action noted that its affiliate, the Minnesota Youth Collective, was part of the Yes 4 Minneapolis coalition that aimed to defund and ultimately dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

Yes 4 Minneapolis is working to get a charter amendment on the ballot in November, 2021 through petition signature collection. Enough signatures have been gathered that community members themselves will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not to replace the police. This is a vital first step in the movement toward abolition in Minneapolis, the collective said in a statement in April 2021.

Voters in Minnesotas largest city ultimately rejected replacing the police department with a Department of Public Safety in November 2021.

The ballot initiative was prompted by the death of Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was later sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.

Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros Open Society Policy Center also gave a $500,000 donation to Yes 4 Minneapolis in support of the defund the police campaign, Fox News Digital previously reported.

The report added that Onward Togethers donations have fallen by nearly 50% since it was launched.

In fiscal year 2017, the organization raised $3.1 million, but that fell to $1.6 million in fiscal year 2020, the report found.

Onward Together and the Alliance for Youth Action did not respond to Fox News Digitals requests for comment.

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Clinton nonprofit funneled $75,000 to 'defund the police' group: report - New York Post

When 16-year-old Julius Tate, Jr. was killed during a SWAT raid by undercover Columbus police officers in December of 2018, citizens swiftly gathered to protest the unjust killing of a child. One year later, during an anniversary vigil mourning Tates loss, Ingrid Raphal, co-creator of No Evil Eye and Film Futura, and Melissa Gira Grant, a New York-based reporter covering police brutality, came together to co-direct and collaborate on They Wont Call It Murder, a documentary short from Field of Vision that captures the enduring grief and activism that surviving families of police violence undertake. The film, embedded above, makes its online premiere today.

The film recounts Tates unjust killing alongside three other victims who recently died at the hands of police in Columbus, Ohio: Henry Green, Tyre King and Donna Dalton. It also chronicles the fight for accountability that the families of the deceased doggedly continue. Though the films title refers to the fact that at the time of filming, it had been more than 20 years since a Columbus cop was charged with murder, the doc itself probes into the politics of what it looks like when justice is finally served. In Daltons case, the officer who killed her broke that 20-year streak and was actually charged with murdera victory that the filmmakers (and Daltons own sister) owe to the fact that she was a white woman murdered by a Black man.

They Wont Call It Murder surveys the horrific reality of the state-sanctioned execution of marginalized civilians, insisting that the wrongful extinguishing of life cannot be rectified by any financial settlement or prison sentence. In documenting the sinister reality of this epidemic as it pertains to Columbus, the filmmakers highlight the ubiquity of these senseless killings across the country.

Filmmaker spoke to co-directors Raphal and Grant via email about their documentary short, touching on their individual connections to the city of Columbus, how they ensured the comfort of the mourning families involved and the oft-inconsistent definition of accountability.

Filmmaker: What individually inspired each of you to participate in this project, and what did you all take away from this collaborative effort?

Raphal: The film takes place in Columbus, Ohio, a city whose legacy with impunity toward police killings perfectly befits the name it bears: Columbus, Christopher Columbus.

I was living in Columbus, Ohio during the murders of Henry Green, Tyre King, Julius Tate Jr. and Donna Dalton (the victims highlighted in the film) and many others in the surrounding Columbus area, witnessing the anger and grief of the families at protests, and supported organizers efforts to rally the Columbus residents. [That] would later inform how They Wont Call It Murder would act as a container for these collective experiences.

After leaving the city in 2019 due to a lack of work opportunities, an opportunity to co-direct a film building off of Melissas extensive reporting on the citys history of police killings with impunity sparked my interest, and I thought about the countless other victims I had heard of while living in Columbus and thought, Nows the time to let their stories known beyond the borders of this city. It all unfolded from there.

The process of making this film was difficult, yet it was rewarded by acts of care, diligence, and trust. Making a film that asks participants, or subjects, to recount memories and moments of deep grief requires all of the ingredients that make a sustainable, and gratifying, relationship work: warmth, love, trust, safety, laughter, consent and more. Though you find these emotions through the film, they are bounded by realities of distrust, lack of safety and accountability from the city and local police department.

As a crew, we needed to make sure that we offered acts of care before and after each interview, that we obtained consent to film at vigils and provided support when families returned to the sites where their son or sister were killed. This taught me that the camera can be an extension of the self, not a barrier between yourself and the participant. When you enter someones home with all of this gear and theyre already wary of local news crews who disregarded their stories, you have to work really hard to not recreate that. And we did, we were attentive to each participants tempos and reluctancy. Because when we finished filming, their lives and grieving process continued: This is a humbling reminder that, as a first-time filmmaker, I will carry with me and embed into my continuing practice.

Grant: Four years ago, I met Bobbie McCalla, after a Columbus police officer shot and killed her sister Donna Dalton. I had been reporting on police violence for several years at that point. But that story was my introduction to the Columbus police departmentthe undercover officers, the pattern of killings.

That was 2018. By then, after the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, there was little expectation that prosecutors would charge a police officer with murder in such a case. Cops and prosecutors truly work the same side. When we started making this film, no Columbus police officer who killed a community member while on duty had been charged with murder since 1996.

The prosecutor in Columbus who would be responsible for these cases said something I couldnt stop thinking about, and I probably wrote it into every story I did back then: he said that nine times out of 10, when asking a grand jury to consider charging a police officer with murder, that his office didnt think a crime was committed. Rarely do they dispute that a police officer killed someone. Whats disputed is if it is a murder. So the press wont use the word murder. But in my conversations with families, they almost always use that word. And while they arent waiting for a grand jury or a prosecutor to affirm that something wrong was done, when they are denied that, it compounds the wrong. Their understanding of justice, to me, felt more expansive than I could address in a piece of print journalism.

Collaborating on this film felt like a first step towards doing that more complex story some justice, to work with people who shared that respect for the families experience and knowledge of the criminal legal system, who valued them as experts, and who didnt want to further compound what they had lost as we told this story together.

Filmmaker: They Wont Call It Murderaddresses that there is an overarching epidemic of law enforcement murdering Black and Brown people with virtually no consequence. The film, however, focuses on this injustice solely in the state of Ohio, namely Columbus. What made you want to focus on this crisis as it pertains to this specific corner of America?

Raphal: I was once told that Ohio is the heartbeat of the United States; situated at the center of it, considered a fly-over state, discarded and ignored, though many legendary people were shaped by its landscape and quietnessto name a favorite, Toni Morrison. Its a state that gets made fun of (understandably so) and though some stereotypes are true (corn fields, Buckeyes-craze, Hell Is Real banners, quietness), this is somewhere I chose to live after college and got to witness its history of violence with impunity.

As documentarians, I strongly believe that we can only give stories their due justice when we are directly connected to the people, themes or arcs that we aim to center. It provides you with a sensibility and accountability to the stories, people and landscape that a non-connected outsider couldnt tap into. This film is something I could give back to the people and community in Columbus that fostered and shaped meand show viewers that though the film focuses on Columbus, Ohio, this is an all-American story and reality.

Grant: Each of us had a connection to Ohio before collaborating on this film, either living there or having family there or both. And we got to see multiple sides of Columbus, from the winter of 2019 to the summer of 2020, to see how it contained that legacy of violence and that community we saw come together in the streets. It was about place but also about the passage of time, how this pattern of violence goes on, too, beyond the close of the film.

Its not a pattern unique to Columbus or to Ohio. These killings could have, and have, happened in so many communities. And no community is representative of another. But grounding the story in one community, and how they had navigated common obstacles with the same police and prosecutors, was important to us. To focus on the way police killings shaped this community, the way people responded here, let us look at police killings differently: not as isolated incidents, but as a pattern of violence that can suffuse a place and define who belongs there and whose life matters there.

Filmmaker: Furthermore, how did you get connected with the films subjects, and what felt vital to highlight when it came to each familys individual story?

Raphal: Relationship-building, organizing and trust led us to our participants: Adrienne Hood, Dearrea and Malika King, Jamita and Maryam Malone and Bobbi McCalla. Local organizers who had established relationships with our highlighted families vetted myself and Melissa, which allowed us to document their stories in a trusting and candid environment.

We spoke to each family separately. Malika King, the mother of Tyre King, surprised us on set at her mothers home and, after questioning our motives, trusted us to participate in the film. The vigil for the one-year anniversary of Julius Tate Jr.s killing was occurring while we were in town filming. At the last minute, the family agreed for us to film and thats how we got connected to his mother Jamita Malone. Bobbi McCalla, Donna Daltons sister, was in community with Melissa through her reporting work and Adrienne Hood, mother of Henry Green, was committed to speak publicly about her sons murder and introduced us to Malika and Dearrea King.

Grant: Pretty quickly we realized that Ms. Hood had done the work of reaching out to families after she heard the news about any police killing in the community, and had been building a relationship with them, offering support if they wanted it, and were able to benefit from that work.

As we got to know each family on our own, through calls and spending time with them at home (before COVID), we started to see certain common experiences they shared, like the very specific way detectives handled them at the hospital, how police informed them and how little they told them, while at the same time sharing much more information with the press. Where they differ is when we got into the question of what justice meant to themlike if a prosecution was accountability, or if police could be held accountable at all. And some of their takes on that question also shifted over the course of our knowing them, from the months before COVID to the months after the 2020 uprisings.

Filmmaker: The landscape of Ohio itself is, of course, heavily featured in the film. It certainly provides a harrowing point of reference for the violent crimes committed here by police, but also offers moments of aesthetic beauty that are compelling (and somewhat hopeful) in their own right. How did you go about framing the films location, and what felt particularly important to capture or convey about this place?

Raphal: When I lived in Columbus, I relied heavily on the bus to get around. This allowed me to discover many parts of the city through the seat of a passenger. I noticed the distinctive characteristics of each neighborhood, each divided by a highway or train tracks. A quintessential American city with rust-belt remnants and few downtown skyscrapers. We mimicked this POV with the camera and drove through streets surrounding the areas where each victim was killedpicking out routes and sceneries that showed the most recognizable landscapes, houses, graffiti, horizon of that area. When we premiered the film in Columbus, Ohio at the Unorthodocs Film Festival, I received feedback that folks appreciated that we showed each neighborhood, which meant we succeeded in capturing the citys essence.

A memorable moment was waking up before sunrise with our crew and capturing the downtown skyline at the brink of dawn while staking out on a parking lot. It was the first time I witnessed the citys skyscrapers glisten against the waking sun. It was a cold morning and though the view was beautiful, we were grounded in the fact that those buildings host the same individuals responsible for not prosecuting or indicting police officers.

Filmmaker:The one white victim of police violence that you spotlight, Donna Dalton, is unique in that the Black officer who killed her was charged with murder, unlike the officers who killed Black victims Henry Bub Green, Tyr King and Julius Tate, Jr. What discussions do you hope this film prompts about the systems relative inability to provide justice?

Grant: Its a huge question the film cant fully addressbut if we start from the position that you cannot separate the function of policing from anti-Black racism, which is where we as filmmakers did start, then you see how a system shaped by white supremacy will define accountability based on white supremacy. You cant assume what people even mean by accountability in this system, what justice means. The criminal legal system and the media have a lot of power to define those things for the community; we resisted that, or we tried to.

Its absolutely significant that at first, the story police and some media told about Donnas killing was of a good cop defending himself in a vice operation gone wrong. Over time, as more and more facts about the officer who killed her came to light, including the racism reported by others within the Columbus Division of Police, the story shifted. What made it easier for people to see a Black officer as a criminal is intimately connected with what makes it easier for people to see a white woman as a victim, and whats common across every story in the film is the way people killed by police are dehumanized and even blamed for their own deaths. They are denied their victimhood. For me, justice has to include breaking with those racist ideas about who is worthy of our protectionbeginning at the beginning, not the end, of a life.

Raphal: What kind of justice can truly be served when someones life has been taken? The film explores what the families consider to be justice, and they each have different answers. Their ideal of justice and accountability range from death penalty, imprisonment, an entirely new system, accomplices to receive carceral punishment, to sentiments that resemble abolition. It begins a conversation around the possibilities of justice that lean on what we know: the judiciary system. We rely on it to enact, and create the rules for, some sort of accountability, built on white-supremacist ideals which means it will fail to protect the needs and interests of oppressed peoples. From this perspective, when police officers act as extensions of power for the state, it is difficult to envision that the state would hold itself (through its judiciary system) accountable to the fullest extent which, to me, means the ending of police killings overall. For all of the families in the film, they have yet to receive any form of justiceas defined by themselves and the system. I would love to start a conversation around how justice could be being able to live your life with abundance and safety because we dont have Tyre King, Julius Tate Jr., Henry Green or Donna Dalton to tell their stories.

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Cops and Prosecutors Truly Work the Same Side: Ingrid Raphal and Melissa Gira Grant on their FOV Doc They Wont Call It Murder - Filmmaker Magazine