Art Gish on the Rush Limbaugh Show

Hello friends,

Church of the Brethren member and Christian Peacemaker Team member Art Gish called in to the Rush Limbaugh show on March 23 to offer his perspective on the nonviolent way of the cross.

As you may know, Limbaugh has been quite critical of CPT through the captivity of CPTers in Iraq.

Here's the transcript. (You can also find it here: Rush Limbaugh transcript, but you have to register for Limbaugh's special membership club. It's also been quoted on several blogs that I have found.)

Peace & grace,

Matt Guynn

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Art in Athens, Ohio. Hi, Art, welcome to the program.

CALLER: I'm part of Christian Peacemaker Teams. I just got back from Iraq. My wife is still in Baghdad with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

RUSH: Okay. Did you call today for a specific reason or did you just want to tell me that?

CALLER: No, I thought you might want to talk to somebody who's been there and been part of the team. The Christian Peacemaker Teams comes out of the Quakers, Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren, the peace churches.

RUSH: Yeah, peace.

CALLER: And it's based on the idea that if we want peace and are opposed to war, then we ought to be willing to take the same risks that soldiers take and go into violent situations and be a nonviolent presence in the middle of --

RUSH: Yeah, but, you know, peacemakers have never won wars with peace. They do it with guns and soldiers and --

CALLER: Well, we have another idea --

RUSH: You win wars by killing people and breaking things, and then you institute the peace.

CALLER: We believe that the only way to overcome evil is through nonviolent suffering love, the way of the cross.

RUSH: Well, the problem is that you're misdefining evil. You're in the midst of evil over there and yet you see it here in the United States. The evil is all around you. The evil just captured a bunch of your members.

CALLER: We see it everywhere.

RUSH: Well, you don't see it then. You can sit there all day and tell me what you see. You've been rescued by people after swearing off any use of force of violence to have these people rescued, they still took the rescue, and there's not one bit of gratitude. There's not one thank-you, there's nothing more than blaming the people that rescued you and calling them now on this program evil. I, sir, am not interested.

END TRANSCRIPT