The World Peace ministry of the Reverend and Ms. Sun Myung Moon has struck a very responsive note in the very depths of my soul. That’s because all that I am and all that I hope to be I owe to the mission on which I embarked now some forty five years ago with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the singularly most important man with the most important message for the most violent times in the history of mankind. His message was simply this: "Either we learn to live together as brothers and sisters on this planet or we will perish together as fools." The mission upon which we embarked was and is that of ending the barbarism of war, the decadence of racism and the scourge of poverty.

When all is said and done, there is more said about world peace than is done. I love Father Moon’s ministry in this regard because he seems as determined as was Martin Luther King, Jr. to DO something about world peace. Let me explain what I mean.

I have in recent months made two trips to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza as a part of Father Moon’s Interreligious International Federation For World Peace Middle East Initiative. The trips have caused me to stretch my mind back across the chasm of the years to a time when I first embraced the dream of Peace in the Middle East.

It was in the year, 1979. The Honorable Andrew Young, my close associate with Dr. King in the struggle of the 1960s, was our U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He fully understood Dr. King’s passion for world peace. He, like Father Moon, decided to act upon that dream. Andy remembered Martin’s teaching: "We hate one another because we fear one another; we fear one another because we don’t understand one another; and we don’t understand one another because we refuse to communicate with one another."

Ambassador Young acted upon that conviction by talking to the PLO’s observer at the United Nation’s in an effort to get the PLO to lay down its arms and come to the peace table to work out a nonviolent solution to the terrible conflict in the Middle East. For that effort on his part to do something to end the barbarism of the war in that region of the world, he was forced to resign as our UN Ambassador.

I was at the time the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that Martin Luther King, Jr. had founded and led for the eleven years leading up to his tragic assassination. It was his vehicle for waging our nonviolent struggle for the civil rights of our people in the United States and for peace round the world. Accordingly, I, with his successor as president of SCLC, Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, decided to take up Andy’s quest by going to both Israel to meet with Prime Minister Menochim Begin and to Lebanon where the PLO was headquartered to meet with Chairman Yasser Arafat. Our purpose was to appeal for the "Land for Peace" settlement proposal that had occurred to me after the Six Day War back in 1967. I told the press at that time that "Neither Andy Young or I, nor other members of the SCLC apologize searching for the relevance of Martin Luther King’s policies in the international political arena."

In an effort to demonstrate the balance in our proposal of a "Land For Peace" settlement of the Arab/Israeli dispute, Dr. Lowery and I together with other members of our delegation met with Jewish leaders in New York and with Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Yehuda Blum. Afterwards, I told reporters that black leaders were "asking both combatants to "declare a moratorium on violence and come to the peace table, each acknowledging for the other what he demands for himself, peace with in the secure borders of a homeland." But the nation and the world were not ready for that kind of solution to the crisis in the Middle East at that time.

I thank God today that, since that time, Presidents George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush have now embraced the vision. Inspired by the instructive example of what Father Moon is attempting to DO about the vision, it is my view that Jewish, Christian and Muslim spiritual leaders must develop the "Holy Boldness" to lead the nation and the world as never before. It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s belief that spiritual leaders must be "Head lights" and not "Tail lights;" that we must be "Thermostats" and not "Thermometers." Thermometers merely reflect the temperature in the room; Thermostats set the temperature.

I, therefore, give my unequivocally support to the Middle East Peace Initiative of the Interreligious International Federation For World Peace. Father Moon is right in believing and acting upon the belief of the writer of II Chronicles 7:14 -

"If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins, and I will heal their land."

With that faith, let us all press forward in support of Father Moon’s Middle East Peace Initiative. Nothing more is needed, nothing less will suffice. We shall overcome.

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