Statement on Massacre of LGBTQI and Latino Community Members in Orlando, USA
NOBEL LAUREATES, 20 Jun 2016
The Peace People – TRANSCEND Media Service
Press Release – 14 Jun 2016
Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire said,
“On behalf of myself and the community of The Peace People, I would like to express our deepest sympathy to the friends, families and neighbours of the victims in Orlando, Florida, USA. Please know you are in our thoughts and prayers and we love you very much.
“Also to our LGBTQI sisters and brothers and their families in Orlando and around the world please know that you are all in our prayers and thoughts on these days of sadness and pain for your community.
“Please know that people around the world are with you all – we grieve with you, we cry with you, we are truly sorry for your great losses.
“When 49 of your beloved were murdered and 53 more wounded on Sunday morning (12th June 2016) it shocked the entire world. However, we have been inspired by the reaction of families and friends calling us all to deepen our love and the call from the Muslim, LGBTQI, and multi-faith communities to use ‘love as defiance’ gave us hope that Love not Hate is the most important force in our world today.
“We join with you in giving thanks for the lives of every one of those killed, and we pledge to remember them by increasing our love, compassion, and forgiveness in response to violence, homophobia, racism, Islamophobia and war.
“In loving memory of all who were killed, we pledge not to seek revenge or hatred, but to work for reconciliation and building peaceful ways of living together in all our diversity and plurality as the one human family sharing our one world equally together.”
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Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.
The Peace People began in 1976 as a protest movement against the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland. Its three founders were Mairead Maguire, Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown. Over 100,000 people were involved in the initial movement and two of the founders, Mairead and Betty, received the Nobel Peace Prize for that year. Since its inception, the organization has been committed to building a just, peaceful society through nonviolent means – a society based on respect for each individual, and that has at its core the highest standards of human and civil rights.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Jun 2016.
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