christ in rubble

I was in a anti-protestant mood a few months back and wrote to my christian friend about my thoughts on the genocide in Gaza and the evangelical movement's insane support of mass slaughter.

With his permission, I'm releasing it, with minor edits, to raise more awareness about the invasion of Lebanon to encourage people to donate to some charities with links below¹.

hey amigo

I was learning some Eugene Debs history the other day and read up on about his arrest and prison sentence for protesting WWI.

He gave a famous speech in his trial refusing to plea for mercy, instead declaring that "while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

It was a very moving speech, especially given how evil the war and its draconian laws were (and are to this day².)

You should read it³ if only to hear the beautiful metaphors people used to compose for themselves before intellectuals got boring and mixed the same idioms for the next century.

Something particular that stuck with me the last few days was this passage:

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.

We've talked before about deist/godless/non-christian leftists using King James oration for their arguments:

Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom.

Even though Tom Paine was as godless as you could be in the 18th century, he loved talking about how the Lord of Abraham hated monarchy in Common Sense.

Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.

The North was no less white supremacist than the South, so Lincoln had to play to his audience and maintain the preservation of the Union as his justification for destroying slavery. There's a billion examples I could've chosen from, but this Matthew 18:8-9 reference is a more subtle favorite of mine.

In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary standards are dissident intellectuals, called "prophets" in the English translation.

They bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, denounced the prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first "selfhating Jew" or "anti-American" in the modern counterparts. The prophets were treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who would later be condemned as false prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.

Chomsky is actually a Jew, if only a cultural one, but that never stopped him from quoting Jesus in his old lectures criticizing the hypocrisy and evil of the "Moral Majority" republicans defunding welfare programs to fund terrorism abroad. This quote from Who Rules the World? is one of my favorite metaphor for challenging power being the only way to say anything interest in our society.

So hearing Debs protesting in the same tones and cutting against the evils of Christian empires of his day really affected me. Moreso with his own commitment to being a part of the subversive, persecuted element of society just as Jesus had done in his day.

You said once that nationalism was the greatest enemy of Christendom since Constantine the Great. There's an extent to which I agree especially to nationalism's inherent syncretism towards any ideology in power.

But it's been Capital, service to Mammon, that's poisoned the Christian soul for the last four hundred years.

All the threats from without: secularism, consumerism, socialism even, wouldn't have come about without Dutch Calvinists inventing the joint stock company and Anglican warships imposing the first modern international markets on the world.

From within, the corruption is to the core. Christians in this country and throughout the west have no Ummah. The genocide in Palestine makes that so clear.

While evangelicals across the country accost Arabs and egg on state violence against peaceful students demanding an end to the Israeli blitz, Palestinian Christians are being massacred in Gaza and the West Bank alike. IDF planes with American bombs are pulverizing centuries old churches along with mosques. Settlers block humanitarian aide and deprive Gaza's children of the proverbial manna that charities like ANERA and World Central Kitchen send.

If Jesus was born today, he’d be born under the rubble of Gaza.

This is a quote from Munther Isaac, a Lutheran Palestinian Reverend from Bethlehem, just this last Christmas as Israeli settlers grow bolder in their violence against Arabs of all faiths in the West Bank.

Rev. Munther's struggle⁴ is wanting to stop the murder of his congregation and his people as a whole. And yet, America's Christians are complicit, providing weapon, funds, moral laundering, or at best silence towards his oppressors, completely trapped in their suicidal "Christian-Zionism" that pre-dated even Jewish-Zionism.

It's been secular Gentile and Jewish students, Sunnis and Shias, and Irish and Hispanic governments that have shown real solidarity with Munther and his people, Christian or otherwise.

As Christians wake up and figure out that Capital no longer needs them to survive and they stare down the sunset of their civilization, it's up to them to realize that only responsibility for their crimes can dig them out of their hypocrisy. Only with paying their moral bill will they avert their current path to self-destruction.

I hope you'll remember your time in the holy land. How Jesus died and came back to save all of humanity. How with his sacrifice, Jew and Gentile alike could be saved before your God, proving that the bonds between us transcend race, creed, or class.

Your friend, always

ángel

PLEASE DONATE:

• Lebanese Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org.lb/
• Lebanese food bank: https://lebanesefoodbank.org/take-action/donate/
• Beit el baraka: https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-now/
• Offrejoie: https://offrejoie.net/contribute/
• Foodblessed: https://foodblessed.org/donate/