A Blog from David Crump
Professor Omer Bartov is a long-time Israeli scholar of genocide and
Holocaust studies. One of his recent books is titled Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, where he compares the Nazi holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (the violent Israeli displacement of750,000 Palestinians in 1948).
Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now. They talked about Gaza, student protests and antisemitism:
Maung Zarni is a scholar who has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. He has spent his career studying genocide, specifically the Nazi holocaust.
In a recent interview he stated that “what is happening in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers.”
You can read a excerpt from the article by Ahmet Gurhan Kartal at “If Americans Knew” below:
“What we are seeing in Gaza is simply mass extermination without the gas chambers,” he said, referring to the brutal Nazi method of killing prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.
“You don’t need to destroy a population with gas chambers only. If you are able to carpet bomb … 80% of the living space, the residential area, most schools, hospitals, you are destroying the population.”
Zarni also pointed out Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s statement that “no one in Gaza is innocent.”
“That’s 2.3 or 2.4 million Palestinian people, including infants. Half of the 2.3 million Palestinians are children and youth,” he said.
“So, what we are seeing is the repeat of Auschwitz in Gaza.”
You can read the entire article here.
One mass gravesite is near Al Shifa hospital. The other is near Nasser hospital. Both hospitals have been demolished by Israeli forces.
Many of the corpses have their hands tied together.
Many are women. Some are children.
Others are wearing hospital gowns. Some even have the IV drip tubes still attached to their arms.
I have posted a selection of video reports below. Since most are age restricted I have enclosed the URL in quotation marks. Simply copy the URL to your web browser in order to watch:
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhsRRGvl1dc”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clg-x1dchv8”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcZ4_dZ8WZU”
The current student anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are if historic significance.
Despite the establishment media’s scurilous attempts to vilify these college students and their supportive professors as churlish antisemites, the abundance of video clips avalable on youtube, X, tic tok, facebook and elsewhere reveal the truth.
Whatever violence my occur is consistently started by the police.
The rare instances of genuine antisemitism are either the outlier having nothing to do with the demonstration’s organizers and membership, or they are false flag incidents committed by pro-Israel agitators trying to make trouble.
These campus demonstations give me hope, not only for the future of our country, but for the eventual demise of Israel as an apartheid state.
The American journalist, Chris Hedges, understandings all these things and eloquently expressed his support by delivering a sermon yesterday on the grounds of Princeton University.
As a Christian, I wish that I could call Mr. Hedges my brother in Christ. Unfortunately, his disbelief in the incarnation and the bodily resurrection of Jesus prevents me from saying that.
I do not believe, as Hedges does, that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ stands as metaphor for the redemptive power of unjust suffering. I see the cross, as I believe the New Testament does also, as the inevitable climax of a life lived in complete obedience to our Father in heaven. (There is much more to be said about this, but that is for another post.)
Nevertheless, as a fellow human being I can only applaud Chris’ profound understanding of the human condition in this world and the cries for justice that arise from those who suffer.
In fact, Chris Hedges has a better understanding of God’s heart for justice, and the work that our Creator asks his people to perform in the temporal pursuit of this justice here and now than does the typical church-goer — fundamentalist, evangelical, liberal or mainline — in this country.
There is much to learn from Chris’ message. I urge you to read it all, prayerfully with a heart ready to respond.
All truth is God’s truth no matter who says it or where it is said.
Here is an excerpt:
. . . To resist radical evil, as you are doing, is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.
Ruling institutions — the state, the press, the church, the courts, universities — mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. All of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. This was true during the genocide we committed against native Americans, slavery, the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the fight against the apartheid regime of South Africa. The most courageous are purged and turned into pariahs.
The theologian James Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”
Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”
Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he or she saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what their heart expected.”
This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you will be treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.
You can read the entire sermon here.
An NBC investigative report demonstrates the frequency with which Israel continues to bomb areas and travel routes that have been designated by Israeli officials as “safe zones.”
Destitute Palestinians travel to areas where they were told they would remain safe from attack, only to be bombed, shot and terrorized in their freshly erected makeshift homes.
It’s as if the ‘safe zones’ were deliberately designed holding pens created to ensure a higher percentage of civilian targets for Israeli bombs.
There is LITERALLY no safe place in Gaza today. Watch:
I have been reading Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory (HarperCollins, 2023). The book analyzes the rise of Donald Trump
and MAGA Christianity within American evangelicalism.
How is it that Christian devotion to such a pagan politician has succeeded in splintering American evangelicalism?
I believe that Vincent Bacote, theology professor at Wheaton College, hits the nail on the head when he accuses American evangelical leaders of failing to disciple, to catechize, their people.
I couldn’t agree more.
For instance, the so-called “Great Commission” is not a command to evangelize unbelievers. It is a command to disciple, to teach and rigorously instruct believers into faithful Christian discipleship. Evangelism is crucial, but it is only the entry point for the radical demands of true Christianity.
Jesus commands his followers, “Go and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20).
A Christian disciple is someone who puts into practice all the upside-down, crazy, counter intuitive, radical lifestyle choices that Jesus taught his disciples, and us, to embrace. That requires a lifetime of sacrificial self-denial and devotion.
Along these lines, Alberta quotes Professor Bacote:
“Jesus loved them [the 12 disciples] but he did not infantilize them. Time and again, when His disciples got something wrong — or even when they simply showed human weakness — Jesus rebuked them. He chided them for being faithless. He censure them for the vanity and biotry and prejudice. He criticized them for not grasping His instruction.”
This is what discipling loopks like And this . . . is what’s absent inside much of the American evangelical Church.
“If you ask me what’s the biggest problem with evangelicalism, I’d say it’s a catechesis problem. It’s a formation problem, a discipleship problem. These are people who are supposed to have a knowedge of the Bible, but many of them don’t . . . A lot of these people are just not going deep enough.”
By remaining shallow in the scriptures, Bacote said, too many American Christians have avoided a necessary showdown between their own base cultural proclivities and God’s perfect standard. When Christians are discipled primarily by society, inevitably they look to scripture for affirmation of their habits and behaviors and political views. But if the Bible is the word of God, then God ought to be interrogating those things.
One important fact that the mainstream media will not tell you about the current anti-war protests condemning Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza is that many of the leaders and participants are Jewish Americans.
Two important Jewish organizations — If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace — are leading the way in these student protests.
Remember this the next time you hear someone accuse these protests of being “antisemitic.”
They are not anti-semitic. That is a standard Zionist lie used to distract from the real issues.
Rather, they are anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian, pro-humanity.
Simone Zimmermann is a young Jewish woman, and cofounder of the Jewish organization IfNotNow, who is also one of the creators of the important, recent film Israelism. I encourage everyone to watch this story of how an increasing number of young Jewish Americans are turning away from Zionism and embracing the just cause of Palestinian liberation.
I have experienced unnecessary, unprovoked police violence myself. I was marching in a perfectly peaceful anti-NATO rally in Chicago.
For no reason other than a chance to flex their muscles, hundreds of Chicago policemen attacked the crowd and arrested dozens of people for nothing more than exercizing their Constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
We see this happening now across the country as police violently assault college students gathered together in peaceful demonstrations.
One of the reasons this happens — but only one reason out of many, which I will address in future posts — is because many US law enforcement agencies have outsourced their police training programs to the state of Israel.
But here is the outrageous catch: It you have watched any of the recent anti-Netanyahu marches in Israel’s cities over the past six months, you will notice a sea of Israeli, Jewish humanity protesting the current government without a police officer in sight.
The only time Israeli police really clamp down on protests or demonstrations is when they are carried out by Palestinians. And all Israeli security forces always treat Palestinians as The Enemy.
And the Palestinian Enemy always “deserve” the harshest, most brutal treatment prior to their arrest, no matter how peacefully they behave.
It is these brutal tactics in “crowd control” that American police bring back with them from their Israeli training. (Often Israeli security forces come to the US to train entire departments here.)
The result is that American demonstrators are treated as if they, too, were The Enemy. Thus, protesters are literally attacked for no reason.
Our civil rights are trampled underfoot. Innocent people are beaten, tasered, handcuffed and jailed simply for speaking out and exercizing their civil liberties.
This Israeli-like behavior is a very large part of “the violence” reported now on US campuses. The students are not out of control, folks. It’s the police.
Watch Kim Iversen’s video explaining it all below, titled “Shocking IDF Link Exposed”:
The journalist Chris Hedges recently posted the following article at his substack page. It’s titled “Revolt in the Universities.”
I wish he had said “Peaceful Revolt” because the vast majority of anti-war demonstrations now occurring on American campuses are peaceful.
Sure, there are always a few exceptions. But the vast majority of the “violence” you see on the reports carried by mainstream media are due to:
I ‘ve searched for but cannot find any student protests of this sort happening in my part of the country, unfortunately. If I could find one, I would be chanting and carrying signs to stop the slaughter in Gaza right beside them.
These young people and their moral sentiments are the future hope of American civil society.
The fact that many Christian evangelical leaders are standing with Israel in vilifying these young men and women is a spiritual disaster of epic proportions.
Below is an excerpt of Chris’s article:
PRINCETON, N.J. — Achinthya Sivalingam, a graduate student in Public Affairs at Princeton University did not know when she woke up this morning that shortly after 7 a.m. she would join hundreds of students across the country who have been arrested, evicted and banned from campus for protesting the genocide in Gaza.
She wears a blue sweatshirt, sometimes fighting back tears, when I speak to her. We are seated at a small table in the Small World Coffee shop on Witherspoon Street, half a block away from the university she can no longer enter, from the apartment she can no longer live in and from the campus where in a few weeks she was scheduled to graduate.
She wonders where she will spend the night.
The police gave her five minutes to collect items from her apartment.
“I grabbed really random things,” she says. “I grabbed oatmeal for whatever reason. I was really confused.”
Student protesters across the country exhibit a moral and physical courage — many are facing suspension and expulsion — that shames every major institution in the country. They are dangerous not because they disrupt campus life or engage in attacks on Jewish students — many of those protesting are Jewish — but because they expose the abject failure by the ruling elites and their institutions to halt genocide, the crime of crimes. These students watch, like most of us, Israel’s live-streamed slaughter of the Palestinian people. But unlike most of us, they act. Their voices and protests are a potent counterpoint to the moral bankruptcy that surrounds them.
Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.
Instead, heads of these academic institutions grovel supinely before wealthy donors, corporations — including weapons manufacturers — and rabid right-wing politicians. They reframe the debate around harm to Jews rather than the daily slaughter of Palestinians, including thousands of children. They have allowed the abusers — the Zionist state and its supporters — to paint themselves as victims. This false narrative, which focuses on anti-Semitism, allows the centers of power, including the media, to block out the real issue — genocide. It contaminates the debate. It is a classic case of “reactive abuse.” Raise your voice to decry injustice, react to prolonged abuse, attempt to resist, and the abuser suddenly transforms themself into the aggrieved.
Princeton University, like other universities across the country, is determined to halt encampments calling for an end to the genocide. This, it appears, is a coordinated effort by universities across the country.
The university knew about the proposed encampment in advance. When the students reached the five staging sites this morning, they were met by large numbers from the university’s Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department. The site of the proposed encampment in front of Firestone Library was filled with police. This is despite the fact that students kept their plans off of university emails and confined to what they thought were secure apps. Standing among the police this morning was Rabbi Eitan Webb, who founded and heads Princeton’s Chabad House. He has attended university events to vocally attack those who call for an end to the genocide as anti-semites, according to student activists.
As the some 100 protesters listened to speakers, a helicopter circled noisily overhead. A banner, hanging from a tree, read: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.”
The students said they would continue their protest until Princeton divests from firms that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign” in Gaza, ends university research “on weapons of war” funded by the Department of Defense, enacts an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions, supports Palestinian academic and cultural institutions and advocates for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
But if the students again attempt to erect tents – they took down 14 tents once the two arrests were made this morning – it seems certain they will all be arrested.
“It is far beyond what I expected to happen,” says Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in classics. “They started arresting people seven minutes into the encampment.”
Princeton Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun sent out a mass email on Wednesday warning students they could be arrested and thrown off campus if they erected an encampment.
“Any individual involved in an encampment, occupation, or other unlawful disruptive conduct who refuses to stop after a warning will be arrested and immediately barred from campus,” she wrote. “For students, such exclusion from campus would jeopardize their ability to complete the semester.”
These students, she added, could be suspended or expelled.
Sivalingam ran into one of her professors and pleaded with him for faculty support for the protest. He informed her he was coming up for tenure and could not participate. The course he teaches is called “Ecological Marxism.”
“It was a bizarre moment,” she says. “I spent last semester thinking about ideas and evolution and civil change, like social change. It was a crazy moment.”
She starts to cry.
. . . There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against indigenous peoples. Slavery. The violent suppression of the labor movement that saw hundreds of workers killed. Lynching. Jim and Jane Crow. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.
The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes.
History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.
You can read the entire post here, though it may be behind a paywall.
A Review of N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness In an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies
(Zondervan, 2024, $22.99)
As I begin this review, I must admit that I am not a dispassionate analyst. I do have some skin in the game since this new book by Wright and Bird covers very similar ground as does my book, I Pledge Allegiance. I have some firm opinions in this area of study.
Having put my cards on the table, however, I can say that Wright and Bird have given the church a very helpful book providing biblical guidance on how followers of Jesus are to deal with the practical matters of church–state relations. Can a Christian be involved with politics? What is the proper relationship between church and state? How are disciples to conduct themselves as responsible citizens? What guidance does scripture offer for answering these types of questions?
All this and more is tackled here with the deft biblical–theological hand one has come to expect from Wright and Bird. With numerous historical examples illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches to such matters.
The first three chapters lay out the church’s relationship to world empires, beginning with Rome’s domination of Jesus’ homeland, up to the church’s contemporary interactions with the Soviet Union, China and the United States. The spiritual backdrop to these interactions is helpfully cast in terms of the spiritual, cosmic powers always at work behind the temporal authorities we see in our national, international, global relations. Thus, Wright and Bird endorse Walter Wink’s important three–volume work on Christianity and the Powers.
Chapter four, “The Kingdom of God as Vision and Vocation” begins the turn to a more pragmatic description of what exactly Christian disciples ought to be doing, and how we ought to be thinking, about our place in secular society. Here they thankfully emphasize the vital unification of both gospel proclamation and social justice activism as equally vital, and ultimately indivisible, kingdom activities for the local church. Across the entire spectrum of Christian, kingdom activities we are reminded that “the whole purpose of Christian influence is not the pursuit of Christian hegemony but the giving of faithful Christian witness,” thereby endorsing James Davison Hunter’s concept of the Christian church offering a “faithful presence” in the world (93).
The book’s second half focuses on matters of church–state relations in the modern day. There is an excellent critique of Christian Nationalism,” as well as the vigorous defense of liberal democracy, pluralism and secularism as the political venues most conducive to religious freedom.
The book’s conclusion reminds its readers that “we are called to be disciples with a theo–political vision of the gospel” (174) meaning that “a kingdom perspective requires prophetic witness, priestly intercession and political discernment” (175). The church cannot build the kingdom of God, only God can construct his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven (176).
This is a fine piece of work. And I am happy to encourage my subscribers to read this book by Wright and Bird, although I encourage you to do it in
tandem with my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018).
Now I must turn to my critical analysis of the work.
Wright and Bird have written a handbook of sorts dealing with the questions of church–state relationship and Christian political involvement. Biblical references are treated as proof–texts cited in footnotes with no close reading or interpretation provided along the way. Since both of these men are fine New Testament scholars, this was obviously a deliberate decision. But this omission leaves the reader with yet another book on politics and theology where we are simply expected to take the authors at their own authoritative word.
The problem with this decision appears most obviously in the discussion of Romans 13. Despite the fact that Paul never uses the vocabulary of “obey” or “obedience” in these verses, Wright and Bird repeat the frequent mistake of taking Paul to say that Christians are responsible “to obey” their secular, civic authorities (105, 109, 110). But this is not the case, and I explain why at some length in my book, I Pledge Allegiance (55–62). Granted, the authors redeem themselves by eventually, and quite rightly, explaining that it is “only good government can claim the mantle of a divinely appointed authority. Accordingly, God brings order through government but does not ordain every individual ruler” (112). Thus, Paul does instruct us to submit to the divine ordering of government, but we are not responsible to obey every person or directive in authority.
Again, Wright and Bird finally reach this conclusion themselves in their section discussing civil disobedience (107–121). They agree that unjust laws may be resisted or disobeyed by believers, although, while admitting that “one needs to have criteria for determining unjust laws,” no specific guidance is offered (119).
They draw a distinction between civil disobedience and uncivil disobedience, the latter being “reserved only for violent authoritarians.” In the face of authoritarianism, Christians are justified in resorting to violence in their efforts to overthrow an oppressive, unjust government. In my view, this is where their argument and methodology go off the rails. Not only is there no biblical evidence on offer, but even the biblical footnotes disappear. Instead, the authors appeal to traditional just war theory, a few notable philosophers, and the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
I obviously disagree strongly with these (less than compelling) arguments justifying a Christian’s turn to violence in civil war. (Again, check out the extensive argument in my book insisting that Christians must always embrace non–violence in every circumstance.) Actually, Bonhoeffer’s own turn to violent anti–Nazi resistance is, in my opinion, the great tragedy of his otherwise exemplary life. For, when all is said and done, Bonhoeffer did not die as a martyr for Jesus Christ and the gospel. He died as a violent insurgent helping to plot a violent murder.
Here we come, perhaps, to the principal problem with Jesus and the Powers. For all the discussion of the kingdom of God and the need for Christian ethics to direct our political engagement, there is no extended discussion of the upside–down nature of Jesus’ kingdom ethics; no exposition of what numerous scholars have called the “kingdom reversal.” In my opinion, this is not only a major oversight but an inexplicable omission in a book like this. Jesus makes it clear, that living out the seemingly upside–down values of the kingdom of God — in every dimension of our public and private lives, political and apolitical — is THE means of demonstrating that the “not yet fulfilled” kingdom of God is, nevertheless, “already present” in this world. Living a non–violent life as Jesus lived a non–violent life, even in the face of the most authoritarian, bloodthirsty injustice exhibited on the cross at Calvary, is our gospel–kingdom mandate.
Similarly, a great deal of additional instruction in political directives could be added, but first we must immerse ourselves in a new way to think, a new way to view life in this world, a new way to live: an upside–down way, a contrarian way in all of life, whether the government is democratic or totalitarian. Unfortunately, Jesus and the Powers gives little attention to this crucial piece of the church and politics pie.