A Blog from David Crump
Contrary to Israeli propaganda, the primary factor in the declining population of Christians in Gaza is not Muslim persecution.
As I have heard many times, most Christian families emigrate in order to escape Israeli violence. With respect to Gaza, it is the regular bombardments and military campaigns against them that has cause the Christian community to dwindle.
Today there are approximately 1,000 Christians remaining as a witness to their Savior from the oldest churches in the world.
Terry and I first met Anas this past March as we sat talking with his young, pregnant wife, Maysan. We were visiting with Maysan in her father’s
home inside the Aida Refugee Camp.
Maysan’s father is our good friend, Sayid, who was once shot in the shoulder by an Israeli soldier while standing inside his own home. Yes, such things happen often to those living under Israeli military occupation.
Maysan has begun a new, thriving dental practice in Bethlehem. She and Anas were eagerly expecting their first child, a daughter, who happened to arrive while we were still visiting in Aida.
Anas is the director of the Aida Youth Center, the organization which Terry and I have worked with closely over the years.
As the Center’s director, Anas is committed to providing educational opportunities and improving the lives of the many children growing up inside a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem.
Now Anas has been arrested simply for being a Palestinian man living in the West Bank.
Below is the account of what happened yesterday as posted by another friend, Munther Amira, on Facebook.
Please join us in praying for Anas’ swift and safe return from Israeli detention (all emphasis is mine):
Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropology professor and a political activist who founded the organization ICAHD, the Israel Committee Against House
Demolitions.
Earlier this week the ICAHD newsletter included the following article from Jeff:
I am going to bed tonight in full certainty that as I sleep, Israel, a member state of the UN, abetted, armed, and egged on by the US and the other G-7 countries that rule the world, is committing genocide in Gaza.
Confining two and half million people to a tiny area (while cynically and cruelly advising them to “leave”), cutting off all food, water, and electricity, declaring that all Gazans are Hamas, thus making even children legitimate targets, carpet bombing for days to “soften” the terrain, and then, tonight as I sleep, invading with an army of 300,000 soldiers — that is THE definition of genocide.
The world is run by war criminals, which imperils oppressed and poor people the world over. But tonight, we must think of the people of Gaza, thousands of whom will die in the next days, their lives destroyed, their cities, town and villages obliterated.
Read the entire article here.
As “pro-life”, Texas governor, Greg Abbott, installs a murderous, floating fence of razor wire down the middle of the Rio Grand river to shred the bare
flesh of illegal immigrants, Phillis Zagano asks a probing question at the Religious News Service: what does it really mean to “respect life?”
[A number of dead bodies have already been retrieved from Abbott’s killer fence.]
Below is an excerpt:
Before backing a law banning abortion in Texas altogether, Gov. Greg Abbott propelled a 2021 measure banning abortion after a heartbeat has been detected, saying he “would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat.” He happens to be Catholic.
So why did Abbott put razor wire and a floating barrier in the Rio Grande? Do migrant children not have heartbeats?
There is an angry selectivity when it comes to life issues. Abortion is certainly a tragic reality in too many places in the world. Without denying the ability of the polity to legally allow or disallow abortion, the better course is to make it unnecessary.
To respect life means just that: the unborn, yes, and the elderly and the stranger, the migrant, and the homeless individual. Respect life includes the “other,” no matter how defined — by gender, skin color, language, ethnicity — the list is endless.
Yet too many so-called pro-life advocates demonstrate an abject denial of others’ right to life.
You can read the entire article here.
Avi Shlaim began his academic career as an Israeli graduate student who went to England for his doctoral work.
He is now a long-time Oxford professor who has done pioneering historical research on the origins of the modern state of Israel and the history of Zionism.
He is one of those rare people of moral character who is willing to be self-critical. He is more committed to a consistent ethic applied equally to all than he is to nationalism or ideology.
Here is a brief excerpt from a longer interview with Human Rights Watch.
Breaking the Silence is an organization of former Israeli soldiers who are trying to educate their fellow citizens about the brutality of Israel’s military occupation over the Palestinian people in the West Bank.
Watch as this woman tells her story (with English translation). She explains how the Occupation is both persecuting Palestinians and poisoning Israel.
[It’s been a while since my last post! I will tell you about some of the things I’ve been doing in a few of the upcoming posts. Here are a few stories about our recent trip to Israel-Palestine. It also gives me a chance to plug my latest book, Like Birds in a Cage, which describes life in Aida camp more extensively.]
It had been nearly 5 years since we last visited our friends and loved one’s in Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem. So, we planned a return visit in early May and spent the rest of the month in our home away from home. We returned to the USA on May 31st. (Whereupon I was struck down by a long-menacing sinus infection. Ugh. But I am much better now, thank you.)
We had returned to the embrace of our Aida Camp family for no more than 10 days when 3 teenage boys were shot by Israeli soldiers, which is the standard punishment for throwing rocks towards heavily outfitted, helmet-wearing soldiers in body armor. Five years’ absence had not changed anything about daily life in Aida camp.
Actually, one of the boys was not shot by a living, breathing soldier but by a Terminator-style, automated, robotic, high-powered rifle. Only the night before a deadly device had been installed on top of the Apartheid Wall segregating Aida from the encroaching Jewish-only neighborhoods of SE Jerusalem. This new, robotic, high-powered rifle now rules over the main entrance to the camp; its field of fire covers the main Aida thoroughfare, several community centers, 2 playgrounds, 1 soccer field, a cemetery, and scores of apartments.
No one knows when or why the new installation may fire again. But this is nothing new. Palestinians have always served as unwilling guinea pigs for Israel’s cutting-edge military gadgets, whether it’s new teargas formulas, other “non-lethal” munitions, or facial recognition technology at checkpoints. No one has yet to inform Aida’s community leaders about the military’s rules of engagement for the new Terminator gun. But this is to be expected. Did Custer ever explain his military tactics to Sitting Bull?
Going to Massafer Yatta
On the first Friday of the month, we traveled with about 100 members of the Aida Youth Center to help an aged farmer work his land in a highly contested area south of Hebron known as Masafer Yatta.
Last year this Palestinian farmer was attacked by Jewish settlers from a nearby Jews-only settlement encroaching on this man’s agricultural land. The settlers broke both of the farmer’s hands. He was then jailed for 10 days without medical attention. [Nope, none of the settlers were arrested. “Law enforcement” in the West Bank exists to serve the purposes of Zionist settlement not to safeguard the Palestinians being displaced.]
My friend, Munther, had been in contact with this farmer and made arrangements for the young people of Aida Camp to replant his fields and rebuild one of the boundary markers along the border of a dirt roadway.
As the Palestinian teenagers picked up their farming tools, the disabled farmer welcomed everyone to his village. With his black and white kufiya blowing in the wind, he gave us instructions about where to plant the hundreds of starter plants we had brought along with us: grape vines, olive trees, as well as peach and apricot seedlings.
After a hard day’s work, planting and watering hundreds of new seedlings, we moved across a large stretch of rocky ground in order to rebuild the small rock wall demarcating the side of a narrow dirt road, running parallel to the edge of the field.
Now for Some Politics
It did not take long for Jewish settlers to emerge from the nearby Jewish-only settlement. They immediately set about destroying our wall, taking down the rocks we had put into place. They were soon followed by Israeli soldiers determined to chase us out of the area.
You see, Masafer Yatta has been declared an Israeli “military firing zone” which means that civilian occupation and agricultural development are prohibited. Palestinian villages have all received demolition orders, their long-time residents told to evacuate the area. Expulsions and demolitions have been ongoing for a long time.
Israeli authorities insist that the Palestinian residents, most of whom have lived on this land for many generations, often going back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, do not have the proper building permits necessary for them to stay where they are.
It’s a perfect Catch-22. Israel refuses to issue the very permits it requires of Palestinian residents, while also refusing to recognize the Ottoman-era title deeds the people still possess. The Mad Hatter couldn’t have devised a more insanely oppressive system.
The height of Israeli hypocrisy appears in the growth of Zionist, Jewish-only settlements in the very areas from which Palestinians are now being expelled. Declaring regions like Masafer Yatta a “closed military firing zone” is an old tactic used by the Zionist state.
It provides a cover story for the expulsion of the indigenous people who have lived here for generations, while simultaneously making room for more and more Jewish settlers who are apparently immune to the dangers of military firing zones. (Because no firing takes place.)
So a Palestinian farmer is beaten, his hands broken, and his land pillaged, while white settlers descended from recent European immigrants take over the region, building their shiny colonial startup cities with the help of Israeli state funding.
Eventually, we were all forced to leave the area as the Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and a stun grenade into the group of panicking teenagers. Munther, the group’s leader, is committed to nonviolent resistance. He was hectically moving from one spot to another, grabbing stones out of boys’ hands, trying to prevent anyone from throwing rocks at the soldiers.
The young people quickly loaded onto the bus that would take them back to Aida camp. Terry and I rode with Munther who was happy to avoid arrest and Israeli detention.
I wondered how long our plantings would survive. Are any of them still growing? Or have they all been ripped out of the ground by settlers?
Brianna Grier should not have been threatened, much less killed by rough policemen with no regard for her safety.
This latest tragedy is another good argument in favor of Defunding the Police, NOW.
Yes, I know that “Defund” is a terrible name for the movement. But it’s not about taking all funding away from local police. Instead, it is about reallocating a portion of local police budgets to social services.
Services that could more effectively handle situations like Brianna’s
Why must American’s resort to calling the police when a family member has a mental health crisis?
Why do the police treat mentally ill people like criminals?
Why do these policemen have so little regard for the well-being of a young African-American woman?
Why must they drag her across the ground, put her into the back of a patrol car without a seatbelt, and then neglect to close the car door?
Mental illness is not a crime.
And this is negligent homicide, at the very least.
If you missed part 1 of this discussion yesterday you can click here to watch the two brief videos I am discussing now in Part 2.
My primary interest yesterday was offering a critique of a typical, conservative Christian discussion of America’s problem with gun violence and mass shootings. A recent editorial on the Christian Broadcasting Network provides the standard bromides of personal piety, individual reformation, and godly parenting as the redemptive trifecta for cultural transformation in this country.
However, my second analysis is provided by Amy Spitalnick on Democracy Now. Ms. Spitalnick offers a different perspective on changing society by tackling the systemic issues that perpetuate the status quo.
For example, she began an organization which sued the leaders of the various
white supremacist organizations that participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, VA which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer, who was deliberately run over by a car.
Ms. Spitalnick’s organization won over $26 million in damages and succeeded in bankrupting the Nazi organizations involved. Her focus was not on changing people’s hearts or minds, though that may have happened too, but on crippling or eliminating the power blocks — groups, organizations, clubs, networks of people — who were carrying the banners of white replacement theory and chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Her goal was to put the organizations responsible for fomenting Ms. Heyer’s
murder out of commission, and she succeeded.
Christians need to engage in these types of organizational efforts aimed at crippling the seats of power which perpetuate the social evils we believe are in need of correction.
The insistence of the Religious Right in making every social problem an exclusively individualistic issue that can only be addressed through evangelism and personal repentance has never made sense to me.
Folks, it IS possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. The proposed solutions need not be reduced to either/or alternatives. Christian can share
their faith, address the individual needs of broken, corrupted people, while also organizing to disrupt the power structures in our fallen society that harbor racism and white supremacy, simultaneously.
In fact, the conservative evangelical caricature of all social ills as exclusively individualistic diseases does not even describe their own work in these areas. For example, the imminent reversal of Roe vs. Wade is the direct result of evangelicals apply the same structural strategies as Ms. Spitalnick.
Anti-abortion protests are not what grabbed the Supreme Court’s attention. Rather, it was the long-term organizational work of coordinated fund raising and nation-wide litigation efforts, all aiming for the goal of getting anti-abortion cases before the Supreme Court on appeal.
And now that organizational and lobbying and prosecutorial work all appears to have paid off for the anti-abortion movement.
In his important book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford, 2010), author James Davison Hunter convincingly argues that:
Without a fundamental restructuring of the institutions of culture formation and transmission in our society — the market, government-sponsored cultural institutions, education at all levels, advertising, entertainment, publishing, and the news media, not to mention church — revival would have a negligible long-term effect on the reconstitution of the culture. (46)
I believe that professor Hunter is absolutely correct.
So, why do evangelical activists continue to speak out of both sides of their mouths, organizing collectively on the one hand, while insisting that only individual transformations, one person at a time, will ever change the world, on the other?
In part, this schizophrenia reveals the long-term effects of fundamentalist revivalism in the American church. I recently wrote about the paradigmatic role of Dwight L. Moody in steering nineteenth century evangelicals away from political activism while focusing exclusively on personal piety.
That anti-systemic nihilism remains deeply embedded in the conservative, evangelical psyche.
Yet, at the same time, the Republican party turned evangelicals into the anti-abortion movement long ago, knowing that their alliance guaranteed the Republicans millions of guaranteed votes for the foreseeable future.
Beyond this dichotomy, I suspect that evangelical, big-business powerbrokers insist on offering old-fashioned, narrowly pietistic, reductionist solutions to every social ill because maintaining the capitalistic status quo is, finally, far more important to them than effectively reducing gun violence or marginalizing white supremacy.
Everyone has an agenda.
Sadly, for too many “Christians” that agenda does not prioritize the collective love of neighbor as much as it does keeping the powerful in power and the marginalized on the margins.
Waving magical Bible wands while repeatedly mumbling “prayer in public schools, prayer in public schools” is a sufficiently religious sop to keep the collective mind dulled and unthinking.
Enquiring minds won’t want to know because truly enquiring minds are made few and far between. Welcome to the world of the Christian Broadcasting Network.
May I suggest that you change stations and begin watching Democracy Now.
Now that Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted on 5 of the 6 charges against her, important questions remain.
First, will she try to negotiate a reduced sentence by finally revealing the whereabouts of the many incriminating photographs and video tapes of internationally famous figures having sex with minors?
Second, will the fact that she and Jeffrey Epstein were both agents working for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, which used their photographic evidence for the purposes of blackmail, finally be openly discussed?
Actually, I suspect that we can guess the answer to both of my questions: No, and No.
Israeli spy-masters will not allow any of that information to become public.
Rather than tell the story myself, I have posted a montage of stories below — which I hope you will take the time to read closely — explaining the long
story of how spying for Israel became a Maxwell family business, beginning with the family patriarch, Robert Maxwell.
Ghislaine’s career as Jeffrey Epstein’s long-time “Madame of the Honey-Trap” would certainly have made her father proud.
The story begins with father, Robert Maxwell, and his well-reported work for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad (see here, here, and especially here).
Ghislaine’s sister, Isabel, has a long record of working for Israeli
intelligence within the circles of Silicon Valley (see here and here).
A recent book by the “alleged former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe” entitled Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales explains that:
Also see here.
Below I have copied yesterday’s article by Philip Giraldi, former CIA and military intelligence officer, entitled “Ghislaine Maxwell Convicted — Israeli Connection Covered Up.” (All emphases are mine).
There has been a lot of speculation regarding whether convicted sex offender
Ghislaine Maxwell will now ‘spill the beans’ on the folks in power who exploited those young female offerings pedophile Jeffrey Epstein made available. No chance of that, I am afraid, as the trial itself was narrowly construed and limited to certain sex related charges to avoid any inquiry into the names of the actual recipients of the services being provided.
Nor was there any attempt made to determine if Epstein was working on behalf of a foreign intelligence service, most likely Israeli, which has been claimed in a recent book by a former Israeli case officer, who states that top politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls. Afterwards, they would be approached and asked to do favors for Israel. It is referred to in the trade as a “honey-trap” operation.
The fact that Epstein and his activities were being “protected” has also been
confirmed through both Israeli and American sources. It is known that Bill Clinton flew on the Epstein private 727 jet the “Lolita Express” 26 times, traveling to a mansion estate in Florida as well as to a private island owned by Epstein in the Caribbean. The island was referred to by locals as the “Pedophile Island,” but Clinton has never even been questioned by either the NYPD or FBI.
Maxwell is presumed to have been an active participant in the Epstein spy operation acting as a procurer of young girls and on at least one occasion has hinted that she knows where the sex films made by Epstein are hidden. That claim was also not explored in what passed for a trial.
It doesn’t take much to pull what is already known together and ask the question “Who among the celebrities and top-level politicians that Epstein cultivated were actually Israeli spies?” But that, of course, is where the judicial farce and cover-up began. We are in an era of government control of information and have just been witnessing selective management of what Maxwell was being charged with to eliminate any possible damage to senior US politicians or to Israel.
If anyone had actually expected the espionage angle to surface even implicitly during the Maxwell trial, they must now be terribly disappointed because Alison Nathan, the Obama appointed judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York did not allow it, the prosecutor did not seek it, and even the defense attorneys did not use it in their arguments.”
The couple reportedly ran a “honey-trap” operation in which they provided young girls to prominent politicians from around the world for sex, and then used the incidents to blackmail them in order to attain information for Israeli intelligence.