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Beyond Religious Nationalism
There are numerous organizations holding conferences and meeting, circulating petitions, making statements, and collecting prominent names to condemn Christian Nationalism. Coalitions and religious entities have been coalescing to resist what is being portrayed as an almost new and alarming phenomenon that is gripping the US’s cultural, political, and theological landscape with sharpened and ravenous claws. Though I fundamentally agree with those concerns I have some reservations about the timing and sense of urgency.

One of my questions is how closely are the concerns of these groups designed to coincide with the upcoming presidential elections? Is the timing of the objections, and the sense of urgency surrounding Christian Nationalism more allied with the Democratic Party instead of with the theological and ideological ethics and implications of Christian Nationalist in and of itself.

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Outside Agitators: How the Power Elite Talk About Dissent

“The phrases and statements used to justify police action against Columbia University students supporting Palestine is a blast from the past. The blast is not a hopeful one, or one that demonstrates how far we have come as a country. Instead, it demonstrates the more things change the more they remain the same. I heard Eric Adams, Mayor of New York City, justifying police action at Columbia by citing the urgency to act because of “Outside Agitators”. These “Outside Agitators”, the rationale goes, infiltrated the student movement at Columbia and spurred them to more extreme actions. These actions would not have happened, the reasoning continues, had it not been for those “Outsiders”. You can hear a stereotypical Southern Sheriff with a beer belly mumbling, ‘our “Ns”, and in this case Columbia students are happy-go-lucky, and don’t make no trouble outside of the usual rowdiness. But Adams is no Southern Sheriff of the 1950s and 60s, but instead a Black man running a major northern police department. It appears that he took a step back in time, and appropriated a classical fascist and segregationist response to dissent. The statement implies that people don’t have a mind to think on their own, or know what they are feeling, or see what they see unless some “Outside Agitator” tells them what to think, feel, and how to interpret their perception. This response beliefs that people are children to be controlled, and most certainly do not have agency of their own.”

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Thousands of Gazans have gone missing. No one is accounting for them.

By Miriam Berger and Hajar Harb

March 16, 2024 at 2:00 a.m. EDT

JERUSALEM — A teenager who sold cigarettes. A singer on the rise. An engineer at a local bottling plant. They are among thousands who have been reported missing in Gaza.

Many disappeared under the rubble after airstrikes. Others are believed to have been detained at Israeli checkpoints while fleeing south or trying to return to the north. Some simply left one day and never came back.

Their desperate families search hospitals and contact hotlines set up by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Theyscour photos of bodies in the streets and of blindfolded men detained by Israeli forces. They share pictures of relatives online, pleading for leads.

From October through February, the ICRC received reports of 5,118 Palestinians missing in Gaza. The Washington Post interviewed 15 people who lost contact with friends and family in Gaza since Oct. 7 — in only two cases were they able to find them. The most painful part, many said, was being in the dark about their fate.

“We hoped that we would succeed in getting even the most basic information,” said Ahmed Jalal, whose brother-in-law Mahmoud Abu Hani, a 25-year-old singer of traditional Arab music, disappeared Feb. 3 while trying to return home to Gaza City.

“Being lost is harder than him having been killed in the war or detained,” Jalal said. “When you are lost, no one knows anything.”

Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the devastating Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, has killed more than 31,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians but says the majority of the dead are women and children. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimates it has killed between 11,500 and 13,000 militants, as it seeks to eradicate Hamas from the enclave.

The ministry relies mostly on reports from hospitals for its death counts. With the enclave’s medical system in shambles, Palestinian health officials say many more deaths have gone unrecorded. Roads are impassable and communication networks are unreliable. Israel, meanwhile, will not disclose the identities of the hundreds of residents rights groups believe its forces have detained.

Israel’s government warned that Hamas “is continuing to hold to unrealistic demands” as it prepared to review the latest cease-fire proposal Friday. A ship carrying 200 tons of food — the first attempt to deliver aid by way of a maritime corridor — began offloading its cargo into Gaza on Friday.

The IDF did not comment for this story, but has said previously that “suspects of terrorist activities” in Gaza are arrested and “brought to Israeli territory for further investigation.” Those found not to be involved in terrorist activity are sent back to Gaza, the military has said, and those who remain in detention are treated in accordance with Israeli law.

There has been no systematic effort to account for the missing. Last Friday, five months into the war, Gaza’s Health Ministry published a Google form to start collecting names of the dead and missing.

Under the rubble

In the initial weeks of Israel’s air campaign, the missing were mainly believed to be trapped, dead or alive, under rubble.

Mohammed Bassal, a spokesman for the civil defense emergency services in Gaza, estimates that 8,000 bodies remain in the wreckage. During the first months of the war, rescue teams raced to strike sites when they could. But without proper equipment, he said, they were often left to dig people out by hand — or not at all.

Bassal says his teams in Gaza City rarely find full bodies now, instead uncovering partial remains — most decomposed and unidentifiable.

Ghada al-Kurd, 38, believes her brother, Safwat, his wife, Maysoon, and their10-year-old daughter, Habiba, are among those lost in the ruins.

Kurd’s sister called Nov. 19 to say that a missile had struck the three-story house where their brother was staying in the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. At first, neighbors said no one was home. Then they saw legs protruding from the rubble.

But without heavy equipment, Kurd said by phone from Rafah, rescuers “were unable to recover them, and they are still missing.” The family is not in the health ministry’s official list of the dead.

Ghada Isaa, who lives in the town of Salfit in the occupied West Bank, last heard from her sister, Wifa’a Alamoor, in Gaza City on Nov. 8. The 50-year-old had no immediate family left in the enclave, Issa said.

Israel’s military bombed Alamoor’s neighborhood near al-Shifa Hospital, saying it was targeting Hamas fighters in the area. Her landlord, who lives abroad, told Isaa the apartment next door was hit. Was her sister there?

“I don’t know,” said Isaa. “There was no one with her. No one to go look for her.”

“God willing, we will find her,” she said. “In the end we all die, but we must know her fate.”

Suspected Israeli detentions

When Israel invaded Gaza in late October, it directed residents in the northern part of the territory to flee south. Raed Halabi, a 30-year-old programmer, heeded the order. His brother, Mahmoud, was traveling with him and says he was detained by Israeli forces.

On Nov. 15, according to Mahmoud, the brothers approached the main Israeli checkpoint, called Netzarim, on the Salah al-Din highway.

“The Israeli soldier called him over on the microphone,” Mahmoud said. Raed’s wife and three children were also there. “They said, ‘Give your son to his mom and come.’”

Raed complied, Mahmoud said. It was the last his family saw of him.

“We are civilians,” his brother said. “He didn’t have any connection with [militant groups].”

Mahmoud contacted the ICRC. But Israel has denied the organization access to its detention centers since Oct. 7. Hamas has also refused the ICRC’s requests to visit Israelis kidnapped by the group on Oct. 7. More than 100 remain in captivity in Gaza.

“We understand the immense pain of family members who are anxiously waiting for news of their loved one, and the frustration when this doesn’t happen in a timely manner,” said ICRC spokeswoman Sarah Davies.

Ziad Musa, 26, has “no trust” that any humanitarian organization will help his friend, Adel Abu Aisha.

“They have left civilians behind,” he said.

Abu Aisha, an engineer at a Coca Cola bottling facility, disappeared during an Israeli raid two months ago in Gaza City, Musa said. He suspects he was detained.

The IDF did not respond to questions about Aisha and Halabi.

The Israeli rights group HaMoked has received reports of 425 Gazans, nearly all men, believed to have been detained since late October, according to executive director Jessica Montell. Israeli authorities, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly rejected HaMoked’s petitions for the information to be made public, Montell said.

“We have been trying to get an answer to the very simple question of who is the address for a response to the status of Gaza detainees,” she said. “We are not able to provide any relief to these families.”

Lost and ‘left behind’

Mahmood Abu Hani, the singer, made it safely from Gaza City to Nuseirat in the center of the enclave early in the war. Last month he tried to return home, and vanished.

“He said people were going home as there were no soldiers on the way,” said his sister, Haleema Abu Hani. He “left Gaza City without any clothes or anything. It was winter and he was sleeping in a tent.”

Heleft around 8 a.m.Somewhere past Wadi Gaza, which divides the enclave’s northern and southern regions, his phone died or was turned off. His family has heard nothing from him since.

There have been reunions, too, amid the chaos of war.

For a nerve-racking month, Shadyal-Hasoumy said, the family feared the worst for his10-year-old nephew Yousef. The third-grader was separated from his family Nov. 18 at the chaotic Netzarim checkpoint.

The family continued south. The scared boy headed back north.

But “the people around him tried to help,” al-Hasoumy said. A family took Yousef in. After a month of calls between communication outages, the Hasoumys found him.

Two more months passed before the boy could make it safely to Rafah and reunite with his family, Shady said.

In that span, more people went missing.

“With every [Israeli military] ground entry into areas, we receive hundreds of appeals for missing family members,” Bassalsaid.

Ziad Sabah, 23, disappeared early Feb. 13 in Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza. He was “bored and wanted to take a walk,” said his father, Mohammed.

Ziad has schizophrenia, his father said, and his symptoms worsened after he was pulled from the rubble of a strike in November. Now the family wonders: Did heget lost? Was he aggressive at a checkpoint? Is he even still alive?

Similar questions torment the al-Masry family.

Haitham, 17, left the U.N. school in Rafah where the family was sheltering on Feb. 11 to sell cigarettes at a market, his father Mohammed said. He never returned.

A Post reporter was the first person to call about his son, al-Masry said last week.

“Do you have any news?
“If Everything is Antisemitic then Nothing Is”

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Read the article on the “Anti-Woke” Warriors, and why it is not new. It is the pre and Civil War angst around the erosion of white supremacy.

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Elliott Abrams is a nightmare, and read why we oppose his nomination to the State Department’s Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

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There is a tacit agreement that exists in the United States that affirms white supremacy, and when that covenant is challenged the nation goes haywire. This article appeared in Radical Discipleship.

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Our understanding of God is distorted and controlled by those seeking to maintain power without question or analysis. This article, “Freeing God be God,” appeared in Radical Discipleship.

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Israel’s hypocrisy and deceptive claims of democracy are exposed through its continuous occupation and genocidal practices against Palestinians. It is time for supporters of Israel to break their silence and demand justice. End Israel’s apartheid. This article appeared on Mondoweiss.

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When FOX fired Tucker Carlson they were covering their behind! Racial biases and proponents of snickering hatred must be challenged and stopped.

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Conversation on WPFW-FM with Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei, Director of The Gaza Mental Health Program
The Morning After the Mid-Term Elections – Analysis and Commentary with Rev. Traci Blackmon, Rev. William Lamar, IV and Mr. Terry Lynch
Speaking with Ariel Gold, Executive Director, Fellowship of Reconciliation. Aired on WPFW FM 89.3 on September 14, 2022

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It Is Harder to End a War Than Begin One

Twenty years ago planes crashed into the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennslyvania. There was disbelief, weeping, and shock as people in the affected areas lookied for their loved ones. There was a deep eeriness in the air, and grief and disbelief set in, and then the tone began to shift to revenge and retribution. Chants began to arise like “USA! USA! USA!” Politicans and preachers began to use the phrase “God bless America,” as if America was somehow more deserving of God’s blessings than anywhere else. Three days later I was speaking on the phone with an insurance company representative about a personal matter, and the insurnace represenatative paused the call so that the entire office could sing “God Bless America.” It was a time, a moment, and a setting that the American public could be conjoled and sold anything seemingly patriotic and it was. The military went into Afghanistan to dislodge Al Queda, and it stayed to create a new government and country. Something that the Soviets had tried to do previously. But that wasn’t enough because the neo-cons and the defensive contractors with the military industrialists decided that it was an opportunity to reconstruct a region in our own image, to control the natural resources of the region, and to create governments loyal to the interest of the west and particularly the US. The US invaded Iraq under false pretenses as a result. If you remember there were claims of weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was offering asylum to Al Queda, and any other excuse to invade Iraq, disassemble a nation and attempt to reassemble one in the image and imagination of the US. If the US controlled Afghanistan and Iraq then with the assistance of their client state, Israel, could put maximum pressure on Iran for its surrender. All of this failed. Twenty years later the US has left Afghanistan in failure, watching the cities and towns of the country fall to the Taliban without resistance.
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