I didn’t intend to write this much. I never do. I’ve just been reading the news and the news is dismal. The kidnapping of soldiers is wrong, no doubt. But the Israeli army has ravaged the Palestinian people for years, years, and more years. By “ravaged” i refer to the rape of women, the killing of children, the shooting of unarmed civilians, the bulldozing of the homes of the poor. Most importantly, there are numerous Palestinians in jail–at least nine thousand–many of them completely and provably innocent. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, equally taken. They, too, have been kidnapped. It is not for me to give you answers but to ask the right questions. One Israeli soldier kidnapped versus thousands of Palestinian civilians illegitimately held in torture-documented jails? Granted, some have committed crimes–even *gasp* terrorism–but what of the equally heinous terrorism committed by Israeli soldiers on a nationwide scale? One reaps what one sows. Why is the killing of Israeli civilians by militants called “terrorism,” whereas the killing of Palestinian ones called “self-defence”? Is Israel “justified” just because they are God’s chosen? Is Israel “right” because they are God’s chosen? My opinion–and it does not have to be yours–is a clear No (and it seems Paul would agree–see Romans).

What is most disappointing to me is Israel’s completely disproportionate response toward Lebanon. In the last few days over 70 civilians were killed in Beirut–in Lebanon’s capital. Beirut’s civilian airport was bombed. Bridges were bombed. CROWDED RESIDENTIAL AREAS were bombed!! RESIDENTIAL AREAS. I can’t believe that. Why bomb civilian crowds as a response to two kidnapped soldiers? And this in the regions not even governed by the group who actually kidnapped the soldiers?

People are getting maimed–not soldiers even! Can you imagine planes from the U.S. flying into Hong Kong airspace, bombing Tsing Ma bridge and a crowded Tai Koo Shing in response to China kidnapping two soldiers? What a preposterous response! What an illogical maneuver! Of course action is necessary. But not the deliberate bombing of civilian targets and civilian residential areas! This does not help one’s case. Stupidity has been given new meaning; Mars, rather than YHWH, is being called upon to “save.”

In light of what is practically an open war maneuver, it looks like the other powers–even if only for face reasons, given their civilians are being attacked–will be forced to launch a military response. >From there, the reasons for going to war will become an irrelevant matter–only the war will matter, each side claiming divine sanction, each side fighting for their honour and sense of self-righteousness, each side playing on the terms laid down by Death–that is, each side trusting in the power of Death to save, and each side trusting in the ways of Death–to live.

Irony indeed.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” I deliberately keep the word “sons” here because in the Hebrew tradition, to be called a son meant more than biological kinship: it meant inheriting the honour, mission, and legacy of one’s father. It meant receiving and taking up his character, and most importantly, continuing the work of his hands. Thus, in calling peacemakers sons of God, Jesus confers on them the title of those who participate in and continue the very work of God in the world (peacemaking which Jesus himself would later epitomize).

Peacemakers–workers for justice and love–follow Christ by offering their own bodies for the sake of reconciliation, and in their willingness to lay down their life for an enemy, they retell the gospel to the world. Peacemakers bear the very character of God for the world to see–and scorn. Peacemakers shout with Ghandi and King that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind!” Their logic seems too simple to be true. “Normality” coerces people to label them as insane–utopian idealists of touch with reality. Yet perhaps it is they who have kept their sanity in a world that has forgotten every language but that of the gun.

“Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Repay no one evil for evil. Do not overcome evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.”

These last few weeks have been weeks of war. Israel; Gaza; Lebanon; Syria; Iran; North Korea. The nations rage and the earth seems to slide around as if on jello, separate and escalating conflicts, yet all eerily recandescent of history.

I have felt helpless, tired, appalled. Incredulous laughter at the reasoning of political leaders has been a daily occurence. I have dropped my jaw at the news reports several times this week. I assume most the Christians I know are praying for Israel, while forgetting the Palestinians. I assume many of them equate the military might of Israel–and its war–with justice and God’s might. I assume most of them have forgotten that when Israel was delivered from oppression, they thought God was giving them license to finally return the favour…and when they did, God “delivered them into the hands of their oppressors.” In the oppression of others, in the mimicing of the ways of their former oppressors, Israel forfeits her separation to God, becoming like the other nations. She is, once again, drunk on the wine of the world superpower, trusting the modern-day Egypt for deliverance, purchasing its armaments and hence buying into its ethos of “might-makes-right” domination and death-worship. Things have not changed.

I have a friend in Gaza. I hope he is okay. We went to college together. He is tall, has black curly hair–an American who grew up in Egypt. Now he is in Gaza–he has been there a while–working for reconciliation and peace between Palestinians and Jews. He is my age.

Whether or not it is a hopeless situation is not the question. He is simply living as a mature human being amidst the frenzy of the principalities in the Fall. He is living in the ethic of resurrection. He is, in a truer sense than me, born again.

But I have not heard from him for a long time.

‘For the first time in the assault, strikes targeted the crowded Shiite residential neighborhoods in south Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah’s leadership.

An initial wave before dawn hit near Hezbollah’s security headquarters and targeted roads, damaging two overpasses. The facades of nearby apartment buildings were shorn away, balconies toppled onto cars and the street was littered by glass from shattered windows. Firefighters struggled to put out several blazes.

A young man with blood pouring down his face was shown on Lebanese TV walking out of a damaged apartment building.’

‘Israel hopes the fighting, which has killed more than 40 Palestinians and an Israeli soldier, eventually will lead to a broader cease-fire deal.’
- AP news excerpts: read full article here

Some of you, especially those in Hong Kong, notice that I say “peace” a lot…it’s usually my goodbye greeting Honestly I prefer the word in Hebrew: shalom–the english word “peace” sounds kind of weak for me.

Now, it may be strange to hear somebody say that peace is NOT weak! Peace connotes weakness and fragility; temporality and unrealism. War is strength; fighting is concrete; conflict is realistic. Peace is a dove, War is a gun. Peace denotes weakness of conviction; war, by contrast, denotes faith–strong belief, self-sureness, and stability of mind. Which is stronger: the barrel of a tank or a white flag?

Peace. When I utter this word I make no reference to a peace of weakness and convictionless compromise. I refer to the shalom that infused Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day. This peace is highly aggressive, perpetually on the offense, its weapon its own body, willing to suffer death rather than take up death’s weapons. It refuses the terms of kill or be killed; it gets in the way of conflict, absorbing hatred into itself and returning, by grace alone, good for evil. It chooses dialogue over the gun; love over revenge; it takes the step back when pride can only push humanity farther toward the brink of self-extinction.

Peace. Ghandi said that violent courage was always preferable to cowardly apathy. Nonviolent peacemaking ought not to attract cowards who had never picked up a gun, but militants who were willing to lay their guns down. “I would pick a violent, courageous person over a nonviolent coward anyday,” he said. “A coward cannot be taught courage, but out of a violent person I can make a nonviolent one.” Peacemaking takes courage; to walk into battle, gunless, with the same dedication as the soldier–to fight and lay down one’s life–is strength. Che Guevara railed against this idea. It was nonsense to him. To a world that has known only war, it is totally illogical. Yet Ghandi, MLK, and countless other movements and movement leaders have found that it is miraculously practical, delivering both the oppressor and the oppressed from evil, and less costly–yes, in terms of human life–than war.

Peace. I began saying this as a political utterance, a reminder to myself of the coming reign of God, the city of God, the city of Shalom, and the coming judgment on seemingly impervious and blasphemous powers. It is a rich word for me, and I took it up as sacrament rather than fashion. I have said it once and I will say it again: peace is not at ALL just the absence of conflict. It is not a name for a negative state of being, a minus sign. On the contrary, it is the full, abiding, overflowing presence of justice and love. Peace is not just “harmonious.” To the world that is all it is. Frailty. Temporality. Compromise. Absence. But God presents to us a better peace than that. Shalom. Shalom is love and justice to the hilt, diffusing throughout society like yeast in dough.

That’s right. I’m going to say something about it…

So I have been extremely, yet quietly disturbed with a lot of the news coverage that I’m seeing. I guess part of the quietness is that I’m in Hong Kong and very few here would understand what I was thinking. But I have been very disturbed at the coverage. The analysis is horrendously shallow, full of euphemism and coded language to avoid the full truth that it is not just the “poor” who are stranded without food and water; not just the “underclass;” but a community defined by their race: black-Americans. Papers that have used the word “black” to describe the victims have done so gingerly, almost reluctantly.. Yet race (and the unequal system that long ago defined your available escape routes from Katrina) is the unmistakable faultline dividing those who had access to leave New Orleans and those who didn’t. Still, most papers, out of fear and/or ignorance, have resorted to speaking of the victims in more neutral, and frankly, more “acceptable” terms, such as class. Such language skirts what is perhaps the city’s deepest wound of injustice: individual and structural racism. To blacks in New Orleans it is no secret that a long history of racist laws and attitudes has been defining their “access”—where they can go, with whom, and when—for generations. Yet only in Katrina has the terrible truth of their “inaccess” been so literally and outrageously played out. The lingering injustice has been well hidden for decades by the government and even the media; yet in Katrina’s aftermath the racial faultlines now lie fully exposed, the covers pulled right off of them.

Except…no newspapers seem to see it! Rather than being openly exposed as a travesty that must finally meet its end, existing racial stereotypes are being staunchly upheld and chillingly re-inforced as truth. (more…)