April 6, 2023
This is a talk I gave on April 6 at a protest at Princeton Theological Seminary demanding the removal of hedge fund billionaire Michael Fisch as chair of the seminary's trustee board.
We are not here to debate
the moral squalor that defines the life of the hedge fund billionaire and chair
of the seminary’s trustee board, Michael Fisch.
We are not here to denounce
him for the personal fortune, reportedly worth at least $10 billion, a fortune
he built preying on the poorest among us, those families that went into debt to
pay his prison telecommunications company’s exorbitant fees which charge up to
$15 for 15-minute calls, fees that see families across the U.S. pay $1.4
billion each year to speak to incarcerated loved ones.
We are not here to decry
the pain he and his corporation ViaPath, formerly Global Tel Link, caused to
hundreds of thousands of children, desperate to speak to an incarcerated mother
or father, to tell them about school, or that they miss them, that they need to
hear their voice to know everything will be okay, that they are loved.
We are not here to contrast
the lives of these children, bewildered at the cruelty of this world, living in
dilapidated apartments in inner city projects, with the feudal opulence of
Michael Fisch’s life, his three mansions worth $100 million lined up on the
same ritzy street in the East Hamptons, his art collection worth over $500
million, his Fifth Avenue apartment worth $21 million and his four-story Upper
East Side townhouse. So many luxury dwellings that sit empty much of the time,
no doubt, while over half a million Americans are homeless.
Greed is not rational. It
devours because it can. It knows only one word — more.
No, we are here today to
call out the Pharisees that run this seminary, the ones who speak about loving
the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized, in the abstract, but who really
love the rich, including the rich who make their fortunes by exploiting the
families of students in prison I teach in the Rutgers college degree program,
students, many of whom should have never been imprisoned, who are victims of
our system of neo-slavery.
We are here today to call
out the liberal church, so quick to wrap itself in the cloak of virtue and so
quick to sell virtue out when it conflicts with monetary interests and requires
self-sacrifice.
Is it any mystery that the
liberal church is dying? Is it any mystery that its seminaries and divinity
schools are contracting and closing? The church bleeds itself to death
sustaining moribund institutions and paying the salaries of church bureaucrats
and seminary presidents who speak in the empty and vague gibberish that Lee
Walton, the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, uttered when presented
with the fact that Michael Fisch, and all he stands for, is antithetical to the
Christian gospel.
This false piety, and the
smug arrogance that comes with it, is killing the church, turning it into a
museum piece.
Is Black Lives Matter a
commodity, a piece of branding, or does it mean we will stand with those Black
and Brown and Asian and white bodies in our prison gulags and internal
colonies?
This seminary may have
removed the name of Samuel Miller — a slaveholder who used the gospel to
perpetrate and defend a crime of Nazi-like proportions —from the seminary
chapel, albeit only when students protested, but it embraces a billionaire who
makes his fortune fleecing incarcerated men and women who work 40 hour weeks in
prison and are paid, when they are paid, little more than a dollar a day.
Prisons are modern day
plantations, and not surprisingly, a multi-billion dollar a year business for
oligarchs such as Michael Fisch.
Crushing the Social Gospel
The wealthy industrialists
in the 1930s and 1940s poured money and resources into the church, including
seminaries such as Princeton Theological, to crush the Social Gospel, led by
Christian radicals and socialists. They funded a brand of Christianity — which
today is dominant — that conflates faith with free enterprise and American
exceptionalism.
The church has gone down
the rabbit hole of a narcissistic how-is-it-with-me form of spirituality. The
rich are rich, this creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not
because they use their power to exploit others, but because they are brilliant
and gifted leaders, worthy of being lionized, like Bill Gates or Jamie Dimon,
as oracles.
This belief is not only
delusional, but Christian heresy. The word heresy comes from the Greek verb
hireo, which means to grasp or to seize — to seize for yourself at someone
else’s expense. You don’t need to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School
as I did, to figure out Jesus did not come to make us rich.
The liberal church
committed suicide when it severed itself from this radicalism. Radical
Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the Anti-Imperialist
League, defended workers during bloody labor wars, fought for women’s suffrage,
formulated the Social Gospel — which included campaigns for prison reform and
educational programs for the incarcerated — and were engines in the civil
rights and anti-war movements.
The socialist presidential
candidate Eugene V. Debs spent far more
time quoting the Bible than Karl Marx. His successor, Norman Thomas, was a
Presbyterian minister.
These radicals were not
embraced by the institutional church, which served as a bulwark of the
establishment, but they kept the church vital and prophetic. They made it
relevant. Radicals were and are its hope.
James Baldwin, who grew up
in the church and was briefly a preacher, said he abandoned the pulpit to
preach the Gospel. The Gospel, he knew, was not heard most Sundays in Christian
houses of worship. And today with ministers wary of offending their aging and
dwindling flocks — who are counted on to pay the clergy salary and bills — this
is even truer than when Baldwin was alive.
This is not to say that the
church does not exist. This is not to say that I reject the church. On the
contrary. The church today is not located inside the stone buildings that
surround us or the cavernous, and largely empty houses of worship, but here,
with you.
It is located with those
who work in prisons, schools and shelters, those who organize fast food
workers, who serve the undocumented, who form night basketball leagues in poor
communities, as my divinity school classmate Michael Granzen did in Elizabeth,
New Jersey, and who are arrested at anti-fracking and anti-war protests.
Billionaires like Michael
Fisch will never fund this church, the real church. But we do not need his
money. To truly stand with the oppressed is to accept being treated like the
oppressed. It is to understand that the fight for justice demands
confrontation.
We do not always find
happiness, but we discover in this resistance a strange kind of joy and
fulfillment, a life of meaning and worth, one that mocks the tawdry opulence
and spiritual void of billionaires like Michael Fisch, those who spend their
lives building pathetic little monuments to themselves.
We must remain rooted in
this radicalism, this commitment to the crucified of the earth. We must always
demand, even at the cost of our own comfort and safety, justice. We may not
always triumph over evil, but our faith means evil will never triumph over us.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The
New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan
bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas
Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges
Report.”
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Iran kickstarts multi-front Middle East war against Israel –
analysis
April
8, 2023
[Blogger’s Notes:
with this article in a paper which is the mouthpiece of the Israeli government,
the Jewish State is getting ready to attack Iran, which may be the start of
WWIII, since Israel is the United States’ war-starter.]
A week
of attacks on Israel, including rockets fired from Lebanon, Gaza and Syria,
represents the manifestation of an Iranian strategy to confront Israel with
multiple threats on different fronts. Although different groups may be behind
the attacks from those places, these groups are likely all linked to Iran. The
groups involved include Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and others that may go
by different or new names, but which are proxies of Tehran.
Iran
has long sought to bring its conflict with Israel to the Jewish state’s
borders. Its backing of Hezbollah and Hamas was key to that strategy over the
decades. For instance, Tehran supplies Hamas with financial support and also
helped it develop longer-range rockets and a larger arsenal. Whereas Hamas
rockets could once only travel a few kilometers, now they can reach most parts
of Israel.
The
Islamic Republic also supported Islamic Jihad, which is even more of an Iranian
proxy than Hamas. The group not only has an arsenal thought to include
thousands of rockets, but it has gunmen in the West Bank and its leadership
often resides in Damascus.
Hezbollah:
Iran's key ally in the multi-front war
Hezbollah
is the largest of Iran’s key allies in the region. An organization with origins
as far back as the 1980s, it was backed by the post-Shah then-new Islamic
revolutionary regime of Tehran, and was able to build up a presence in Southern
Lebanon.
The
Lebanese terrorist group’s power has also grown exponentially since then. It
not only has an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets, but it has developed more
sophisticated systems, such as precision-guided munitions. Along with Hamas, it
also has drones that it has used to target Israel and to threaten energy
exploration off the coast.
While
Hamas has been mostly penned into Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal from the
coastal enclave and the group’s victory in Palestinian elections, it now
appears to be increasingly able to operate from Lebanon – with Hezbollah’s
approval.
The
fact that Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh flew to Lebanon on April 5, a day before
34 rockets were fired at Israel from there, shows how it has increased its
presence. Hamas cannot fire rockets or operate from southern Lebanon without
coordination with Hezbollah.
The
rockets that were fired at Israel on April 6 were fired in broad daylight near
Tyre. This is an area where Hezbollah has a presence. Last year, Hezbollah
killed a UN Irish peacekeeper in Lebanon’s Al-Aqbieh north of Tyre. In May
2021, rockets were also fired at Israel from near the village of Seddiqine,
also in the Tyre district.
Hezbollah
has increased its operations abroad in recent years. This includes networks
that stretch to West Africa and South America. The most important development
is its operations in Syria, which began in 2012 in support of the Syrian
regime. Hezbollah has moved forces to areas near the Golan, an area known as
the group’s “Golan file,” according to reports from the Alma Research and
Education Center, which covers threats in the North of Israel.
In
2019, Hezbollah even brought drones to this area to threaten the Jewish state.
The threat was neutralized.
Other
elements of Iran’s threats to Israel include militias in Syria and Iraq. These
include the Iraqi-based Popular Mobilization Units and their factions such as
Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Iran flew a drone into Israeli airspace
from Iraq in May 2021. It also launched a drone at Israel last week from Syria.
Iran’s
idea for a multi-front war is not new. It has been boasting in recent months
about how Israel is internally collapsing, and it signaled that it wants to
increase its threats. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Sunday
that this year its power will grow compared to Israel’s. Jerusalem also carried
out drills in May 2022 in preparation for the threat of a multi-front war. At
the time, estimates said Israel’s adversaries could fire 1,500 rockets a day at
the Jewish state.
Iran’s
entrenchment in Syria
The
multi-front war is made possible by Iran’s entrenchment in Syria. In the past,
it could threaten Israel using Hezbollah in Lebanon or Islamic Jihad in the
West Bank and Gaza, and Hamas in Gaza. Israel has launched operations to
neutralize the Jihad and Hamas threats in the past. Since last year, it has
also been battling Jihad gunmen in Jenin and other Palestinian factions that
are emboldened against the Jewish state.
Israel
has generally tried to isolate these threats, or at least manage these
conflicts. Overall, it has concentrated more heavily on the Iranian threat and
containing Iranian entrenchment in Syria. This operation has been called the
“War Between the Wars” campaign and it has gone on for several years, involving
many airstrikes on sites in Syria. This has also involved larger operations
such as Operation House of Cards in Syria in 2018. Islamic Jihad was also
targeted there in November 2019.
Nevertheless,
the Iranian threat has not gone away and its proxies and allies appear to have
begun a multi-front conflict with Israel over the past week. This involved the
Iranian drone operation on April 1, Gaza rocket fire from April 5-7 and 34
rockets fired at Israel from Lebanon on Passover, April 6. In addition, there
was rocket fire from Syria on April 8 and 9. There were also shooting attacks
in the West Bank and a drone launched from Gaza on April 3.
When
one looks at the larger picture, the Iranian octopus of partners and groups is
seeking to threaten Israel from multiple areas. This is also unprecedented in
terms of the rocket fire from Lebanon and Syria over such a small period of
time. In general, peace has prevailed along the Lebanese border since 2006. Now
Iran is showing it can heat up any border using various groups whenever it
wants to.
AFP
April
8, 2023
A Saudi
delegation arrived in Tehran Saturday to discuss reopening its diplomatic
missions in the Islamic republic, two days after a historic meeting in Beijing
between their foreign ministers.
The
visit follows the unprecedented meeting between their heads of diplomacy in
China on Thursday after they agreed last month to restore diplomatic ties.
The
Saudi diplomatic delegation arrived in Iran to discuss the reopening of its
missions after a seven-year absence, Riyadh's foreign ministry said.
Cited
by the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA), the minister called the visit part of
"implementing the tripartite agreement" reached on March 10 between
the two regional powers, brokered by China, to restore ties ruptured in 2016.
The
two longtime Middle East rivals have now pledged to work together.
When
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and his Iranian counterpart
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met in Beijing on Thursday they vowed to bring
security and stability to the turbulent Gulf region.
"The
two sides emphasised the importance of following up on the implementation of
the Beijing Agreement and its activation in a way that expands mutual trust and
the fields of cooperation and helps create security, stability and prosperity
in the region," a joint statement said.
On
Saturday, a Saudi "technical delegation" met Iran's chief of
protocol, Mehdi Honardoust, at the foreign ministry in Tehran, SPA said.
-
Turbulent region -
The
two countries severed ties after protesters in the Islamic republic attacked
Saudi diplomatic missions following Riyadh's execution of a prominent Shiite
cleric.
The
shock rapprochement between mainly Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, the world's
biggest oil exporter, and Shiite-majority Iran, strongly at odds with Western
governments over its nuclear activities, has the potential to reshape relations
across a region characterised by turbulence for decades.
Under
last month's agreement, the two countries are to reopen their embassies and
missions within two months and implement security and economic cooperation
deals signed more than 20 years ago.
Iranian
President Ebrahim Raisi has also been invited by Saudi King Salman to Riyadh, a
trip planned to take place after the holy fasting month of Ramadan which ends
later in April.
The
United States has for decades been the key diplomatic power in the Middle East
and has an alliance, albeit a frequently strained one, with Saudi Arabia.
Washington
has cautiously welcomed the rapprochement between the Saudis and US adversary
Iran despite the role of China, which it sees as its biggest global challenger.
Iran
and Saudi Arabia vie for influence in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.
They
also support rival sides in several conflict zones across the region, including
in Yemen, where Huthi rebels are backed by Tehran and Riyadh leads a military
coalition supporting the government.
In
a separate development on Saturday, Omani mediators arrived in the Yemeni
capital Sanaa to discuss a new truce between the Iran-backed Huthi rebels and
Saudi Arabia, an airport source said.
Diplomatic
efforts to resolve the conflict have multiplied since the Chinese-brokered
Saudi-Iran deal to restore relations.
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