Chris Hedges: Sermon for Gaza

 

Chris Hedges: Sermon for Gaza

This is a sermon the author gave Sunday, April 28 at a service held at the encampment for Gaza at Princeton University. The service was organized by students from Princeton Theological Seminary. Read here...

excerpt: 

In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.

These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits — a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy.

They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. I set my life by the standards they set.

You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague.

Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Iganacio Ellacuria, who was gunned down by the death squads in El Salvador in 1989.

And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.

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.

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An Israeli Ambassador
& the Failure of Media

New Zealand national broadcaster TVNZ had a chance to hold Israel’s ambassador to New Zealand to account. What transpired was hard to look at, writes Mick Hall. Read here...

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Patrick Lawrence:
The Impotence of Antony Blinken

With the U.S. unable to compete in the EV market and desperate in Ukraine, the Secretary of State traveled to China to talk at Beijing for his domestic audience. Read here...

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