UN Charter: Article 51 – About Things That Matter

Readings for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Exodus 22: 20-26; Psalm 18, 2-4, 47, 51; 1 Thessalonians 1: 5c-10; Matthew 22: 34-40

Thank God for Hamas.

Yes, thank God for Hamas. At least that’s what I’m thinking. Hamas could be the unlikely agent of God’s revelation.

That Hamas possesses such agency seems likely in the light of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions in general and in that of the liturgical readings for this Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time. All three can enable discerning people of faith to see past western propaganda to what Hamas is actually up to. Hamas is lifting the veil to help us identify who’s responsible for most of the world’s problems. It’s the United States and Israel. Both represent brutal criminal enterprises.

That’s my two-point message for today. it’s one that we’d do well to let into our consciousness blinded by nonstop propaganda that hates Muslims and the poor, that hates non-whites, and those who dare to defend themselves against imperialists, colonialists, and racists.

So, don’t expect here the de rigueur denunciation of Hamas’ “atrocities.” In terms of freedom and justice for Palestine’s oppressed, that requirement is deceptively counterproductive. It creates a detestable false equivalency between the tactics of resistance fighters on the one hand and the infinitely worse barbarisms of their overlords on the other. Once again, it ends up justifying Israel’s slaughter of their concentration camp captives.

[By the way, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, Munir Akram, recently said something like that to the General Assembly. He refused to criticize Hamas unless Israel was also criticized as the root cause of the crisis in Israel-Palestine. But, of course, the U.S. and Israel refused to allow such critique. (Be sure to view Akram’s speech above.)]

No, my points for us living within a nearly impenetrable “veil of ignorance” are to affirm that (1) Hamas may well be the agent of God’s revelation, and (2) the scriptural traditions of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions suggest that strongly.

Hamas

To begin with what do we know of Hamas? I mean, what do we really know that’s not filtered through western (i.e., through imperial and colonial) propaganda machines?

The answer is, “almost nothing!”

Think about it. What we know of Hamas comes from its inveterate enemies. It’s like getting information from the Nazis about Jews in the 1930s. And we fall for it every time. I think Goebbels said something about that.

In other words, our information about Hamas comes from proven compulsive liars (like the colonialist Benjamin Netanyahu, the imperialist Joe Biden, and their lackey press corps). Uniformly, they tell us:

Hamas represents “pure unadulterated evil.”
Simply put, they are “terrorists.”
There is no distinction between them and the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza.
All of them (including women, children, and even infants) are guilty.
After all, they elected Hamas to govern them in 2006.
That proves that all Gazans are inhuman. They’re simply animals. They have no human rights. Yes, they’re beasts and can be treated as such.
The Hamas violence on October 7^th provides further evidence.
It came out of the blue and was “unprovoked.”
Hamas cadres wantonly killed innocent young people spraying them down with machine gun bullets at a rave dance. (Nothing about crossfire.)
Unlike Apartheid-Israelis who hold more than a thousand Palestinians in custody (often without charge) Hamas has no right to take political prisoners.
After all, hostages and political prisoners are not the same.
Hamas militants even beheaded infants and children. Joe Biden said he saw the photos. (Later, his team “walked that back.”)
They raped women. (No evidence. Again, a claim “walked back.”)
Their rockets, not Apartheid-Israelis, destroyed a Gazan hospital. (Without investigation, Joe Biden believes that too – on the word of the highly principled Benjamin Netanyahu.)
They’re worthy of condemnation because they have chosen violence over the non-violent tactics so obviously favored by virtuous Apartheid-Israelis and Apartheid-Americans. [Nothing about Palestinians’ non-violent “Great March of Return” (2018), Apartheid-Israel’s brutal response killing hundreds, and the general lack of coverage in the west’s mainstream media.]

That’s what we know about Hamas. Am I right or wrong?

And every one of those allegations is a lie or at best a prevarication containing a tiny grain of truth. Every one of them!

I won’t waste my time or yours debunking them one-by-one. You can find that information elsewhere.

Instead, let me tell you briefly what we’re never told about Hamas. (You can find all this on Wikipedia):

To begin with, it is a political organization democratically elected by the people of Gaza in 2006.
It is also a religiously inspired social services collective that funds welfare projects helping people survive the hardships of hostile governments throughout the Middle East.
It represents a kind of Islamic theology of liberation that (in the name of the biblical and Koranic God of the poor) serves the impoverished and embraces the right to revolution recognized by Article 51 of the UN Charter.
For instance, in Gaza, Hamas provides food, water, medical and rent assistance for residents. It funds nurseries, schools, orphanages, soup kitchens, women’s activities, library services, and sporting clubs. That’s the foundation of its popular support.
And, of course, Hamas also has a powerful military wing to defend Gazans from the atrocities that Apartheid-Israelis have routinely inflicted on Palestinians for the last 70 years.
As such, according to international law, it enjoys the legitimacy accorded those resisting illegal occupation by foreign powers. (As illegal occupiers and aggressors, Apartheid-Israelis have no such corresponding rights.)
With all that in mind, Hamas atrocities turn out to be no different (except in their lesser severity) from those of the Apartheid-Israelis which preceded and followed upon them.
In the Palestinian case, they are acts of anger and vengeance for a whole series of brutalities inflicted upon them by their oppressors for the last 70 years. Those acts are far more understandable and justifiable than the acts of Apartheid-Israel that preceded and followed them.

Agent of Revelation

Moreover, (and this is a principal point in this homily) whatever you might think of its tactics today, Hamas is functioning as the agent of God’s revelation as articulated in this Sunday’s readings.

And here I’m using the word “revealing” in its etymological sense – removing the veil.

That is, (according to Scott Ritter ) Hamas has forced Apartheid-Israel and Apartheid-America to show their true colors. As a result, we finally see the blood drenched palette every day on our TVs. Simply put, the colonizer and its imperial sponsor have revealed themselves as brutal reincarnations of that other genocidal European force whose name can barely be printed in the mass media. Apartheid-Israel and Apartheid-America are revealing themselves to be racist, white supremacist, and N*zis.

According to Ritter, such revelation is what Hamas’ strategy is all about. They desperately realized that the settler invasions and occupations of Palestinian lands coupled with Israel’s Abraham Accords with surrounding Arab nations signaled a window closing on any hopes for an independent Palestinian state.

So, Hamas decided to force Israel’s and America’s brutal hands. They took up arms against their concentration camp captors. And the captors reacted in exactly the way Hamas knew they would – by bombing the concentration camp itself. Their keepers responded with wholesale slaughter of women and children – with obvious war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and outright genocide.

And the world finally noticed. The Hamas tactic worked. Everyone (outside the western bubble) now sees Israel and the United States for the criminal enterprises they are.

Both the latter claim to embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s all hypocrisy.

Just read today’s first selection from the Book of Exodus. It’s so short and to the point that I risk quoting its first paragraph verbatim here:

“Thus says the LORD: ‘You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.’” (Ex 22:20-26).

And then there’s today’s Gospel selection from Matthew. Confronting the upperclass Pharisees and Sadducees whom the Jewish Yeshua saw as blaming the victims of the Romans (in the case of the Pharisees) and directly cooperating with their imperial oppressors (in the case of the Sadducees) he reminds them that they must love those they despised. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he says.

Those words expressed the Christ’s mystic insight that all humans are one single entity. We are all equally “chosen.” We are more than brothers and sisters. Our neighbor is Our Self. In killing Palestinian women and children, elders, teachers, doctors, nurses, first responders – and Hamas supporters – we are committing suicide. We’re killing our common indwelling Spirit.

All that promises to become even more apparent as Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues while the whole world is watching. The horrific revelation will continue.

Conclusion

So, yes, I’ll dare to say it: thank God for Hamas. Yes, it’s removing our veil of ignorance. In that sense, it is the agent of God’s re-veil-ation. The thousands and thousands Apartheid-Israel is executing before our eyes are martyrs reminiscent of the early Christians. They are revealers too.

The world’s poor, the Global majority living in the West’s former colonies and current neo-colonies see that more clearly than any of us. While Israel and the U.S. scandalously oppose a cease fire, the Global South (i.e., the world’s vast majority) supports it.

It’s far past the time for westerners like us join their chorus demanding that the criminal Apartheid-Israel state and its criminal American counterpart STOP THEIR CRIMINAL OPPRESSION.

Like Scott Ritter, I find myself praying for the complete defeat and humiliation of Apartheid-Israel — and of the United States on every front.

As I listen to the debate surrounding the awful events unfolding in Israel Palestine, I can understand how many are fooled by the one-sided pro-Israel propaganda circulated in the mass media and by their refusal to understand the Palestinian viewpoint. The media’s welter of misinformation and knee-jerk support for U.S. policy in the Middle East coupled with their implicit appeals to sentiments of revenge can be confusing even for the well-informed.

To clarify my own thinking, I feel compelled to express in writing what I think about the tragic drama as it unfolds.

So, for what it’s worth, please let me share my tentative conclusions. Perhaps they might help others formulate their own positions which, of course, may differ drastically from mine.

In any case, here are my tentative thoughts distilled into 25 points:

As a person of faith and a critical thinker, I can NEVER support empire.
That’s because I’ve come to realize that empire is a system of robbery whereby a militarily stronger nation imposes its will on a weaker nation for purposes of transferring the latter’s resources to the imperial center. That’s criminal.
Currently, the United States is the planet’s only empire.
As Martin Luther King said, it is the “world’s greatest purveyor of violence.” As such, it has NO moral right to render any judgments about the immorality of violence. None!
This means I cannot NEVER support the foreign policy of the United States. With less than 5% of the world’s population, it seeks to control the entire planet by the violence just mentioned as well as by a system of unequal trades, war, sanctions, regime change, and routine support of dictators. Again, all of that is criminal. It makes no moral sense to support U.S. empire.
By the means just mentioned and ever since the Second Intercapitalist War (WWII), the United States has exercised the same power Adolph Hitler sought in the decades of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
In that sense, it is a fascist regime that historically has supported fascists throughout the world. It NEVER supports the people its system has impoverished. It is ALWAYS on the side of the rich and powerful and instinctively opposes changes that serve the poor.
Today, Israel is an instrument of U.S. fascism. It represents the alter ego of the United States in the Middle East facilitating the U.S. control the sea of oil beneath land masses in the region – to benefit the already wealthy in their struggle against the poor majority.
In fact, Israel represents a colonial regime whose purposes at the local level are the same as imperialism’s at the macro level. [Remember, Israeli Jews are basically European invaders (from Poland, Russia, and other mostly European states housing the Jewish diaspora since their eviction from Palestine in the middle of the second century). European Jews invaded Palestine in 1948 and have since gradually stolen more and more land from the indigenous people of Palestine.]
This land theft has long been recognized and denounced by the international community, e.g., in UN Resolution 242.
But Israel (with full support from U.S. imperialists) has refused to obey international law.
Like its U.S. sponsor, Israel is therefore an international criminal nation.
It is also a state sponsor of terror within the borders of Palestine. It represents an apartheid regime MUCH WORSE than that of South Africa.
For nearly 100 years in the process of its land grabs, Israel has killed and maimed thousands of Palestine’s indigenous people including women and children with complete impunity and virtually without coverage by the mainstream media.
This has made the state of Israel the principal terrorist in the region.
In the face of its endless list of atrocities, any war crimes allegedly committed by indigenous resistance organizations (such as Hamas) pale by comparison.
Yes, Hamas represents an indigenous people resisting imperial and colonial oppression.
International law (e.g., Article 51 of the UN Charter) gives them the right to defend themselves by armed resistance, which necessarily entails killing their oppressors.
Yet the imperialists and colonialists (masquerading as advocates of non-violence!) predictably adopt the standard imperial practice of labeling as terrorists any who exercise their legal right to armed self-defense.
Their propaganda persuades the inattentive by isolating or even manufacturing atrocities by indigenous freedom fighters to illustrate the barbarity of the latter as if such acts were not faint shadows of their own greater atrocities committed over decades upon decades.
It’s all reminiscent of European colonialists in North America who in their “Declaration of Independence” described other indigenous resisters as “merciless Indian savages, whose warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
I oppose all this not only on the just noted grounds of historical understanding, but on that the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The latter is not neutral, but always takes the part of the poor and oppressed by exercising the Biblical God’s “preferential option for the poor” and its opposition to imperialism and colonialism.
This option is clearly demonstrated by the Divine’s incarnation as Yeshua of Nazareth, a poor person who lived under empire and who himself was executed as a terrorist and revolutionary by the Roman Empire).
None of this means that the current conflict in Israel-Palestine is irresolvable. Historically, both parties have more in common than what allegedly separates them. Both parties are Semites. Both have long histories of persecution by empire. This shared background opens the door to negotiation, resolution, and shared resistance to imperial designs.

I hope that helps.

Tag: UN Charter: Article 51

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