A Call for signatories and affirmation from Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA). Click here to sign on individually or on behalf of your organization.
Over 3000 “Christian Zionist” leaders affiliated with American Christian Leaders for Israel (ACLI), a project of the extremist International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem (ICEJ), recently issued a deeply immoral statement calling on President Trump to declare Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the Holy Land. That statement can be accessed here. Trump is expected to make an announcement on the topic of annexation within the coming weeks, if not days.
The ACLI statement is wholly inconsistent with the God witnessed to in the pages of scripture and with our moral and ethical obligations as followers of Jesus and the Biblical prophets. We must publicly renounce such efforts and make it clear that those affiliated with ACLI do not speak on behalf of Christians or Christianity. Moreover, we must categorically reject any thinly-disguised plan to annex Palestinian land and engage in continued violence against innocent civilians in the occupied West Bank, in Gaza, and beyond.
By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler (above), Pastor Emeritus of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ and Director and Chief Visionary of Faith Strategies, LLC
As a clergy person who has served congregations in the Black and of-color communities in Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC for over 45 years I am acutely aware of the traumas and anxieties that are encountered because of changing political administrations nationally, regionally, and locally, and how they impact families and lives. Politicians and even the media often speak in broad generalities of what a change means statistically, according to the latest poll, and its implications for government and how it may set a precedent or not. But those of us serving pastorally in local communities are called upon to allay fears, to bind the wounds, make meaning out of the meaninglessness, find silver linings amidst the dark clouds, and to identify hope in the despair and confusion. We have done this many times, but at no time has the impact been as stark, devastating, or as frightening as it is now.
With Trump/Musk/DOGE, and their radical approach to government there are many lives traumatized by the fears and are suffering from the emotional abuse inflicted on those who have worked for the federal government and their families. There are also many contractors and vendors associated with government work experiencing the same high anxieties that comes with the uncertainty and worries associated with the political battering of uncertainty and threats inflicted on families and their sense of stability and security.
The following Op-Ed, originally published by Mondoweiss, was written by a group of international graduate student organizers studying at universities in the United States. They have requested anonymity due to the current targeting of Palestine activists on student visas (and now, it seems, green cards) for deportation.
We are international students who have organized in solidarity with the Palestine liberation struggle over the past 16 months. We write anonymously because the moment demands, strategically, that we do so. However, we will not be silenced. You may censure and suspend us, you may send ICE to knock down our doors, you may deport us back to our home countries, but we are only one drop in a vast ocean, and the tide of support for Palestine is rising everywhere.
Israel’s ongoing genocide has shaken the outrage of the free people of the world. While the so-called international community appears largely content to censure the zionist state and continue with business as usual, we cannot unsee images of nineteen year old student Shaban Ahmed Al-Dalou burning to death in his tent attached to an IV drip after Israeli forces bombed families sheltering in Deir al-Balah. We cannot unsee Wael Dahdouh’s tears as he looked upon the body of his martyred son. We cannot forget Dr. Refaat Alareer’s voice breaking as he sat in the semi-darkness of his apartment, flinching as bombs exploded around him ‘It is very bleak, it’s very dark…there’s no way out…what should we do, drown? We are not going to do that’. We cannot forget Medo Halimy’s daily updates, bringing humor and laughter to ‘tent life.’ We will never forget how they murdered him in his tent.
An timely excerpt from the last chapter of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of America (1980).
History which keeps alive the memory of people’s resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular rebellion never looks strong enough to survive.
However, the unexpected victories – even temporary ones – of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people – the employed, the somewhat privileged – are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica – expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.
Certain new facts may, in our time, emerge so clearly as to lead to general withdrawal of loyalty from the system. The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system – the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government – to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas. The internationalization of the economy, the movement of refugees and illegal immigrants [sic] across borders, both make it more difficult for the people of the industrial countries to be oblivious to hunger and disease in the poor countries of the world.
All of us have become hostages in the new conditions of doomsday technology, runaway economics, global poisoning, uncontainable war. The atomic weapons, the invisible radiations, the economic anarchy, do not distinguish prisoners from guards, and those in charge will not be scrupulous in making distinctions. There is the unforgettable response of the U.S. high command to the news that American prisoners of war might be near Nagasaki: “Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged.”
There is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the guards. We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn’t care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government – combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left…
…With the Establishment’s inability either to solve severe economic problems at home or to manufacture abroad a safety valve for domestic discontent, Americans might be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another reshuffling of the same deck, another New Deal, but radical change. Let us be Utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that “realism” so useful to the Establishment in its discouragement of action, that “realism” anchored to a certain kind of history empty of surprise. Let us imagine what radical change would require of us all.
By Ellen Grady, re-posted from social media (3/1/2025)
On Wednesday, I went to trial at the Syracuse Federal Building on two violation charges stemming from an action November 15, 2024 calling for the US to stop funding genocide in Gaza. After a six-and-a-half-hour trial with a couple of short breaks, the judge found me guilty. I will be sentenced on Wednesday, March 12th. Below is my opening statement. The story at the end of my statement was the most important thing I wanted on the Federal record.
(This statement was modified slightly when presented at trial.)
Good morning, Judge Dancks. I am grateful to be here today with you. I am grateful that I have the right to be heard in a court of law, and that you have dedicated your life to that service. I’d also like to thank all the people serving in court today for your work in ensuring the right to a fair, public trial, a key tenant of democracy. And I am grateful to everyone who has come to bear witness today.
I want to acknowledge that we are on un-ceded Onondaga territory. And that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy founded in 1142 by the Great Peace Maker is often described as the oldest participatory democracy and that their Constitution is believed to be a model for the US Constitution.
I would also like to thank my parents and my elders for their example of trying to faithfully live the Gospel call to Love one another as God loves us.
I want to make one thing clear. I left BBC News last year after covering Gaza for months because I could see evidence accumulating into the robust conclusion that Israel has been committing war crimes & crimes against humanity.
I watched my org fail to shape coverage around this, as it does with other evidence-based findings (e.g. that climate change is real). We are long past the point at which Israel’s culpability is up for debate, just as we’re past debating that climate change is happening.
Too many mistake constant debate for good journalistic practice. Journalists need to be coming to evidence-based conclusions. Reaching conclusions after thorough investigation doesn’t make me “biased”, it makes me good at my job.
As the old saying goes, the journalist’s job isn’t to report that it may or may not be raining – it’s to look outside and tell the public if it is. And let me tell you: there’s a storm.
A potent word for this particular moment from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colón (above). The intro is re-posted here from Sojourners.
LIKE THE AUTHOR of the First Letter of John, we are living in a time for “testing the spirits.” That is, we must discern the forms of freedom, or unfreedom, offered to us as we read the signs of our historical moment — a time in which the catastrophic is often our daily bread.
Many of us have made homes in religious traditions where we have found collective love, care, community-building, and resilience. But so much of what passes as spiritual in the United States — churches who only see their work as therapeutic, prosperity gospel proponents, white evangelical nationalists, New Age movements — is commodification by other means. John warns us against false prophets who, through quick fixes and distorted spiritual comforts, foster division and confusion in the service of lucrative self-aggrandizement.
I am an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and I work as a movement chaplain in Los Angeles. I was trained as a spiritual director, and I have been doing ministry with faith-rooted activists since 2016. My work is informed by my primary training as a medical anthropologist and community researcher. I know that Jesus said that we humans are of more value than many sparrows, but I’ve found that we are a lot like them. We need refuge and sustenance. We need shelter. We need to nest somewhere. But with whom shall we do this for the short and long haul? And where shall we build our nests?
Edgar Rivera Colón, a movement chaplain, spiritual director, and medical anthropologist, teaches health justice and the history of racism in U.S. medical institutions at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
I describe myself as a pacifist, as a fairly committed proponent of nonviolence. But I have the privilege of saying those words in a relative vacuum, a vacuum created by the fact that I live on the launching end of the bombs. I live within the heart of the empire. And so two things come into clarity that I wish hadn’t, but being as though they have, I need to address them.
The first is my right to tell anybody under a state of occupation how to resist that occupation, which is no right at all. I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. Particularly when there is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that’s economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance. So first of all, I have absolutely no right to tell anybody how to resist their occupation or a state of injustice.
But second, I can sit here and I can tell you how committed I am to nonviolence. And I can believe that fully. But by virtue of the society I live in, by virtue of what my tax dollars are being used to do, I am one of the most violent human beings on earth. And I can’t simply brush that away and say, hey, I haven’t thrown a punch since I was 15 years old, I’m fully committed to non-violence. I am part of a society that exercises great industrial violence. And at the very least, I should acknowledge that. And that makes it much, much more difficult to then go around parading my views about how violence as a whole. Sure, it does, but I am actively engaged in it right now. That has been a very difficult thing to contend with and I wish I had a sort of easy wraparound answer for it, but I don’t.
A long time ago I was at a literary festival up in Canada and literary festivals in Canada started with land acknowledgements well before US festivals started doing the same. And we were sitting there, we were about to start our event and one of the organizers gets up and says, just before we begin, you know, I just want to take this time to acknowledge the really important acknowledgement that we are on unceded indigenous territory and to also thank the hedge fund that is sponsoring this event. And I was like, this is the most honest land acknowledgement I’ve ever heard.
I think of it, particularly this idea of after the fact acknowledgement as, and maybe this is particularly cynical of me, but I think of it as a continuation of theft. You steal land, you steal lives, and what’s left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before. You know, when I wrote the title of this book when I was first thinking about it, I wasn’t thinking in terms of weeks or even years. I was thinking if I’m fortunate enough to live the average lifespan in this part of the world, maybe by the end of my life, I’ll be watching a poetry reading in Tel Aviv that begins with a land acknowledgement. I think it’s a fundamental part of any system of endless taking, which, you know, colonialism and whatever stage of capitalism we’re in are fundamentally part of. There are very few systems as well-versed in after-the-fact shame and after-the-fact guilt as the ones that are predicated on endless taking.
And you see it all over the place. I mean, there’s an incredible poetry collection by a Layli Long Soldier called “Whereas,” which is all about sort of repurposing and undermining a U.S. government declaration that basically said, sorry about all that genocide, indigenous people, sorry about the theft. And it was passed in the most sort of bland manner hundreds of years after the fact. And that is such an important part of the entire project. We can all be sorry afterwards. The taking happens now and the apology comes later. It’s a hallmark of every colonial society.
The thing that makes it so dangerous to acknowledge right now is that we’re not after the fact. We’re in the middle of the fact. And so the people who disagree with the content of this book or with the assertion of that title are going to disagree vehemently until one day they don’t have to. And then they’re going to acknowledge it and there will be no repercussions and we can sit around and listen to a very flowery land acknowledgement when it’s too late to do anything about it.
Radical Discipleship 