The Palestine Exception

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This is a letter signed by hundreds of students and community members in Southeast Michigan demanding that Attorney General Dana Nessel drop the charges she slapped on members of the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Nessel’s criminalization of protest shamefully seeks to protect U-M’s investments in the genocide of Palestinians—and also reflects Nessel’s personal and financial ties to the Regents themselves, as The Guardian recently reported.

Attorney General Nessel,

We write to demand the immediate dropping of the felony and misdemeanor charges against eleven pro-Palestine protestors associated with the University of Michigan Gaza Solidarity Encampment. These charges are legally absurd, racist, and motivated by political self-interest. As such, they are an unjustified and unprecedented escalation against a movement advocating for divestment from genocide and for Palestinian life and liberation.

Your press release suggests these cases were pursued due to their supposed multijurisdictional nature; however, the charges only involve a single jurisdiction. Your justification is a lie. Further, these charges appear to be motivated by your relationships to the Regents at the University of Michigan, six of whom have donated to your election campaign prior to requesting these horrifying charges against protestors – a clear conflict of interest. If that weren’t enough, your history of anti-Palestinian bias raises serious concerns about your ability to act as a fair arbiter in this situation. You have previously condemned Representative Rashida Tlaib for her pro-Palestinian advocacy, distorting her words to fit your racist narrative. Furthermore, your actions have been praised by sites like Canary Mission, which target and harass pro-Palestinian activists. These facts indicate that the charges are politically motivated rather than grounded in any legitimate legal rationale.

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Advent for Palestine

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Re-posting this beautiful children’s Advent calendar from the Rev. Stands for the Revolution, the Substack newsletter of Rev. Addie Domske, an ordained minister and trained movement chaplain who lifts up queer abundance and Jesus’ rebellious message.

One thing I want to be when I grow up is a cool, radical auntie.

I have been trying to be good at this role for about 15 years now, starting when the first of my four niblings1 was born. I will find out from them in their collective adulthood if I succeeded.

I have lived far, far away from all four of them for their entire lives, so most of my interactions come from mailing them things, (I had the cutest pen pal relationship with my oldest nibling when he was a wee lad.) A few years ago, I started the tradition of sending them all advent calendars each year based on their interests at the time. This year I’m proclaiming that they are all interested in Palestine, because my spouse and I decided to spend all of our Christmas gift funds for our external families on products from Palestinian artisans.2

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Festival of Radical Discipleship

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A message from Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, the executive director of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.

Dear Radical Discipleship friends,

We are excited to invite you the Festival of Radical Discipleship May 23-26, 2025 at Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor, PA.

This gathering is a Collaboration between Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (BCM) and Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.

Grace Boggs, Detroit organizer and now ancestor, would ask over and over again, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” We cannot deny that we are standing at an urgent and catastrophic moment. We are witnessing an assault on humanity and all of creation from so many directions. From climate disaster to genocidal militarism, to racial and religious supremacy, and so much more.  

Our souls are hungering for time and community to be asking what it means to live humanly in this moment. We need to create space for listening and discernment, deep study and imaginative organizing, a diversity of voices and stories, and perhaps more than anything else hope and joy. So, dear friends, we are throwing a festival! 

We are hosting the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship- a gathering of kindred spirits rooted in the radical Christian tradition. It will be a time to remember past gospel experiments, discuss current calls to witness and work; and conspire about future collaborations! Come and join the feast. 

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The Truth of your own Sacred Contribution

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In May 2024, students of conscience at UC Irvine organized a non-violent direct action to demand that their university divest from companies profiting off the genocide in Gaza. Fifty protestors were arrested. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, a tenured professor of global and international studies, was escorted away by riot police, her hands zip-tied behind her back. In a recent interview, she said: “You cannot war-machine your way out of massive social problems that actually require study and reflection.” This is a poem that Professor Willoughby-Herard posted in 2020.

Radical Possibilities

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This is an excerpt from Steven Salaita’s recent essay. Salaita is an Arab-American scholar who lost his job at University of Illinois after he tweeted out the truth about Palestine. He is the author of An Honest Living, a book about the ostracism and loneliness and alienation (and vitality and joy and regeneration) that comes from being loyal to the oppressed and downtrodden of this world.

The massive Democratic failure opens some radical possibilities that can only be developed outside the mythic parameters of U.S. democracy.  If we can’t pursue radical possibilities now, after this disaster of an election in which deeply vulnerable people were viciously renounced by purported allies and defenders, then there’s nothing left to do but wait out the decline of our planet.  These electoral spectacles aren’t the sign of a healthy political culture; they’re an ugly business that benefit nobody outside of a corrupt and hermetic ecosystem aggressively devoted to its own proliferation.  

Everyone else, the great majority of people throughout the United States, ends up with a whole lot of disaffection.  Republicans have proved somewhat capable of exploiting this disaffection—they’re certainly more capable than Democrats—but they have limited appeal to the ever-growing number of Americans on the periphery, whose impulse is to avoid the spectacle altogether.  (The viewpoints of this enormous demographic are scarcely represented among the pundit classes.) 

Ignoring professional activists, public intellectuals, sitting politicians, and would-be presidents isn’t simply a survival mechanism; it is an active statement that we deserve something better and are willing to create it ourselves.  Let the technocrats swap business cards and donor money.  Their main concern is and always will be the status quo.  Their occasional fit of conscience is marketing, nothing more. 

We can never lose sight of what brought us to this moment:  bipartisan support of the century’s most hideous atrocities, which would have ended months ago without the constant supply of American weapons.  There’s no coming back from what we’ve witnessed.  The system that allowed it to happen, that encouraged it, must become a target of opposition. 

We’ve known for a long time that electoralism is coercive, anesthetizing, and mendacious.  Now we know that it’s genocidal, as well. 

So Long

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A blast from the past from James Boggs (November 1963).

Now I did not come here to comfort you. I came here to disturb you. I did not come here to pacify you. I came here to antagonize you. I did not come here to talk to you about love. I came here to talk to you about conflict. I say this at the outset because the American people have lived for so long under the illusion that America is an exception to the deep crises that wreck other countries – that they are totally unprepared to face the brutish realities of the present crisis and the dangers that threaten them. The American people have lived so long with the myth that the United States is a Christian, capitalist, free democratic nation that we can do no wrong, that the question of what is right and wrong completely evades us.

The Salvation of Western Interests

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An excerpt from James Baldwin’s Open Letter to the Born Again (September 29, 1979).

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.

A Revolution of Value

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An excerpt from Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own (2020).

In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe. I am aware that this is a radical, some may even say, dangerous claim. It amounts to “throwing away” a large portion of the country, many of whom are willing to defend their positions with violence. But we cannot give in to these people. We know what the result will be, and I cannot watch another generation of black children bear the burden of that choice…

Our task, then, is not to save Trump voters nor is it to demonize them. Our task is to work, with every ounce of passion and every drop of love we have, to make the kingdom new! The first step involves what I called…a “revolution of value.” This involves telling ourselves the truth about what we have done. It entails implementing policies that remedy generations of inequities based on the lie. It requires centering a set of values that holds every human being sacred. All of this will be made possible by grassroots movements that shift the center of gravity of our politics…Our task involves shaking loose the warm “swaddling clothes” that secure us in our prejudices and prevents us from confronting our fears. Our task means speaking truth to power and looking the darkness of our times squarely in the face without the security of legend or myth, and without the comforting idea that black people will save you.

The White Liberal

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Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to write a play produced on Broadway. After she became famous, she participated in a panel on race relations with black activists and white liberals. It was the mid-60’s and they were attempting to address the growing tension between the two groups.

As the Black freedom struggle moved to the streets, most of the white liberals pulled back their support. On the panel, Hansberry spoke plainly about their ultimate goal in gathering together: “We have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”

Sixty years later, perhaps this task has gotten even more challenging. This is what the Black revolutionary Assata Shakur, writing from exile in Cuba, famously said about the situation.