The Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.
The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting those who defend Palestinian rights—including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine—is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.
Thirty-eight state governments’ passage of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an antisemitic trope. It is a fact.
An excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s speech at the closing rally of the World Social Forum in 2003.The Indian author will now be prosecuted for remarks she made about Kashmir back in 2010. Fascism is escalating everywhere.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
An update from Chava Redonnet, the pastor of Oscar Romero Inclusive Catholic Church which meets in the dining room of the Rochester Catholic Worker (June 16, 2024).
Dear friends,
When my daughters were growing up, at suppertime around the table I would ask them each to share something that made them happy that day, and something that made them sad. (They hated it). (But I learned a lot I otherwise might not have!)
So here’s my own “happy thing” and “sad thing” from the past few days. First the happy thing.
I love it when we have a bunch of people at community supper and Mass. Last night our board met out at the house before supper (some on zoom and some in person), and Librada and Maria hung out with us for a while afterwards. Maria brought some great potato salad. For me personally, things are so much better with Nina and Betty doing the cooking. So grateful. And Bill brought ice cream. At Mass, it was hot enough to need a fan, but the stand-up fan proved to be an irresistible draw for two-year-old Lucas, who wanted to lick it. I told the story about the raccoon and the cookies from way back at the beginning… this Sunday is the 13th anniversary of the first Migrant Mass in 2011. It was just a good and happy evening, and I am full of gratitude.
Thursday evenings, June 27 – July 25 (no class July 4)
7:00 – 8:30 p.m. EST
“In wrestling with the problem of how to present the teachings of nonviolence in an age of mass violence, it seems to me that the writings of Ignazio Silone are of immense importance.” – Dorothy Day
Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day often cited the novel Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone as one of the most influential works of fiction in her life. A deeply humane and compassionate novel, it was written in 1936 while Silone was in exile from his native Italy for his resistance work against the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. He recounts the story of an idealistic revolutionary who tries to organize Italian peasants against a repressive regime.
Rev. James Lawson died yesterday. He was 95. Here are some compelling things about his life that we can meditate on and emulate today (curated from a few biographies and obituaries).
Lawson became a “conscientious objector” during the Korean War. In April 1951, he was found guilty of violating the draft laws of the United States, and sentenced to three years in a federal prison. Upon his release from prison, Lawson returned to Baldwin-Wallace and earned his bachelor’s degree.
In 1956, Lawson entered Oberlin College’s Graduate School of Theology. In 1957, one of Lawson’s professors introduced him to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged him to move south and aid in the Civil Rights Movement.
“Don’t wait! Come now! We don’t have anyone like you down there,” MLK pleaded, according to author David Halberstam’s history of the civil rights movement, The Children. Rev. Lawson was outwardly “mild and gentle,” wrote Halberstam, “but he was a true radical Christian who feared neither prison nor death.”
If we are going to talk about how undocumented immigrants impact our society, we ought to first address how our national policies have disrupted their lives. Above all, solidarity with the immigrant poor should seek to know them not as statistics, but as human beings who endure extraordinary hardship and trauma in their struggle just to survive–especially since the structural causes of their impoverishment lie on our side of the border.
An excerpt from James Baldwin’s letter to Angela Davis (November 1970).
The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins —that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too, White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the loves of their own children, we the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands; which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with the inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that a democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked— mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
Radical Discipleship 