THE LAMENTABLE AND INEVITABLE ISRAELI-HAMAS WAR
©Wendell Griffen, 2023 Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global has written an analysis of the current war between Israel and Hamas. I am quoted in it along with others who hold shared and different perspectives. https://baptistnews.com/article/in-this-war-there-are-no-good-guys/ The analogy Ashlee Wiest-Laird shared in Wingfield’s piece is appropriate. Nobody should expect people whose land has been stolen, who've been locked in a room of their house, denied basic protections and civil rights, attacked at will by a stronger, US financed, stocked, and cheered military that is the fourth largest in the world, and whose 75-year plea for justice has been belittled, to decide that fighting their way out of the hellish place they have been forced into is unreasonable. I wrote a long piece for Baptist News Global in May of this year to mark the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (meaning "catastrophe") that provides the historical context for the war now bei
How many unarmed black and brown people have been killed and abused by law enforcement officers since President Kennedy's 1962 statement?
ReplyDeleteHow many calls have been made, peacefully yet firmly, to eradicate the culture of violence within law enforcement agencies and reform and remedy those agencies?
How many times have protesters been told to remain calm, be patient, and trust the process that inevitably results in no arrests, charges, or even dismissal of officers who kill and maim unarmed people?
Now recall President Kennedy's statement. The violent and tragic responses to abusive and homicidal police actions now are the inevitable and deplorable results of institutional failures within law enforcement agencies and the local, state, and federal governments that are supposed to regulate them.
But those violent results, however deplorable, are by no means comparable to the decades of vicious and tragic abusive and homicidal police behaviors.