A PRAYER FOR JUSTICE CONCERNING GAZA, THE WEST BANK, AND EAST JERUSALEM

 

©Wendell Griffen, 2023

 

To the One who gives all life, God of Creation, Love, Justice, Hope, Peace, Truth, and Vindication, hear this prayer for your children in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Hear our prayers for the infants of Palestine.

Hear our prayers for their parents.

Hear our prayer for the playmates children in Gaza will never know.

Hear our prayers on their behalf for justice.

See the silent and sobbing tears we weep for the futures they will never experience. 

Smiles. Laughter. Giggles. All lost.

Bombed.

Incinerated.

Targeted.

Massacred.

The slaughtered children, parents, and elders cannot plead for help.

The nations of the world will not protect them.

Religious leaders across the world do not cry out for them.

Politicians in Israel, the United States, and their allies calculate how to take advantage of them, discount them, and subsidize, arm, and cover for Israel.

Israeli Defense Forces collectively punish them, occupy them, displace them, massacre them, and abuse them.

O God of life, love, truth, and justice, judge the hands that are murdering your children.

Judge the politics of hate, bigotry, deceit, hypocrisy, and fear masquerading under disguises while dealing in death-dealing, settler colonizing, land stealing, and white supremacist lies.

Security for Israel. Lies.

Self-defense. Lies.

Israel is the one true democracy in the Middle East. Lies.

Judge the perpetrators and sycophants of apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, Zionist-minded racism, Islamophobia, Christian Zionism, imperial fascism, and xenophobia.

Judge those who deprive your Palestinian children food, clean water, safe shelter, sanitation, medical care, and protection from their enemies.

Take notice of those who bomb hospitals, churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, refugee camps, and life support systems.

Judge the snipers who murder women and children while they leave places of prayer, praise, refuge, and reflection.

O God of truth, justice, and vindication, avenge them in your name.

Avenge the massacred people in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Avenge the displaced.

Avenge the tortured.

Avenge the detained.

Avenge the persecuted, hunted, and murdered journalists .

Deliver fierce judgment against the murderers, land thieves, slanderers, and enemies of your Palestinian children.

Judge the people who perpetrate their genocide, displacement, and sufferings.

Judge the people who put more value on corporate profits than child protection.

Avenge your children, God.

Vindicate their rights to live, grow, learn, love, and heal the world.

Hear their deadened voices.

Avenge your Palestinian children, please God.

As God of justice, for their sake do not hold back your wrath against their oppressors.

Bring judgment against those who treat your children in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as worthless.

Disposable.

Expendable.

Forgettable.

Unprotected.

Defenseless.

Avenge your Palestinian children, God.

Comfort them by your acts of vengeance. 

We appeal to your exclusive right to avenge the deaths, land theft, and other suffering of our Palestinian siblings.

Our hearts are pregnant with outrage. 

Make us your co-workers for justice against those who oppress and slaughter your children in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Loosen our tongues to loudly declare your judgment on all involved in the oppression of Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Strengthen us to defend and support the Palestinian resistance to that oppression.

Guide us to help their fight for freedom, independence, self-determination, and equality.

Teach us how to speak your truth, hope, and work for justice.

Rise up, O God, in power. Vindicate the people of Gaza, the Israeli occupied West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Rise, O God! Rise!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Read more

THE CRUEL DISMANTLING OF DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (DEI) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

  THE CRUEL DISMANTLING OF DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (DEI) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS © Wendell Griffen, 2023   In an email message sent on Tuesday, June 13, Dr. Charles Robinson (Chancellor at the University of Arkansas flagship campus in Fayetteville, Arkansas) announced that staff and resources from the campus Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) would be reallocated to other campus offices beginning this fall. I’m posting a link to the message Chancellor Robinson sent the campus so you can read his words. https://chancellor.uark.edu/key-communications/150-forward-update-from-chancellor-robinson.php Robinson sent his message two weeks before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided, by a 6-3 vote, that the admission policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are racially discriminatory because both schools include racial identity among the factors considered in determining who to admit. The SCOTUS decis
Read more

IT’S TIME TO VOTE AS FREE PEOPLE

  ©Wendell Griffen, 2024 Early voting for the Arkansas primary elections begins February 20 across Arkansas, and March 5 is Election Day.   So, candidates are working hard to attract attention and influence voting decisions by voters. This essay is my effort to inform voters in Arkansas about election contests involving candidates for positions on the Arkansas Supreme Court, Arkansas Court of Appeals, circuit courts, and district judges. Because judicial candidates are the least well known of all political office contenders those of us who understand what judges do must help voters decide whether to support certain candidates over others. I have been a licensed attorney in Arkansas since 1979. I am also a retired state court judge who served on the Arkansas Court of Appeals (from 1996 through 2008) and as a Circuit Judge (from 2011 through 2022). I taught law   at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Bowen School of Law from 2009 through 2011. I share this information so rea
Read more