Israel and Palestine (Migration, Immigration, Colonizing, Occupation)

Israel and Palestine (Migration, Immigration, Colonizing, Occupation)

Oct. 22, 2023   Dr. Roger Ray   click here to see the video

 

 

When my Korean born daughter was 13 years old, I offered to take her on a trip to South Korea to lean about her native culture and, if she wanted to, to try and locate her biological family. She didn’t seriously consider the offer for even a minute. Having grown up on a steady diet of Disney movies with their none-too-subtle anglophile spin on everything, she asked if we could go to London instead. 

 

Never one to turn down any excuse to go to London, I immediately signed on. She was the perfect age for that trip, it was just before her adolescent self became entirely embarrassed by everything I said or did and she was still under the impression that, as she once told her mother, “Daddy does so know everything.” 

 

We did fun tourist things, but I also worked in a couple of trips to the British Museum where I could show her some of the most amazing artifacts of the history of the world, all stolen in by British archaeologists and scientists in an earlier time when such theft was considered to be both research and preservation. 

 

As we started our trip back to the United States, back in those days when international flights offered one movie screen and we all got to watch what the airline had chosen, the first thing on the screen was a brief newsreel about the second Intifada in Palestine. My daughter asked as we were taking off for our 7-hour flight back to Chicago, “Daddy, why do the Palestinians and Israelis hate each other so much?”

 

How do two distinct ethnic and religious groups end up with such a profound claim of ownership on the same piece of real estate? Where do you begin? Frankly, I made several false starts. You can’t really start with the Holocaust and the modern creation of the State of Israel in 1947, and in the end, I managed to go back to the Hebrew Bible and the possibly fictitious accounts of Moses and the Egyptian Pharaoh, the Zionist belief in the Kingdom of David, and the Babylonian captivity, and the first century dispersion of the Jews from Judah by the Romans’ attempt at the extermination of the Jews. 

 

I don’t know how much of it that she was awake for, but I do clearly remember that I was still talking when we began our final descent into Chicago. It took Valerie almost 20 years to work up the courage to ever ask me another question. 

 

But serious, how would you answer that question? Why has there never been a workable solution that would allow Jews and Palestinians to live on this tiny postage stamp of global real estate with one another in peace? How could they both have arguably legitimate claims to the same place?

 

One of the ironies of the Jewish claim to Palestine comes from the Biblical narrative found in Exodus and yet, if you remember your Sunday School lessons regarding that bit of Jewish faith history, the Jews were not originally from that area and when they moved there, they found it inhabited and had to fight generations of wars with other inhabitants to control it. Of course, the Bible, written by Jews, for Jews, claims that God gave it to them but that isn’t a title claim that could stand up in court. Of course, a book written by the Jews would say that they hold a divine title to the land they occupied but the Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, and Philistines, were never big fans of the Jewish Bible.  Even if you take the Biblical accounts as having been based on history, it was still a story of occupation by conquest.

 

The question before us in the modern world is, when do national boundaries become sacred, legal, status quo, and when was migration, conquest, annexation, legitimate? How long does California have to be part of the United States before the claim that it was stolen from Mexico no longer have merit. Or, for that matter, when would the claims of Mexico trump the claims of the various Native American tribes who lived there before it was part of Mexico?

 

Why is the American claim on Arizona more legitimate than Russia’s claim on the Ukraine? Or the claim of Palestinians on the land we now call Israel more legitimate than the claim of current Jewish residents?

 

This is the problem that I have with all of the popular DNA tests now that have people confidently claiming that they are 20% Irish and 30% German, and some other string of national names like they came with a label of ingredients like a can of dog food. Folks, we are all 100% from Africa. The human race evolved in Africa and over thousands of years, migrated all over the globe. 

Your ancestors may have spent some time in Asia or Europe before they ended up where you live now, but unless you are living in Africa, it is very likely that your ancestors have lived in a lot of places over the centuries. 

 

We have various terms to describe the movement of people around the globe. In prehistoric times, we talk about human tribes migrating from one continent to another, but we know from the dawn of time that there have been migrations that were more like conquest and occupation. Most of the shape of the modern world’s map was based on a couple of centuries of colonization. Sadly, a few of those centuries of colonization involved the genocide of indigenous populations and the importation of slaves from other places. 

 

As the anti-slavery movement grew in the early United States, there was an organization called the American Colonization Society, that acquired land in West Africa that they called “Liberia” which was to be the homeland of freed African slaves from America. 

Their project was based on the misunderstanding that black slaves who were born in America, and maybe were the product of centuries of slaves who had lived in the Americas, would really be much happier if they were repatriated to Africa. More than half of the 40,000 newly freed slaves who went there died. They were black but it had been a long time since they were African. 

 

Telling people to “go back where they are from” is typically seen as a racial insult, but there lingers some romantic sense that everyone could simply go back to wherever their ancestors lived before they came to where they are now.

 

You may recall the controversy created by the nearly 90-year-old White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, who, when asked for a comment about Israel in 2012, said that the Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine.” She was forced to apologize and resign her chair in the press corps because her comment was considered to be anti-Semitic. It was inartful, you can’t deny that, but I have said for years that we never should have joined Britain in the decision to take part of Palestine in the 1940’s to create a Jewish homeland. The Jews who had survived the holocaust certainly deserved and needed a homeland, but the Holocaust had not been conducted by Palestinians. It was a horrible historic crime committed by European Christians against European Jews. The sacrifice of land to create a homeland certainly should have come out of European real estate and not Middle Eastern real estate. 

 

Both Jews and Christians may have been overly affected by the Biblical narratives about what they called “the Holy Land,” at the end of WWII. The voices of the Palestinians who were being displaced were not heeded. This land theft by the victors of WWII created hostilities that immediately issued in violent attempts at driving the Jewish immigrants into the Mediterranean Sea. 

 

You could say that Israel has been in a perpetual state of war with her neighbors ever since the modern state was founded in 1947. Technically, I think that Israel has 19 named wars in that 76 year history but the reason that we have heard so much about people hiding in their “safe rooms” during the recent Hamas invasion out of the Gaza Strip is that people are used to missiles falling on their neighborhoods, not a thousand at a time as has happened when this conflict started, but always a threat and a potential disaster. 

 

I have met people in Israel who spent every night of their childhood in a bomb shelter. A possible attack is always in the back of people’s minds. The radical sentiment of pushing the Jews into the sea was pervasive in the early years but over time, as almost no one alive today can remember a time when Israel did not exist where it is, there are Palestinians who want to live in Peace with Israel but there is a minority that only pretends to talk about peace while always plotting to kill as many Jews as they can.

 

There are many Israelis who want peace with Palestine but there are others who feel that it is a hopeless situation, and their only chance of survival is to virtually wipe out the Palestinian population. Every skirmish, every police killing, every terrorist murder, and, especially, every instance of rape or violence against children, radicalizes people more and more. 

 

When Israel was founded, they were attacked by all of their neighbors: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan, but now Israel is fighting against terrorist organizations, not nations. Hezbollah and Hamas fighters don’t wear uniforms. There is not a government of Hamas or a capitol of Hezbollah. And who is to say how many people in the Gaza Strip would be considered to be members of Hamas, or Hamas sympathizers, or supporters? And, given the dynamic of the hardships of life in the Gaza Strip, the same person might be fighting for Hamas one day and fighting against them the next. Israel now threatens a war on an idea, not a country, not an army, but a sentiment of those who just don’t want the Jews where they are. 

But folks, the real offense of  Helen Thomas’ comment a few years ago is the simple fact that Israelis don’t have anywhere to go back to. There are many ethnic minorities who do not have a homeland anymore but it was the unique circumstances of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust that made Western powers believe that they should be given one, and I don’t disagree with that, I just think it should have been in Europe. 

 

But the recent attack my Hamas terrorists has forced me to focus on the present. Debating the establishment of the modern state of Israel is good for a history class but it doesn’t address the fact that there is now a Jewish homeland in the Middle East surrounded by majority Muslim states that do not want to accept that what happened in 1947 cannot be undone in 2023. I adamantly remain convinced that it was a bad idea, but it wasn’t the only bad idea made in the post-colonial world and now it is a nearly unsolvable problem that demands a solution.

 

500 of my closest friends received an essay from me a few days after the October 7 attack. I was still struggling with an innate desire to blame Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration’s absurdly abusive policies towards the Gaza Strip for the violence but even then, I knew that I couldn’t. Liberals have an ipso facto tendency to side with the underdogs, but I want to ask my people to slow down and think about the hard realities and to not fall into false equivalencies. 

 

Two things can be true at once. I still believe that Netanyahu has been disingenuous and dishonest. No matter what happens now in Israel and the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu’s political career should be over. He needs to spend his time and resources defending himself against multiple criminal charges and disappear from Israeli government. However, as egregious as his offenses have been, the offenses committed by Hamas are of an entirely different kind and level of disgusting depravity. 

 

I don’t often throw roses at American presidents. I have been an equal opportunity critic of every president we have had in my adult life, but credit where credit is due. I cannot fault Joe Biden in how he has handled this impossible situation with Israel trying to fight against a terrorist ideology. Netanyahu’s instincts, and I fear many Israelis who now have family members being tortured as prisoners of Hamas and those who have had family members, from teenagers attending a music festival to children attacked in their schools, understandably would like to see the Israeli army wipe the Gaza Strip off of the map. 

 

We came too close to doing the same when we attacked Afghanistan after 9-11. Since there was no army to attack, no government of Al Qaida, we killed thousands of civilians who simply had proximity to Al Qaida training camps, whether they had Al Qaida sympathies or not. President Biden has assured Netanyahu and the Israeli people that our support for them in the midst of this war should never be doubted, but at the same time he has publicly and privately insisted on restraint and care to avoid civilian casualties. He has coupled, more by implication than by contract, that our military aid is tied to humanitarian aid to the civilians of the Gaza Strip. 

 

Yes, our president often sounds like a confused senior citizen who can’t keep his bingo card straight at the Senior Center, but when it really matters, he seems to have admirable clarity of vision. In fact, who among us could have done better than what he has done? Hamas cannot rack up wins as a result of killing children, raping young women, taking hostages, and killing civilians who were running for safety in bomb shelters. They cannot be rewarded for these subhuman tactics.

However, we have to accept that we have talked this “two state” solution to death without making enough progress to justify all of the talking. Israel’s existence, where it is, cannot rationally be debated in 2023. Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks cannot be reasonably questioned. And the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip need to be given greater freedom and greater opportunity but not the freedom to keep fighting with Israel and not the opportunity to keep spending their resources on rockets and bombs rather than a decent future for their young people. 

 

We fought the Germans and the Japanese in WWII and ten years after the war we were trading partners and allies. We have invaded Canada and annexed the northern half of Mexico, and now we vacation in Mexico and import most of our comedians and hockey players from Canada. We began in a war with Great Britain and now we follow their royal family as if we were still subjects of the crown.

 

Heck, we have invaded Nicaragua four times in the last century and most of you didn’t know that we ever had and when I have been their doing relief work, I have never detected a moment of hostility towards me because I am an American. Warring factions can learn to see that their best interests are served when the live in peace with their former enemies and cooperate in building a better future for everyone. 

 

The purpose of terrorism is to instill terror in the people they hate. The only way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be afraid. It is our fear that makes us want to fight a retaliatory war. I admit that there will be a military response to the terrorism of Hamas but I beg you to see that beyond the next month, the only real answers lie in the direction of diplomacy. The Jews will not be driven into the sea, and the Palestinians will not be annihilated.

 

The most difficult and the most necessary of all renunciations is resentment. The desire for revenge is powerful but as the old Chinese proverb says, “The fire you kindle against your enemies burns you.”  The best hope for peace in Israel is to create greater justice in Palestine.

Why Support Ukraine’s War with Russia?

Why Support Ukraine’s War with Russia?   October 8, 2023   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Wikipedia: Thomas Aquinas’ Just War Theory - According to Aquinas, three requirements must be met. Firstly, the war must be waged upon the command of a legitimate

sovereign. Secondly, the war needs to be waged for just cause, on account of some wrong the attacked have committed. Thirdly, warriors must have the right intent, namely to promote good and to avoid evil.

 

When I have been asked why I decided to become a minister, I always say that the primary factor was the way which the Vietnam War radicalized me. My father was a W.W. II vet and though he was traumatized by his war experience, he stuttered and night terrors until he died at the age of 92, still, he was proud of his service.

He wasn’t the sort to go to military reunions or to hang out at the VFW, but we discovered, when he died, that he had continued to send donations far beyond what he could afford to wounded veterans’ charities.

 

W.W. II was always thought of as the “good war.” I am sure that no one in my rural Kentucky town ever questioned how the US embargo against shipping metals to Japan, slowing their industrialization, might have caused the attack on Pearl Harbor. But in my Southern Kentucky context, such things as “causes” or “reasons” were not considered. Furthermore, because my father’s generation had been convinced that W.W. II was the great war, they tended to credit every military action taken by the United States to be a “fight to defend our freedom.” 

 

Just as no one in Glasgow, Kentucky talked about our embargo of industrial supplies to Japan created the tensions between us and the Japanese, they certainly knew nothing of how we got involved in Vietnam, taking over the defense of a French colony that was the world’s leading source of natural rubber which was still needed by the growing automobile industry.

 

I don’t recall anything ever being said in the news about this issue and the propaganda about having to stop the spread of communism in Vietnam because of some “domino theory,” was obviously absurd, even to a 14-year-old high school student in Glasgow, Kentucky, where, as I have told you before, the zip code is E-I-E-I-O. 

 

I read books written by imprisoned draft resistors that our school librarian probably didn’t even know that we had on the shelves. I was convinced that our involvement in that war was wrong, morally wrong, and the only way that I had to express my objections in a way that wouldn’t get me kicked out of the house for being a communist, was to express my beliefs in religious terms. I rehearsed those speeches so many times through high school and college that I could have hardly ended up anywhere other than seminary. 

 

In those days, I wanted to think of myself as a religious pacifist. Certainly, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. had championed non-violent resistance in something like that voice. Martin Luther King very clearly insisted that the suffering of black Americans certainly wasn’t coming from Vietnam, and he insisted that our country realign its priorities.

 

But it deserves to be asked, are there ever good and just causes for going to war? Certainly, repelling an invasion is justified. What about stopping a genocide or a holocaust, even if our own country is not being threatened, that would be a noble cause wouldn’t it?

 

For centuries, philosophers and kings have offered “Just War” theories. Augustine spoke to this issue voluminously, but it was St. Thomas of Aquinas who formalized a statement of the conditions of a just war. His work has stood up to the test of time pretty well. He said that:

Firstly, the war must be waged upon the command of a rightful sovereign. That is, it can’t be a terrorist act or a rouge rebellion. Only a government can wage war.

 

Secondly, the war needs to be waged for just cause, on account of some wrong the attacked have committed. That is, it can’t be to steal another nation’s land or wealth. Which limits countries pretty much to self-defense or to stop an egregious crime like a holocaust or a genocide. 

 

Thirdly, St. Thomas says, warriors must have the right intent, namely to promote good and to avoid evil. Because, even when we seem to be going to war for the right reasons, soldiers often seem to behave badly, adding rape, torture, murder, and robbery to the battlefield. St. Thomas envisioned an army of noble soldiers.

 

I’m not a historian, but I don’t think that many just wars have been fought if we take Thomas seriously because none of this is simple and the real causes of a war are never so black and white. We understand that bombings by citizens in Northern Ireland are in protest of British rule, but would we be sympathetic if Native Americans began to set off bombs in American cities in protest of the Europeans invasion and genocide in North America? We have objected strongly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but there is a lot of history there. Russia historically got its start in what is now Ukraine and the borders have changed many times over the centuries. There are parts of Ukraine where Russian was the dominant language and the majority of the population preferred to be a part of Russia. 

When do boundaries become permanent? What is legitimate territorial reclamation and what is invasion and occupation? Does Israel have a right to claim the West Bank because, possibly, during the time of King David, it was Jewish controlled? What about the people who have lived there for the last two thousand years? People who don’t think that the Hebrew scriptures are telling the truth about God promising real estate to one ethnic group or another?

 

As a pacifist, I would like to “Rodney King” the whole issue of modern warfare and just say, “Why can’t we all just get along?” But it is never just that simple. 

Those of you who have followed my work for a while will recognize the name of the famous WW I general, Smedley Butler, who wrote the book, “War is a Racket,” A very short book but worth your time. Butler was convinced that nearly all wars ended up being an excuse to transfer wealth and power into the hands of a very few people and that the soldiers were just exploited for this purpose, costing them life and limb to make war profiteers rich.

 

Butler proposed an amendment to the constitution that, were it put to a popular vote, might well pass in an afternoon. His amendment proposed that our soldiers could never be sent off of the United States, unless of course they were defending the Panama Canal. His proposed amendment would limit our navy to sailing no more than 500 miles from our shores and our air force had to stay within 750 miles of American territory. This adamant non-interventionalist position sure could have saved us a lot of lives and money over the past century and I know most Americans would absolutely love it, but is it just for a nation of our size and power to take a hands-off approach to the rest of the world? Is that, in and of itself, just?

This is especially significant in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To put this conflict into context, let me remind you that when the Soviet Union was falling apart, NATO countries were legitimately concerned about how reliable some of those Eastern European countries were going to be, not only to govern themselves, but to sensibly manage the nuclear arsenals, located on their land, that had once been managed by the Soviet government. 

 

Russia and NATO powers persuaded Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons, and their stockpile was the largest in the world, based on the promise that the west would come to their defense if they were ever invaded by Russia, and we promised Russia that we would never try to expand NATO any closer to Russia. 

 

That set of circumstances worked pretty well for about 30 years. However, we didn’t defend the Ukraine when, in 2014, Russia took the Crimea. I don’t know that we have ever gotten an honest account of that failure to live up to our promises, but I suspect that Crimea was “Russian enough” to be a plausible acquisition and it was needed for both shipping and oil and gas pipelines. Who are we to object to taking military action to defend our economic interests? 

 

Early in February of 2022, when Russia was positioning troops on the border with Ukraine, I thought it was a bluff. In fact, I remember saying at the time that Putin was chest thumping because we had, in fact, been working hard to move NATO influence closer and closer to Russia, as we had solemnly promised that we would not. So, I thought it was a threat to send a signal to the west. Evidently, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thought so too, because he literally made fun of President Biden for making so many public warnings about an immanent Russian invasion. Clearly, American intelligence was better than Ukrainian intelligence because Biden was right, and Zelenskyy was wrong. 

 

However, Putin did not want to just warn Ukraine about getting too close to NATO, he intended to annex the whole country and end the debate. And in so doing, Nixon’s old “domino theory” excuse for war started to look pretty plausible. In February of 2020, I thought Putin had very rational reasons for concern. But I have not been able to use the word, “rational” in reference to Putin since that time because his conduct of the war has been anything but rational. 

 

War is never black and white. There is never just one good side and one bad side. However, when we start to wonder what makes up a “just war,” Putin’s Russia has made this war appear to be about as black and white as modern warfare can be. 

 

In 1989, when the Soviet Union was disintegrating, my old college roommate went to the Army language training center in California because, he believed, the Army would pay him to study Russian but that within a couple of years, industry would hire him to be a translator in the huge business explosion that would be taking place in Russia. I adopted my daughter from Korea in early 1989 and she was among the last of Korean babies adopted out to the west and so we thought that our second baby would probably be coming from Russia. 

 

But corruption in Russia made western businesses pull out almost as quickly as they had rushed in and parents who tried to adopt, most often found themselves being asked for bribes to government officials that became so exorbitant and the whole Russian adoption thing virtually never happened. 

Russia went from being a corrupt communist government into being a corrupt oligarchy, ruled by oligarchs who had become rich through bribes and corruption. 

 

Ukraine was similarly famous for the same kind of corruption. In fact, my first introduction to Volodymyr Zelensky when he was described as being Eastern Europe’s Jon Stewart. He was a comedian who had a TV show making fun of the corrupt Ukrainian government. He played a corruption fighting president on TV before his popularity got him into politics and he was elected to be an actual corruption fighting president.

 

I’m not going to stake my reputation on this, but I don’t know how much progress he was really making in fighting corruption until Russia did invade a year and a half ago, and everything got real. Most western leaders didn’t take Zelensky very seriously at first until history turned a comedian into the leader the Ukraine needed. 

 

Mind you, our media likes to keep things simple and so they have mostly described this conflict in only black and white terms. War is dirty business and there is no way to fight a war and remain morally pure. And, Putin’s allegations of Ukrainian government corruption and of Nazi influence in some regions of the Ukraine were not false. He had a point but its not like you can say that being taken over by Russia would not simply make matters worse for Ukraine. 

 

To get and keep the military and financial support of the United States and the rest of NATO, Ukraine has been having to clean up its act very aggressively, although some of those Nazi influenced soldiers seem to be pretty good at fighting, any visible government corruption is being addressed quickly. 

 

Were it not for support from NATO countries, Ukraine wouldn’t have survived more than a few weeks of this war. And, sadly, if Trump had won the last election, he would not likely have done anything to thwart Putin’s designs on taking over the whole country. For whatever reason, be it sympathy or blackmail, Trump will never stand up to Putin. 

 

So, we have an election coming up in just over a year that is more important to this war than any election in the Ukraine. President Biden has been the glue that has brought NATO together in support of Ukraine in this war and without him, I don’t that NATO’s unity would survive. If Trump is elected, next November then the Ukraine will quickly fall into Russia’s hands and things may not be looking too good for Poland.

 

A lot of religious people are so opposed to war that they have been calling for immediate negotiations with Russia, even if it means giving up big pieces of Ukraine. I, frankly, tend to share General Smedley Butler’s cynicism about almost all wars. Even when there is just cause for conflict, that doesn’t keep war profiteers from getting involved to fleece the country. 

 

In fact, though said tongue in cheek, I have often said that I am personally so opposed to military conflict that I am already against the next war, wherever it may be. But now I think that we must take a more sober view of what it means to enter a just war, even if, because of the nuclear potential of getting involved more directly, it must remain a proxy war. 

In the early 20^th century, General Butler made an exception for his non-interventionalist views in the case of the Panama Canal because the Panama Canal was crucial to world trade, especially regarding food. The longer some foods are in the hold of a ship, the more of it gets lost to spoilage and vermin. So, I see why he made that exception.

 

But the world of the early 21^st century is even more interconnected than Butler could have even imagined. For example, Russia is blocking sea traffic in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. That’s not hard to understand since Ukraine’s resupply of ammunition and war related supplies comes through those ports. But the Ukraine is also a major exporter of grain, most of which goes to some of the poorest nations in the world in the Middle East and Africa. That creates and economic hardship for Ukrainian farmers, a humanitarian crisis, especially in Africa, but that loss of grain on the world market also makes the price of my Cheerios go way up and inflation in the USA also hurts the most poor and at risk people all over the world. 

 

We are trying to embargo Russia’s oil and gas to cut off their ability to fund their illegal war but that drives up the price of heating oil all over Europe and threatens the energy needs of industry in India and China. Still, is this level of global destabilization sufficient reason to prolong the war by supplying Ukraine with the sophisticated and powerful weapons we are giving them? 

 

When Russia took the Crimea, and the rest of the world stood idly by and watched, only 6 people were killed, and three of those six were protestors, not soldiers. 

Six people but compare that with the casualty count in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At this point, we estimate that a quarter of a million Russians have been killed and about 130,000 Ukrainians. It is important to note that most of these deaths have been civilians with only a fraction having died while in battle. The war is nowhere near being over and almost 400,000 people are dead. What justifies this? Can anything justify this? 

 

If I could believe that the rumors are true and that Putin is gravely ill and will be dead soon, maybe that would be reason to keep fighting. But if I could believe that he really would settle for holding onto some part of Ukraine as an additional buffer against NATO, I might be inclined to trade some real estate for an end to the bloodshed. But, of course, that’s not my decision to make, nor is it the right of anyone living outside of Ukraine to decide to give up a part of their country in exchange for peace. 

 

I will not conclude this sermon in the way that I have so many others, saying that this is just my opinion and that I just so happen to be right. This is, however, just my opinion, but I know that I could be wrong. 

 

Here are the things which I believe that spiritual persons, people who have a social conscience, should consider:

1)   This is undoubtedly a proxy war in which NATO is willing to fund the Ukrainian military so that they fight a war to weaken Russia that we cannot fight ourselves without starting a nuclear, possibly world ending, war. 

2)   The cost of this war is not just the lives of brave Ukrainians but it is also draining the finances of the USA and many European countries so this war’s costs include healthcare not provided to millions of poor people, public housing projects that don’t get built, schools, fire stations, renewable energy resources, that don’t get built, and bridges that don’t get repaired, because we are spending our money on bombs, bullets, and airplanes. 

3)   And finally, I will offer this; If Putin is not near death, any concession we make to him now will make every other country in eastern Europe less safe. I was wrong to believe that Putin wouldn’t really invade the Ukraine and I don’t think the rest of the world should be at all Cavaliere about the fact that Putin is a 21^st century Hitler who must be stopped, even though stopping him comes at a very high price. Placating tyrants always ends up costing more than it costs to stop their empire building delusions.

Which, though no one asked, is why I think that it is important for Donald Trump to serve real jail time for his many crimes. Democracy itself is not safe if we allow a tyrant like Trump to get away with leading an insurrection and trying to set our constitution aside, and ignore the results of a free and fair election. Bu t that observation is for free and isn’t really related to the topic of this sermon.

 

 

The corporations that manufacture bombs, bullets, and airplanes are getting rich off of this war, even though we want to resupply the beleaguered Ukrainian army, the military industrial complex wins when countries fight, no matter which country ultimately wins the war. In that sense, General Smedley Butler is 100% right. We should avoid military conflict in virtually every instance except for these times when failing to take up arms causes much more suffering than the more satisfying pacifist response. 

 

Non-violent protest is always best . . . except for when it isn’t. War is never black or white. No war is a “good war.” But some causes are more just than a dogmatic neutrality because, as Elie Wiesel said, “neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed.” 

 

So, it is my belief that it would be wrong to remain neutral in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I have chosen a side, and even a post-theistic pastor can say at a moment like this, “God help us.”

 From the founding of our church, our motto has always been, “Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By.” To choose to sit this one out is to give aid to the tyrants who cause death and suffering all over the world, and that, my friends, is not our portion.