Hello everyone, welcome, thank you all for coming - I know it's a rainy day.
Thank you to (groups involved) for coming. Without your support we would be alone, and in these times alone is the most dangerous place to be. I cannot thank you enough.
My name is Anthony and I am with the Ocean State Youth Movement. We are organized today and every day because we see that the present system is incapable of reflection and therefore incapable of justice. The fascist American dictatorship is a full and equal partner in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims, Jews, and Christians from Palestine.
We condemn this government, and the proxy calling itself Israel, without equivocation and without reservation. We are unafraid of retaliation and of baseless accusations and of state violence. We do so alongside thousands of good people all over the world.
Inside of that building is a man called Kasim Hafeez. He is among the Zionists here who dare call themselves Christians. He would tell you his life story. He will say that Islam is dangerous and that his own family pushed him to embrace Zionism. He will twist his tongue and he will say things he does not mean and he will add himself to the chorus of heretics and blasphemers.
He has come to Rhode Island to ask us to support an extermination campaign. He is begging on behalf of terrorists for our support for a state which is designed by colonialists to rid itself of color, light, and love. The project which they celebrate in that building is a parking lot in the Holy Land. They are begging us to abandon our consciences and our notion of true religion for a Chipotle in Nazareth. He hopes you will stay silent while Israel rips God out of their home, as Israel bombs hospitals, classrooms, churches, mosques, synagogues.
What is going on in there has as much unity as a Klan rally. It has as much inspiration as a Radiohead show in Tel Aviv. It is as loving as a humming drone carrying death to children sheltering in church sanctuaries. It is a deep, deep shame for anyone to participate in such a thing, especially someone who would call themselves a Christian.
These Zionists are here in that building so that they may gild themselves in filth, so that they may use God's house as a latrine. I have never seen anything more idolatrous and shallow as this. It tells me that secular socialism may not be enough. I have come here to make a public commitment - to say here before you all that Christians like me have not done enough.
There is a profound spiritual outrage here which is occurring alongside the real carnage. The fascist American Christianity has created a fear culture. People fear the cross because it is often the banner of bigots and racist men. Many good Christians and non-Christians have been killed by homophobia, sexism, and other unspeakable crimes.
For me, this fear culture makes me hesitate to talk about my faith. Of course I believe in the separation of Church and State and I am not a socialist because I want to impose my beliefs on anybody. I oppose aggressive organized religion and hierarchical churches and elaborate theologies of hate.
But! I was baptized a Catholic before I ever picked up my first protest sign. I was confirmed by the Catholic Church before I was ever organized into a socialist party. If I were a Catholic in Gaza I would be sheltering right there in the Church with them. It is easy to be faithful to God from the comfort of a luxurious church, outfitted with televisions and buttressed by routine donations. It is vastly more difficult to keep the faith when you can't even keep a loaf of bread. It is vastly more difficult to pray when all you can hear are the hovering drones. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in which Christian refugees are hiding are some of the last standing buildings in Gaza city. These facts cause me to reflect. How can I abandon the Church now, while there are Palestinians who remain there to their last breath?
I was an altar boy for a long time and I attended Catholic school until I graduated from Providence College. I know the scriptures, the traditions, the church fathers and doctors, the saints, the sins, the sacraments. I learned the word "martyr" means "witness" and it didn't mean anything to me. When I was still in high school the senior priest asked me if I wanted to become a priest one day. In Italian American families, the second son traditionally became a priest. I told him I would think about it and I did.
The truth is, I decided that I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I dedicated my life to opposing queer people, opposing women's reproductive healthcare, and opposing safe sex. That's all I saw priests, bishops, and lay Catholics doing all day. I lost my faith and I saw hypocrisy everywhere.
And then -- I saw Aaron Bushnell light himself on fire outside the Embassy of Israel. I was set on fire too. I remember the clarity he gave me. I remember encountering the word "martyr" again. The word "martyr" means "witness." What is the martyr witnessing?
The thing is, every martyr witnesses the same thing we do, when we are all said and done - when our time is up and the clock is ticking and we close our eyes - from dust we came, to dust we shall return. And so - what do the martyrs see?
The martyrs see that death is not the end. They exist for a brief, blissful moment in between now and forever. The martyrs are content, and they have lived so that we may live. In their martyrdom it is now we who become witnesses. We can find something. We can go somewhere. We live! and while we live the words and deeds of the martyrs are always on our lips and in our hearts and hands.
Mr. Hafeez, inside of that building, will not speak of martyrs. He doesn't hear the children under the rubble. His religion, the Zionist Christian heresy, was founded by emperors and missionaries, not by martyrs. Zionist Christianity is not the Good News. It's the shallow piety of a Roman soldier praying that he does not die before slaughtering an entire town.
It is the enormous marble bust of Augustus Caesar's head, which Jesus would have seen as he came and went from Galilee, proclaiming that the Empire is heaven, proclaiming to the downtrodden masses -- "Behold, the Son of God!" These Christians have abandoned sense, sensibility, and the faith. These Christians do not talk about the martyrs.
We are here to talk about the martyrs. The Palestinian theologian, pastor, and educator Reverend Munther Isaac asks Christians - "Where is God in war?" His answer - "God is under the rubble." This is also where the Christians are. The Christians of Gaza have thus far survived lifetimes of terror and still they do not abandon their churches.
It has been difficult but there are still Christians - because Christ was a refugee too. Christ worked with his hands too. Christ was a political prisoner. Christ was unhoused. Christ was treated like a foreigner in his own country by armed thugs. He associated with the Zealots, who were in open rebellion against the Roman Empire. He is reported to have said, "I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!" He educated people, he healed people, and one day he made a scourge out of small cords and he drove all of the compradors and collaborationists out of the Temple, he poured out the changer's money, he overthrew the tables. He was nailed to a cross a week later.
His followers were persecuted in His name. They were the masses - Jewish and Gentile. They dared to imagine heaven, and heaven was freedom. They listened to Christ when he asked them who they would be if they could tell the soldiers and the tax collectors "No." They built a real communist society, thousands of years before Karl Marx, and sustained it in complete secrecy for hundreds and hundreds of years. The symbols of Christianity began life as a system of codes and secret signs. The sacraments were closed to Roman collaborationists, and the rich had to give everything they had to join the Christian community.
The ichthys - that's the fish symbol - was meant to direct poor people and widows to a place where they could eat, where they could rest. The Roman empire actually allowed a lot of its colonized peoples to practice their own religions, as long as they made it fit into the greater Roman project. So what was illegal about Christianity? Simple - Christianity was a political movement. Christianity was an anti-imperialist popular front that fed and clothed itself, that claimed beyond common sense that there was no earthly political authority.
The empire tried to defeat Christian communism with everything it had. Elaborate rituals of humiliation were planned Unable to defeat communism, the empire chose to embrace its imagery while rejecting its substance. But the masses only have the right to religion - not the figureheads and the megapastors! Not the Israeli parliament, not the American congress! Only the people have Christianity because all Christianity has is people.
It is not perfectly ideal for a socialist to speak about the immortality of the soul. I confess that Ocean State Youth Movement bases itself on the material realities of the people we strive towards liberation with. We organize people, not theologies. We ask for volunteers and mutual aid, not for indulgences and tithes. Even the Christian revolutionary hero, John Brown the Emancipator, says to us that "The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth."
But how can I look only to the earth while Hell wreaks havoc upon Creation? Hell is cold and quiet. Hell is a morgue full of children. Hell sounds like cannon fire and it smells like ash and it feels like gnawing, aching hunger, unending thirst. And Hell is there, in that building full of liars and cowards.
Heaven -- Heaven is here. There are other words for it - Providence, Jubilee. Heaven is the day your debts are forgiven. Heaven is the day you stop worrying about your family's safety. Heaven is the day we make food instead of war - the day we melt swords and make plowshares. Heaven is a dark room where you plan your escape from prison. Heaven is the zeal of an antifascist, heaven is the shroud of a freedom fighter. Heaven is here - the Kingdom of God is in you and in you and in you. I can hear heaven right now. Heaven is right in front of me. Heaven is what it sounds like when you say FREE FREE PALESTINE! FREE FREE PALESTINE!