Grief and limbo at Christmas; defiance for 2025
Gaza, Guantánamo and the coming collapse of any belief in our broken political systems.
For those who managed to secure some meaningful time with family and friends despite the corporate materialist onslaught of Christmas, I salute you.
I think I largely managed it myself, although I won’t pretend that a terrible shadow wasn’t hovering over it all, perhaps expressed best in the sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, who cancelled Christmas celebrations for the second year running, because of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Last year, the Rev. Dr. Isaac delivered a Christmas sermon, “Christ in the Rubble”, and followed up, this year, with “Christ Is Still in the Rubble”, in which he stated, powerfully:
“It is hard to believe that another Christmas has come upon us and the genocide has not stopped. It has expanded. We are out of words. We feel powerless to stop it. Decision makers are content to let this continue. To them, Palestinians are dispensable. And they know it. They are watching. It is not as if the horrors of this genocide will be discovered after all is said and done. No, it is well documented. We are all watching it. Even those committing it, the ruthless soldiers and their masters, are sharing images of their blatant crimes against humanity and boasting about it. They are taking pleasure in our erasure and our annihilation. Israeli news reported about soldiers competing to arbitrarily kill the most civilians. And that's not just soldiers ‘following orders.’ It has become some sort of a recreational activity. You can actually go on top of hills and watch our executions live. They have created a tourist spot for this. Or a boat tour for the whole family. A casual afternoon spent watching the bombs fall on Gaza. Celebrating this. It has become entertainment to them. They don't see us as human. Because in the logic of settler colonialism, despite knowing there were always people here, the land was ‘empty’ of who they deemed human.”
The full text of the sermon is here, and you can also see excerpts from it, and an interview with the Rev. Dr. Isaac, on Democracy Now!
Limbo at Guantánamo
At Guantánamo, meanwhile, some of the men still held marked their 23rd Christmas without charge or trial, unnoticed by most of the world. Since the Presidential Election last month, which, depressingly, returned Donald Trump to power, those of us who have spent much of the last two years campaigning for freedom for 15 of the 27 men still held who have long been approved for release (mostly for between two and four years, but in three outlying cases for nearly 15 years) cannot have failed to notice that their isolation on Christmas Day only reinforced the particular limbo in which they currently find themselves.
This limbo involves uncertainty as to whether the Biden administration, which ignored the rank injustice of continuing to hold them for the last 20 months without doing anything to free them, finally recognized that they should be freed before Trump’s return, securing a resettlement deal with an amenable country, because of a law preventing the return of prisoners to a number of proscribed countries; primarily Yemen, where most of the 15 men are from.
If a deal was arranged, it had to be finalized by December 20, because of another cynical legal requirement that Congress be notified 30 days before any prisoner is released. However, we have no idea whether it took place, and we won’t find out until the men either are — or aren’t — freed by January 19.
On Christmas Day, one of these 15 men, Khaled Qassim, marked 900 days since he was approved for release. One of two talented artists still held — along with the better-known Moath Al-Alwi, who makes impressive sailing ships out of recycled materials — Khaled’s most striking work involves using the gravel in the prison itself, and mixing it with glue to make a textured surface on which he paints words or objects (often cleverly politically charged), and his allegorical paintings, heavily lacquered, which look as though they are centuries old (an example is posted above). Some of these works are reproduced in an article I wrote about him in February 2020, when much of his work was included in an art exhibition at CUNY in New York.
Khaled is also, as his friend, the former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, explained in an article in March 2020, a natural leader, a poet, writer, teacher, singer and footballer, and in 2021 I wrote a song about him, 'Forever Prisoner', which I recorded with The Four Fathers and released in August 2022, just as it was revealed that, after 20 years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, he had finally been approved for release.
Resistance in 2025
In what was otherwise a largely quiet week, because of the Christmas break, I posted, on December 22, a freewheeling 80-minute interview about the state of the world, and my hopes for increased resistance in 2025, with my colleague Andy Bungay, for my regular monthly appearance on his show on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in south London.
We discussed the return of Donald Trump, the situation in Syria, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, climate collapse, and the ways in which I hope — or anticipate — that resistance will only increase in 2025, as more and more people come to realize that, throughout almost the whole of the west, our political systems have become incapable of serving our interests, with all the major parties almost identical, committed to endless war, and, as the last 15 months have shown, the implacable defence of Israel, even if it means the destruction of all international laws regarding armed conflict and the gravest of human atrocities.
Our major political parties also, collectively, refuse to acknowledge the extent of climate collapse, and, perhaps most crucially, refuse to look after those affected by it, as is the case with those whose homes and livelihoods were recently devastated by Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. What will these people, and others whose lives will be devastated in 2025, do when they discover that, just as President Biden didn’t care, as he funneled further grotesque amounts of money to Ukraine and Israel, so Donald Trump and the Republicans won’t care either when, next year, further devastation inevitably follows?
We are all being taken for fools, and at some point people will have to realize that the alternative to so-called liberal, centrist neoliberalism — populist, far-right neoliberalism, masquerading as “freedom” — is no alternative at all, because the entire edifice of modern politics is rotten to the core.
Six months since Julian Assange became a free man
In some rare good news, yesterday marked six months since WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange stepped onto Australian soil as a free man, after five years in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, and, before that, nearly seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
To mark the occasion, I made available a live video of The Four Fathers playing ‘Warriors’, the song I wrote for Julian and Chelsea Manning, at the launch of our new album, 'Songs of Loss and Resistance', last month, and I hope you have time to watch it.
I’ll see you next week (if not before). Thanks for all your support, and please feel free to let others know that they can stay informed about my work, by subscribing to me here on Substack, via an email newsletter once a week.