Ron Radosh has also been writing on William Zantzinger (in addition to Steve Earle) in this post at his Pajamas Media blog: Cognitive Dissonance in the Left/Folkie world.

Having read my post on Billy Bragg’s The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie (Philosophizing Disgrace), Ron also apprises me of a letter he wrote in May of 2007, when the play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” was due to be staged at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia near where he lived. It was an open letter which he addressed to the producer, and includes this:

I write this letter as Hamas, a group pledged to destroy Israel, has resumed its barrage of Quassam missiles from Gaza into the town of Sderot. They have sent over 160 missiles this past week alone, and are threatening to use longer range missiles which could hit the next nearby town, which has a few hundred thousand people living in it. One of its leaders, Osama al-Muzaini, said yesterday that “it’s only a matter of time” before Hamas resumes suicide bombings within Israel.

Rachel Corrie went to the area not to seek understanding, but as a committed militant of a front group of these Palestinian terrorists, The International Solidarity Movement. It proudly proclaims on its website that the victimized Palestinians have a right to resort to violence against their oppressors, while Israel, of course, has no right to defend itself. One of its leaders, interviewed on Al-Jazeera, put it this way: “We recognize that violence is necessary and it is permissible for oppressed and occupied people to use armed resistance and we recognize their right to do so.” One of the activities those would-be noble ISM militants do is organize riots at Israel’s security fence, built to deter infiltration from suicide bombers. Yet Corrie has the nerve to write “I’m really new to talking about Israel-Palestine, so I don’t always know the political implications of my words,” written at a time she was in fact a complicit enthusiast of and supporter of an American group that backs Hamas and Fatah, and which also protects
and cooperates with Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa fighters.

Corrie claimed to be engaging in action by ISM militants meant to prevent “Israeli demolition of civilian homes,” as she says in the play. Actually, her Hamas and Fatah recruiters used her and her innocent and gullible comrades as human shields to deter attacks on arms caches and hidden shooters, and on homes that in reality are depots for weapons. The Palestinian terrorists, as we know, have no compunction on using civilian homes as repositories for guns and missiles, hoping that this realization will prevent Israel from acting to stop them. Corrie knew her role. She wrote that she imagines “the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen.” In other words, she saw herself as a potential propaganda figure for the terrorists.

I’ll reiterate what I said in my post on Billy Bragg’s song The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie from 2006: One of the saddest things about Rachel Corrie’s death at the young age of 23 is that she did not live long enough to potentially realize the degree to which she was being misled and manipulated by movements and forces beyond her understanding. In my young adulthood at one point I worked for Greenpeace. I’m sure glad I didn’t die in any effort to stop some solid-waste incinerator from being built. (But then, in fairness, my environmentalist manipulators never went as far as to encourage me to put my life at risk.)

…

Fred Barnes writes on ten things President Bush got right during his time in the White House. I’d mostly agree with the things he lists, but on one — Bush’s resistance to the global warming movement — I devoutly wish Bush had been more, well, devout. And I would add as one of his most important achievements Bush’s advancement (albeit incremental) of the concept of a culture of life, including in relation to embryonic stem cell research. Fred gets at that obliquely however by pointing out Bush’s very real and very important success with regard to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Then there were John Roberts and Sam Alito. In putting them on the Supreme Court and naming Roberts chief justice, Bush achieved what had eluded Richard Nixon, Reagan, and his own father. Roberts and Alito made the Court indisputably more conservative. And the good news is Roberts, 53, and Alito, 58, should be justices for decades to come.

I must append to that: please God.

…

On the First Things website they have brought up to the front page a 2005 article by the late, great Richard John Neuhaus called “Our American Babylon.” In it he explores themes that will likely be handled again in what will be his posthumously published final book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, due out in March. He had also been exploring the themes of that book in recent posts at the First Things website each Friday. The typically fascinating article posted today begins thusly:

Once upon a time—it was the 1976 bicentennial of the American founding, to be precise—I wrote a book on the American experiment and the idea of covenant. Time magazine picked up on it and reported, “On the day of judgment, Neuhaus wants to meet God as an American.”

That’s not quite right. What I wrote is that I expect to meet God as an American. And that for the simple reason that, among all the things I am or have been or hope to be, I am undeniably an American. It is not the most important thing, but it is an inescapable thing. Nor, even were I so inclined, should I try to escape it. It is a pervasive and indelible part of what is called one’s “identity.” Among American thinkers, and not least among American theologians, one frequently discerns an attempt to escape one’s time and place. It is a very American thing to try to do. We are never more American than when we believe we have transcended being American. America is, after all, as some like to say, the world’s first “universal nation.”

The theologian Robert Jenson has employed to fine effect the phrase “the story of the world.” The story of Israel and the Church, he writes, is nothing less than the story of the world, and the world is today lost in its confusions because it has “lost its story.” I would add that, for those of us who are Americans, we are as Americans part of the story that is the story of the world. Moreover, America itself—this nation that the founders called an experiment and, like any experiment, may succeed or fail—is part of the story that is the story of the world. Of the many ways of thinking about America—economic, political, cultural, etc.—there is today a striking scarcity of thinking about America theologically.

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