Tag: Carlos Mendoza

Foreseeing the uncertain times ahead, Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb convened a group of fifty colleagues from around the world to form a network called "Theology After Gaza." He invited us to think together about how to confront the genocide of the Palestinian people that began with the Nakba or Catastrophe in 1948, which is reaching its final phase with the current extermination in Gaza and the West Bank.

Since then, we have met numerous times, in person or virtually, to organize research projects aimed at raising awareness in our academic, religious, and civil society circles around the world about the cause of the Palestinian people. We must not forget other forms of violence, such as in the Congo, South Sudan, and Ukraine, nor the victims of terrorism and the necropower of criminal mafias around the world, as is the case in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.

Thanks to this initiative of the rector of the University Dar-Al-Kalima, based in Bethlehem, Palestine, we have been sowing seeds of social and intellectual resistance in universities in Asia, the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through research programs on the culture of the Palestinian people and other peoples in resistance. A primary source for our work is the ancestral Palestinian wisdom of Sumud, or firmness with constant perseverance in the face of evil. It is a long-standing resistance, where the connection to the land, mutual care, and the arts as guardians of memory have played a preponderant role in keeping the dignity of the Palestinian people alive amid the Israeli army's bombardment of Gaza and the control of their territories by insatiable Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

The arts have been an essential part of people's resistance throughout history. The Zapatista youth reminded us of this a few days ago with the festival "(Rebel and Revel) Art. A Gathering of Art, Rebellion, and Resistance Toward the Day After," held at the Caracoles in Jacinto Canek and Oventik, and at the Cideci in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. A similar initiative, with a more academic tone, will be the congress. Decolonizing Power: Rethinking the Politics of Art and Religion which, if possible in the context of the current immigration policy against foreign intellectuals in the United States, is being organized by Dar-Al-Kalima University in Boston next November, in conjunction with the annual convention of the American Society of Religion (AAR) to bring together more than seventy speakers of decolonial thought around the theme of the arts as an essential means to strengthen the imagination of peoples in resistance to the current neocolonialism that is spreading across the planet.

But today it is urgent to remember that the destructive force of the capitalist hydra does not abate, but rather threatens with new heads that devour everything in its path. It now deploys a strategy of fear to control freedom of expression, as is currently happening in the United States with the criminalization of human rights thought, international law, and peace processes. This strategy has led to the cancellation of research programs, as well as the harassment, detention, and deportation of foreign graduate students and professors, accused of antisemitism and of being a threat to national security, for their academic and social activities in favor of the ceasefire in Gaza.

However, this is only the beginning of a broader strategy that seeks to dismantle critical thinking in American universities as part of a master plan of the new white imperialism, of extractive capitalism controlled by 9/11, with a toxic masculinity bias that reinforces millennia-old patriarchy, and with an ideology that corrupts Christianity by justifying racist colonialist projects around the world as an expression of a populist political messianism.

In recent weeks, Israeli bombings of Gaza have continued to kill the civilian population, especially Palestinian children. Meanwhile, the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank continues, with international indifference. Muslim and Christian holy sites are being closed as places of worship by Israeli authorities on the most important dates in the religious calendar for both traditions.

I began writing these lines on Holy Saturday, when the Christian community commemorates God's silence following the public execution on the cross of Jesus the Galilean, accused of being a criminal by the Roman Empire and a blasphemer by the authorities of the Temple of Jerusalem. That silence from the tomb of the crucified is shared today by the Palestinian people and by so many other victims executed for the sake of necropower. A time of silence that portends a new world yet to be born. But that day will not come soon, for the night is long. Today, in the silence of the ruins of Gaza, as of the extermination camps in Mexico, the murmur of the survivors who resist is the bastion of humanity that can save us all. Do we hear it?

Forty days of silence and hopeful mourning, represented in that symbolic Christian religious calendar with Hebrew roots as a time of passage or Easter, give rise to a time of rescue of the innocent in the Merkaba or chariot of fire that symbolizes the divine and human compassion that dignifies the righteous people of history, such as Elijah and the Galilean.

It is the powerful symbolic background of Jesus' ascension to heaven that Christian communities celebrate these days. It is not merely a myth of the past for a community mourning its murdered Rabbi. The chariot of divine fire is a way of expressing that every creature in the cosmos, especially the innocent victimized by necropower, live in the divine and human sphere of loving compassion.

May this be an opportunity to trust in this human-divine movement that rescues and dignifies the Palestinian people and the innocents of history, disfigured faces of our humanity, but a presence that is "like a splinter that hurts" and that calls us to live radical compassion to stop the spiral of hatred that is sweeping the planet today.

Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro

June 1, 2025.