Facta primum, deinde iudicium, “First the facts, then the judgment.” This and similar principles were an intricate part of Roman jurisprudence from at least the time of Cicero, and of many other ancient cultures legal systems.
The motivation behind censorship, today and yesterday, is to deny people facts, which possibly could alter their moral judgment of a situation.
Bishops of the Catholic Church and of all other mainline Churches morally permit, indeed often explicitly or implicitly encourage, their congregation to go to war and commit all the internal and external evils that war requires, all the time telling them they are being faithful disciples of Jesus. Such abominable spiritual leadership by a Bishop should in and of itself result not just in his removal as Bishop but also his laicization. Spiritual blindness of this proportion regarding which acts are consistent with following the Way of Jesus and which acts are not should never be permitted to be in any type of authoritative position in the Church.
However, beyond this there is another area of calculating blindness that is near universal among Bishops, namely, withholding critical facts from their people, facts which could possibly alter their congregation’s moral judgment on a matter. The average lay person, unlike the average Bishop, has to accept, because he or she has little time nor means to do otherwise, what is said in the press and on the TV news as the truth. Because of nationalistic nurturing from the cradle he or she more or less takes what the government officially states as true as in fact true. Yet, it is an ancient truism attributed to Aeschylus (500 BC) that the first casualty of war is truth!
In 1966, I believe, polls showed that Walter Cronkite, a CBS newscaster, was the most trusted person in America. Parenthetically, today, TV news persons or newspaper persons consistently in polls fall just above used car salesmen in the trustworthiness category. Nevertheless, the corporate mass media still is the primary and almost exclusive source, from which facts or lack thereof get to the average person.
What about the Internet you may ask? If you have the time to sift through the tsunami of planted misinformation, disinformation, partially true information and outright lies, perhaps, you can sometimes get to the truth of a matter. But again, working men and women with families and with a multiplicity of other obligations are just too tired after eight hours of work, after driving through traffic or riding public transportation to go home to a family to make dinner, to start investigating the veracity of news stories on, say, what Israel is doing in Gaza and why by Larry and David Ellison and Bari Weiss on the corporate news network, CBS, that the Ellisons own and that Weiss operates.
This brings us to the heart of this reflection. On two occasions in the past, I have tried in my own small way to counter the dearth of information which is used to justify or minimize the beastly oppression and destruction of the Palestinian people by Jewish Zionist in and outside of the State of Israel. I have forwarded what I saw as factual, visible documentary information on Palestine to those on my email list. The first was the 47 minute film, Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story. This was intended to put the lie to the Zionist propaganda campaign that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people (Jews) without a land” before the Zionist arrived there. The second documentary piece of information to counter Zionist propaganda that I sent to my email list was the 1949 twenty-five minute classic with Dorothy Thompson, Sands of Sorrow, which revealed as only film can, the misery the Palestinian people had been forced into by the barbarity of the Israeli political leadership and military immediately after the Zionist declared Israel to be a state in May 1948.
If you have not viewed either or neither video, please do. The Palestinian people, who for nearly a century now have had their lands and lives, their children and grandchildren’s lives stolen from them by violence and lies of Zionist Jews, made possible largely by the total political, financial and military support of the Christians of your country, that is, the U.S. or Britain, deserve at least a fair hearing to counter the perpetual deception process that has turned their lives and land into hell on earth in the name of a non-existing murderous, savage, xenophobic, baby-killing, genocidal, god of armies that Zionists believe is God.
The final piece in my trilogy to offer that fair hearing, unlike parts 1 and II mentioned above, is not a documentary style video presentation revealing the life of the Palestinian people before and after the NAKBA, the catastrophe of 1948, but is rather a lecture by the most learned and renowned scholar in the U.S. on the history of the Jewish Zionist -Palestinian clash for approximately the past hundred years, Dr.Norman Finklestein. There is no other one place that I know of where a person can get so much raw, meticulously verified information on this subject in a single lecture. The lecture is long but long have been the days and nights in Gaza since the Nakba that forced the internment of 2.3 million Palestinians in what is known, literally and not hyperbolically, around the world, except the U.S., as the world’s largest concentration camp, Gaza.
Please do listen attentively to the entire presentation. Get the facts. Facta primum, deinde iudicium. Because, then, and only then, comes the possibility of an authentic nonviolent creative Christian response to those facts, that is, of returning love for hate, good for evil and thereby bringing good, rather than more evil, out of evil.
But first, listen and learn the facts.
https://youtu.be/zFoHXuhq9mU?si=DF2KHywdT2tAsZUZ
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
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